Olgica
Bakajin

Lawrence Livermore gave Bakajin resources few commercial environments could match. A national laboratory's mission is curiosity, not quarterly revenue. She had colleagues like Aleksandr Noy working on allied problems, access to electron microscopy and computational tools, and a mandate to push at the edges of what was known about nanoscale transport. The 2006 Science paper was the product of years of careful, painstaking measurement - the kind of work that requires no commercial justification and considerable patience.

But the numbers pointed somewhere inescapable. If water moved that fast through carbon nanotubes, and if you could fabricate membranes from those tubes at commercial scale, the energy economics of water treatment shifted dramatically. Desalination, wastewater treatment, food processing - every industry that moved water at scale was a potential customer. Bakajin negotiated an exclusive license from LLNL for the carbon nanotube membrane technology in desalination applications, then founded Porifera in 2009.

The early years were a classic startup pivot story. Desalination was the headline application - the one that made investors' eyes widen and press releases sound impressive. DARPA funded a program. NASA partnered on graywater recycling for Army forward operating bases. The California Energy Commission put in grants. But scale-up manufacturing for large desalination infrastructure proved slower than expected.

The pivot to food and beverage concentration was quietly transformative. The problem of concentrating a liquid without destroying it was just as real in a coffee roaster's facility as in a municipal water utility - but the unit economics were completely different. Specialty coffee commands a premium that makes energy savings genuinely meaningful. Craft breweries care intensely about flavor preservation. Winemakers in Napa and Burgundy will pay for a process that doesn't erase their terroir.

By 2013, Porifera had launched its first commercial products. By the time of its 2024 financing round - led by Silverstrand Capital, with Mann+Hummel joining as a strategic partner - the company had more than $20 million in non-SBIR revenue under its belt and a customer base spread across five continents. Bakajin had turned a nanotube anomaly into a global business.

Bakajin did not build Porifera in isolation. The LLNL connection gave her access to a global network of scientists, engineers, and government program managers. Aleksandr Noy, her collaborator on the carbon nanotube work, continued the foundational research at the lab. The DARPA MANTRA program, the NASA graywater collaboration, and the Department of Energy funding all trace back to Bakajin's ability to navigate the government research ecosystem while simultaneously building a commercial business.

Mann+Hummel, the German filtration technology group that joined as Porifera's strategic investor in 2024, brings industrial manufacturing scale and global distribution that a 28-person company in San Leandro cannot replicate. Silverstrand Capital, which led the 2024 bridge round, specializes in climate and cleantech investments - a signal about where Porifera's story intersects the energy transition narrative.

Bakajin's publication record spans top-tier journals: Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Nanotechnology. Her 1997 Nature paper on capillary flow - the mechanism behind why a coffee spill dries into a ring rather than a uniform spot - is a different kind of famous. It explained an everyday phenomenon that nobody had quantified before. The ability to see a scientific problem in a coffee spill and turn it into a major paper is the same instinct that sees a membrane application in a nanotube anomaly.

More than 20 patent families protect Porifera's core technology positions. In a space where the difference between a functioning membrane and a commercial membrane is mostly manufacturing know-how and IP architecture, that portfolio is the moat. Bakajin built it while running the company - a combination that requires sustained attention to both the science and the business that few founders maintain past Series A.