Aramco Ventures joins $36M Via Separations funding round

Saudi Aramco’s venture arm participated in a $36 million funding round for Via Separations , a US-based deeptech company developing modular membrane filtration systems for industrial separation processes. New investors in the round include Climate Investment and Marathon Petroleum, with existing backers also participating.  Via Separations says the funding will be used to accelerate global deployment of its filtration platform, expand manufacturing capacity, and push adoption of membrane-based separations across industrial sectors, with a particular focus on refining and chemicals.  What Via Separations builds Industrial separations are a core part of how fuels, chemicals, paper products, and many everyday materials are manufactured. In many large plants, key separation steps rely on heat-based processes such as evaporation and distillation, which require significant fuel and steam. Via Separations is positioning its technology as a replacement layer for those heat-driven steps. The company says its modular systems integrate with existing industrial equipment and can reduce energy use at the separation step by up to 90 percent by shifting to a mechanically driven membrane process.  In the funding announcement, the company also cited an industry-wide magnitude claim: thermal separations account for roughly 12 percent of global energy use.  Where the company has proven it so far Via Separations says it has proven the technology at commercial scale in the pulp and paper sector, approaching two years of continuous operation at a pulp mill in Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada.  It is now moving into a larger market. The company said it completed a pilot at a major Gulf Coast refinery last year and described a commercial pipeline worth hundreds of millions of dollars in capital projects as it expands into refining and chemicals.  What investors are backing In the press release, Climate Investment described thermal separations as one of the larg