Last Wednesday, BMW became the latest member of an exclusive multimillion-dollar club: It invested in Lilac Solutions, a startup trying to make lithium extraction faster and more efficient.

The German car company joined Lowercarbon Capital, T. Rowe Price, SK Materials, and others in Lilac’s $150 million Series B round.

Why it matters: Demand for lithium, which is used in batteries for smartphones, computers, and electric vehicles, has shot up as more automakers commit to moving away from gas-powered cars. Lilac has developed new ion exchange technology that it claims would speed up lithium production, though it won’t be a silver bullet for impending shortages.

Demand for the metal is expected to quadruple over the next decade, and the market could see a shortage as soon as 2023, according to BloombergNEF.

• Mining companies literally can’t get lithium out of the ground fast enough. Manufacturers will need about 189,000 metric tons more than extractors can provide in 2025, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. For context, that gap is larger than the size of the entire lithium market in 2015.

The impact? Nearly 19 million rechargeable electric cars could be lost over the next decade due to battery-cell shortages, according to a report from the Center for Automotive Research.

Lithium is found either in hard rock or saltwater deposits, and collecting it from either source has its own environmental impacts. Mining it from rocks—as they do in Australia, the world’s top producer of lithium, as of 2019—is energy intensive and expensive. Extracting the metal from brine sources is more economical, but takes much longer and requires a massive amount of water, which is threatening ecosystems in the lithium-rich countries in South America.

Enter: Lilac Solutions

Founded in 2016, Lilac says its brine extraction method takes about two hours—instead of as long as two years, the current norm—and can produce the same amount of lithium from one acre of land that the traditional process collects from 10,000 acres.

The company uses patented ceramic beads for ion exchange, meaning the brine is filtered through these beads, which absorb the lithium in the liquid and reject other contaminants like sodium, magnesium, calcium, and boron. Then the beads are flushed with hydrochloric acid to create lithium chloride—the equivalent of “crude oil”—and from there are converted into the powder form of battery-grade lithium.

Lilac also claims to address concerns about water usage and environmental impact by returning the brine to the ground after the extraction process.

So far the company has tested its tech on multiple brine samples in its Oakland, California, lab, and has completed its first field pilot.

• Lilac is partnering with Australian lithium developer Lake Resources to provide the technology for the Kachi Lithium Brine Project in Argentina.
• They plan to begin production at the site using Lilac’s method by 2024.

Looking ahead: Lilac will use its Series B funds to double its headcount and build a US manufacturing facility for its ion exchange beads. The company’s vision is to be a sort of mining as a service business, partnering with developers to design, build, and operate their lithium-extraction systems.

View this story on-site.—GD

Global funding for semiconductor startups hit record highs last month—and US companies in particular are now stacked with cash.

This year, 85 global deals in the sector have raised a total of $3.7 billion, per Crunchbase. US semiconductor startups are responsible for 43% of that.

Ups and downs

It’s a significant glow-up: In dollar amounts, US semiconductor deals are up one-third from last year and 133% from 2019. And that’s through only nine months of 2021.

Quick recap: If you’re wondering why semiconductor startups are so hot right now, it’s because the worldwide chip shortage has been plaguing companies big and small since early 2020.

• And as tech companies and automakers wait 20 weeks for chip deliveries, experts are predicting the shortage could last until 2023 or longer.

Ergo...investors mainlining $$ into US semiconductor startups. But the US isn’t necessarily trying to become a chipmaking leader overnight—mostly because, well, it can’t.

• It takes years of planning to make a semiconductor fabrication plant (“fab”) a reality. The necessary equipment alone can take more than two years to get from door to door.

That’s why the bulk of this year’s semi startup investments are focused on “new and better-designed chips that can cut down on the amount of chips needed [and] the power they use,” Crunchbase reported—plus helping bolster some of the weaker sections of the supply chain. In other words, the startups are not necessarily going to 10x manufacturing capacity, but rather go all in on R&D.

Exhibit A: In 2021’s biggest semiconductor deal yet, Qualcomm spent $1.4 billion to acquire Nuvia, a California-based semiconductor startup founded by former Apple chip designers. Nuvia has been working on a chip lineup with higher performance and lower power consumption, which Qualcomm plans to incorporate into everything from smartphones to cars to XR devices.

View this story on-site.—HF

Stat: As of Friday, nearly half (46.3%) of the global population had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, but just 2.4% of people living in low-income countries have received a dose.

Quote: “Now you’re not just looking at, ‘Is this an EV-centric market,’ you’re going to go, ‘It doesn’t matter—all the markets are going to be EV-centric.’”—Brendan Jones, president of Blink Charging, to Emerging Tech Brew

Read: Inside the multibillion-dollar market for your phone’s location data.

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Here are 10 of the most popular articles we published across Q3. We’ve got dispatches from the land of actually driverless vehicles (Chandler, AZ), woolly mammoth resurrection, weed tech, the digitization of both the buttoned-up (lawyers) and unbuttoned (Las Vegas), and more.

1. We spent two days riding Waymo’s driverless taxis and it felt surprisingly normal
2. In a patch of Arizona, everyone knows Waymo. But few use it.
3. A biotech startup has raised millions to resurrect woolly mammoths
4. Weed farmers are using drones as crop cops
5. Mixed reality could transform the travel industry in unexpected ways. Here’s how.
6. From Sin City to Smart City: Inside Las Vegas’s plan to digitize
7. How lawyers embraced the robots
8. Everything you need to know about crypto wallets
9. Growing medical cannabis? You’ll need some tech essentials first
10. Autonomous vehicle vision company Oculii partners with one of China’s largest automakers

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Biden wants to build 500,000 EV chargers by 2030. The question is where to put them.
• Why Amazon, Apple, Google all back a seamless standard for smart homes
• AI-ethics pioneer Margaret Mitchell on her five-year plan at open-source AI startup Hugging Face