SEPPURE turns chemical separation processes greener

Its nano-filter technology can separate chemical with 90% less energy.

Chemtech startup SEPPURE wants to reduce the Earth’s energy consumption when it comes to separating chemicals by offering a novel nano-filter technology. The firm claims that they provide a greener alternative to thermal chemical separation processes such as evaporation and distillation.

Such methods are being commonly used in industries ranging from food, pharmaceutical, and petrochemical. Its solution can separate chemical without heat and at 90% less energy, which can potentially conserve billions of gallons of water, millions of tonnes in volatile organic compound emissions and billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in a year.

“Not only these processes are operating at massive scale, but also they require immense amounts of energy that account for up to 15% of the planet's entire energy consumption,” Mohammad H. D.A. Farahani, CEO and co-founder at SEPPURE, told Singapore Business Review.

He also shared that their tech can take high temperatures up to 120°C, whilst their filtration throughput (membrane flux) for many organic solvents is much larger than our competitors (5-10X higher).

In a seed funding round, SEPPURE bagged $3.54m (US$2.6m) last August. It was led by SOSV and participated by Entrepreneur First (EF), 500 Startups and SGInnovate. The proceeds will be used to run industrial-scale pilots across other industries.

“They have a unique and patented technology in an area where there is very little competition. The potential impact is huge,” said Duncan Turner, general partner at SOSV. “There is already a huge pipeline of potential customers. Once the technology has been fully commercialised, I expect Seppure to be achieving significant revenues very quickly indeed.