Three innovating lithium firms get Venture Center acceleration

Three companies ready to invest in pilot projects in Arkansas’ emerging lithium industry are building relationships with producers, investors and academics through The Venture Center’s Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator.

The three participated in a luncheon Dec. 8 at The Venture Center’s headquarters in Little Rock. The center is an entrepreneur support organization helping startups become high-growth businesses.

One of the three, Springdale-based Menen Group, is a water-wastewater treatment company that wants to use its technology to separate the abundant lithium from the saltwater brine in the Smackover Formation.

That formation stretches across southern Arkansas and other states. The U.S. Geological Survey says Arkansas has between 5 trillion and 19 trillion tons of lithium, enough to meet projected worldwide car battery demand nine times over in 2030.

The other two members of the cohort include Lithios, a startup company that originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It extracts lithium using electric processing. The other member, San Diego-based Tyfast, uses lithium and Hot Springs-mined vanadium to produce fast-charging batteries for heavy-duty and military applications.

The three companies are participating in the Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator’s second cohort. From Dec. 1-17, they are meeting with the companies that are investing in lithium production, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Standard Lithium.  They also are meeting with economic development organizations about government incentives and programming, with investors, and with academic institutions, said Arthur Orduna, The Venture Center’s executive director.

The accelerator’s backers include Standard Lithium, the Walton Family Foundation, and the University of Arkansas.

Orduna said this second cohort’s three members were chosen with input from a Technical Advisory Council composed of lithium producers. Selectors are seeking companies that have demonstrable technology. Lithios is already piloting a program, and Menen Group and Tyfast are ready to do so.

“We select companies that are ready to do a pilot, and then from there move to commercialization,” Orduna said.

He said selectors liked Menen Group’s multiphase vacuum desalination (MPVD) technology. The company is already Arkansas-based and can leverage its technology and in-state platforms. Several producers strongly recommended Lithios because of its innovative electrochemical approach. A selling point for Tyfast was its innovative use of vanadium for the anode market. Tyfast furthermore is seeking to capitalize on what Orduna called the “missing midstream” — the levels of production above simple extraction.

That’s a focus of The Venture Center’s efforts. The goal is to create an ecosystem off of what Orduna said is Arkansas’ “unique, unique global asset.” Doing so would benefit Arkansas and local communities.

“We have the most upstream element,” he said. “We’re the beginning of the supply chain with the Smackover. We should consolidate all of the different stages in upstream, and then in the midstream. And midstream, we mean cathode and anode production, material production.”

Orduna said The Venture Center has made plans for two more cohorts in 2026 and may have three. It could continue having cohorts indefinitely as long as it has funding and support.

The three companies briefly spoke at the luncheon and then provided interviews to Talk Business & Politics. Menen Group Engineering Director Chris Milligan told the audience the company saw an opportunity to apply its water and wastewater expertise to lithium extraction. He said his company can use 60% less energy than conventional methods.

Daniel Whalen, Menen Group’s technical director, said in an interview that the company’s process creates a vacuum to cause water to evaporate at lower temperatures and then freezes the water, concentrating the lithium in the remaining liquid and ice at a lower energy cost.

Whalen said the Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator is helping the company understand producers’ needs while connecting the company to financial and economic organizations.

“We’ve learned exactly where the state of the industry is in terms of lithium,” he said. “We’ve understood where the forecast is in lithium for Arkansas, and we’ve also started to understand where not only our technology applies, but also all of our expertise in water-wastewater, and where we can apply that in other parts of the flow sheet.”

Lithios is offering the market’s first scalable electrochemical technology, said Anna Scheidt, director of operations. It uses stacks of electrode plates set at a certain voltage that attract only lithium ions.

Scheidt said brine flows in, the lithium ions get captured, the brine flows out, the company runs a rinse solution, and then it reverses the current. The process releases the lithium ions into a highly purified concentrate solution.

She said the company’s solution could lower costs of lithium production by as much as 40% over current direct lithium extraction methods, which would make the state competitive on a global scale. The company has raised $15 million in seed funding and has launched an effort to raise more.

Scheidt said Lithios has been piloting a third-generation version of its technology in Arkansas in the last month and a half. The next step is to build a demonstration facility starting in 2026 that uses fourth-generation technology.

Scheidt said The Venture Center has been an “amazing connection point” that has helped the Boston-based company meet other industry players, learn what resources are available, and make Arkansas connections.

She said in her presentation that the state offers “the perfect ecosystem for future … growth.” It has a friendly regulatory environment, tax exemptions, and royalty structures. in addition to the accelerator.

“The brine is here,” she said in her presentation. “The positive environment is here. We’re piloting here. Arkansas feels like home in the U.S.”

Tyfast CEO GJ la O’ said his company is developing a lithium vanadium oxide (LVO) anode material that it will sell to battery manufacturers that makes electric power viable for construction, mining, trucking and defense applications. Current technology cannot compete with diesel because batteries take too long to charge, degrade over time, and don’t function well in the cold.

The company uses lithium and vanadium, which the company sources from Hot Springs-based U.S. Vanadium, rather than graphite in the anode (negative) part of the battery. That approach enhances capability, durability and cold weather performance, la O’ said. He envisioned a future where an LVO battery could recharge on an electrified section of roadway, eliminating the need to stop to recharge.

More than a dozen commercial trucking, mining, construction and defense companies have expressed an interest, la O’ said in his presentation. Meanwhile, he said the U.S. Army wants to hybridize ground vehicles so they would run silently and with a longer run time than with diesel vehicles that must be refueled.

He said the company is in prototype mode and wants to build a pilot scale plant. It  wants to have a gigafactory in Arkansas by the end of the decade. He said Arkansas has land for his company to expand, labor that will be trained to the industry’s needs, and battery manufacturers in nearby states.

“Arkansas for Tyfast is our strategic advantage,” la O’ said. “We already source our major raw material here. We want to source lithium in Arkansas in the future. We want to co-locate raw materials and active battery materials manufacturing in the state.”