Anurag Bajpayee’s Gradiant Tackles the Science of Industrial Water Reuse

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The MIT-trained engineer is betting that chemistry, physics, and AI can solve one of industry’s most overlooked crises: water scarcity.

When Anurag Bajpayee looks at water, he doesn’t just see a resource; he sees an engineering challenge. As the CEO and co-founder of Gradiant, a Boston-based water technology firm, Bajpayee has spent over a decade trying to solve one of the most stubborn scientific puzzles in industrial sustainability: how to clean, reuse, and recover water efficiently from some of the most contaminated sources on Earth.

Today, Gradiant’s technologies, born out of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), are being deployed across semiconductor fabs, pharmaceutical plants, and oil refineries in over 90 countries.

The scientific challenges they address are as fundamental as they are complex, combining thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, membrane science, and artificial intelligence.

The Hidden Physics of Dirty Water

At its core, industrial water reuse is a battle against entropy. Wastewater streams from factories contain dissolved salts, organic molecules, metals, and microscopic contaminants that resist easy separation.

Traditional technologies like reverse osmosis (RO), while effective for seawater desalination, struggle when faced with heavily contaminated industrial brines.

High concentrations of solutes create osmotic pressures that overwhelm membranes, leading to fouling, high energy costs, and limited water recovery rates—typically around 70%. Worse, conventional systems often leave behind toxic brine waste that requires further disposal.

Bajpayee’s solution? Go back to basics—specifically, to the natural water cycle.

During his PhD at MIT, Bajpayee helped develop Carrier Gas Extraction (CGE), a process that mimics evaporation and condensation in the atmosphere. Instead of forcing water through a membrane, CGE uses a heated carrier gas (like air) to evaporate water from contaminated sources, then condenses it as clean water.

The process operates effectively even with high-salinity or chemically complex waste streams, and crucially, it can use low-grade industrial waste heat rather than expensive electricity.

By embracing the physics of phase change, Gradiant’s CGE sidesteps some of the biggest energy bottlenecks in industrial water treatment.

Beyond Filtration: The Rise of Hybrid Systems

While CGE tackles complex brines, Gradiant’s broader approach relies on hybrid systems that combine different treatment methods based on the specific chemistry of each wastewater stream.
For example, its Counterflow Reverse Osmosis (CFRO) technology pushes beyond the traditional limits of membrane desalination.

By using smart pressure staging and flow reversal, CFRO achieves higher water recovery rates and minimises membrane fouling, critical for industries like semiconductor manufacturing, where ultrapure water is essential.

Another Gradiant platform, Selective Contaminant Extraction (SCE), applies tailored chemical processes to isolate specific pollutants.

Instead of treating all contaminants equally, SCE can recover valuable resources—such as lithium from battery manufacturing waste—or selectively remove harmful ones like heavy metals.

To orchestrate these complex treatment steps, Gradiant relies heavily on its SmartOps AI platform.

Drawing on real-time sensor data, SmartOps continuously adjusts flows, pressures, and treatment sequences to maximise efficiency while minimising energy and chemical use.

It’s a glimpse into a future where industrial water plants function less like static utilities and more like self-optimizing systems.

The Forever Chemical Challenge

One of Gradiant’s most ambitious scientific achievements is its latest platform, ForeverGone, which tackles a particularly resilient foe: PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as “forever chemicals.”

PFAS molecules, used for decades in firefighting foams, non-stick cookware, and industrial coatings, are exceptionally stable due to their strong carbon-fluorine bonds. Conventional filtration methods can trap PFAS but do not destroy them, creating concentrated waste that must be incinerated—an expensive and energy-intensive process.

Gradiant’s ForeverGone system applies proprietary chemical and physical processes to break PFAS
molecules apart at the molecular level. It leaves behind only inert byproducts like fluoride ions and carbon dioxide, eliminating the need for secondary waste handling.

“We didn’t want to just move the PFAS problem—we wanted to erase it,” Bajpayee said when Gradiant received the Gold Award at the 2025 Edison Awards for ForeverGone.

This capability is arriving just as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is finalizing strict new limits on PFAS in drinking water, creating an urgent market for viable destruction technologies.

Energy, Efficiency, and Thermodynamic Trade-Offs

While Gradiant’s systems offer substantial advantages, the scientific trade-offs are real. Phase-change processes like CGE, for example, inherently involve thermal energy input. Although
industrial waste heat can mitigate energy costs, scaling such systems requires careful thermal management to avoid inefficiencies.

Similarly, hybrid membrane processes like CFRO require sophisticated material science to maintain durability under high-pressure, high-salinity conditions. Advances in membrane coatings, anti-scaling agents, and intelligent cleaning protocols are crucial to achieving long-term operational viability.

Finally, chemical extraction methods like SCE must navigate the fine line between selective removal and secondary contamination. Overdosing treatment chemicals can create new waste streams or regulatory liabilities.

In each case, Gradiant’s scientific challenge is to optimise performance across multiple variables—water quality, energy input, recovery rate, chemical use—simultaneously. It's an exercise in systems engineering at a molecular scale.

Engineering for the Climate Era

As climate change accelerates and droughts intensify, the need for scalable industrial water solutions is becoming more pressing.

Industries from data centres to battery manufacturers are facing water constraints in regions like Texas, Taiwan, and the Middle East.

Many are setting corporate sustainability goals that require near-complete water reuse. Some governments are introducing mandates for industrial zero-liquid discharge (ZLD), further boosting demand for high-efficiency treatment systems.

Gradiant is betting that its scientific rigour — and its modular, customizable platforms — will make it a partner of choice in this new landscape.

Gradiant’s scientific ambitions are considerable. The company is investing in further research on low-energy desalination, real-time chemical sensing, and even advanced oxidation processes for emerging contaminants.

It’s also expanding its regional manufacturing and R&D hubs to accelerate deployment in North America, Europe, and Asia.

But the larger scientific challenge remains: how to deliver highly efficient, adaptable, and low-impact water systems at global scale. In that sense, the work is just beginning.