Leading The Closed-Loop Mining Revolution

Dreams of Water

Mohammad Doostmohammadi grew up in the ancient city of Isfahan in the heart of Iran. As a young boy in the 1980s, in the aftermath of revolution and war, Doostmohammadi would play by the banks of the majestic Zayandeh River that flowed through his hometown. The river was the lifeblood of the city, a source of beauty and sustenance for its people.

But as the years went by, young Doostmohammadi noticed the mighty river diminishing. Drought, industry, and agriculture conspired to suck the Zayandeh dry. By the time he was a teenager, the riverbed was cracked and parched. The sight saddened Doostmohammadi deeply. 

“The [way the] water is right now…There’s a war everywhere for water and there’s a fight and you can see it,” he recalled. “We had an amazing river, a beautiful river in the middle of our hometown, Isfahan in Iran, that dried out. I was sad…I always was really interested in water and how we can save water, how we can manage water.”

This early fascination with preserving a precious resource would shape the course of Doostmohammadi’s life and work. After earning degrees in mining engineering and chemical engineering from some of Iran’s top universities, with a focus on sustainability, Doostmohammadi spent years working on wastewater projects around the world for various industries, including mining and mineral processing. He saw firsthand the challenges of managing wastewater as environmental regulations tightened.

“The PPM level of minerals allowed in wastewater is going lower and lower and it’s hard to extract more of those heavy metals from the wastewater,” Doostmohammadi explained. “It just adds more cost and more cost. So it’s getting more costly and harder to manage.”

Doostmohammadi’s passion for water and background in mining led him to the realization that the industry desperately needed cleaner, more efficient extraction methods. “It’s just, the wastewater is getting harder and harder to get rid of it [heavy metals],” he said. “We need to think about it.” 

The Budding Entrepreneur

While Doostmohammadi’s interest in water sustainability would go on to define his career trajectory, his drive to innovate and create positive change was instilled in him by his parents from a young age. Doostmohammadi’s father was a teacher who later founded his own private middle school, while his mother was an artist and entrepreneur who ran her own art education institute.

“[My dad,]...he was actually really passionate about literature and history, some finance,” Doostmohammadi shared. “[My mom,]...she’s an artist and was doing [a] different type of education. She had her own educational institute for art and she was managing it.”

Watching his parents build something of their own and pursue their passions left a deep impression on Doostmohammadi. And in the face of challenges, like struggling to make payroll at times, their determination and thoughtfulness shone through.

“The challenges that they had helped [me realize], ‘Okay, this is what I’m going to face down the road’,” Doostmohammadi reflected. “[For example,] I know rent is coming, the bills are there. So how much I have to spend this year - Is it better to just invest in the company this year or maybe next year? That’s the discussion that we had all the time…and it prepared me a lot for what I’m doing here [at pH7 Technologies].”

While his parents’ entrepreneurial spirit inspired Doostmohammadi, it was their values and emphasis on learning that truly shaped him. His parents were always reading and discussing new ideas with Doostmohammadi, encouraging him to be curious and think critically.

“My dad was a teacher and he was trying to educate me by his learning something,” Doostmohammadi recalled fondly. “Same as for mom - She was learning every single thing. I saw her actually in the middle of the night, at midnight, 10 PM. She’s reading something. She’s trying to learn something. And I believe that’s something that they learned from their family. And I built onto that.”

This love of learning would fuel Doostmohammadi’s own journey as an innovator and problem-solver. One of his earliest ventures began in middle school, as computers and the Internet were just beginning to take hold. “When I was in my middle school, it was all the Internet era, computers, and I was involved in that business…doing coding…created some softwares…selling it,” Doostmohammadi recounted.

Doostmohammadi and two of his classmates developed a user-friendly software platform that could easily install different programs on a computer and provide Internet access. They sold the software, at that time delivered on CD-ROMs, to the local market. “Copying that and selling it to the market and I was about, by that time, about 14, 15 years old,” Doostmohammadi shared. “That was my first entrepreneurial journey that I made some money out of - Actually pretty good, decent amount of money for that age. So that was a pretty cool experience.”

The CD-ROM business marked Doostmohammadi’s first taste of end-to-end entrepreneurship. “Development, sales, marketing, everything - You call it,” he reflected. “We learned everything from that [experience].”

Combined with the indelible memory of the vanishing Zayandeh River and higher education in engineering, these family influences and early experience in entrepreneurship forged the foundation for Doostmohammadi’s mission to leverage business and technology to revolutionize the mining industry and protect precious resources.

Pursuing a Vision

Drawing from his lifelong interest in water and experience in mining, Doostmohammadi founded pH7 Technologies in 2020 with the ambitious aim of extracting critical metals in an environmentally friendly way at a global scale. The startup’s name is a nod to the neutral pH of water, a metaphor for the balance Doostmohammadi seeks to strike between industry and environment.

By 2020, Doostmohammadi already had entrepreneurial success under his belt. Besides his early CD-ROM business, Doostmohammadi co-founded and served as CEO of Alchemy Powder Asia in Iran for four years. That venture produced valuable chemicals from industrial waste streams using spray drying and evaporation technologies before Doostmohammadi ultimately relocated to Canada, where pH7 was born.

But he dreamed even bigger with pH7 - a company that could reshape the mining industry globally and help enable the world’s transition to clean energy by increasing the supply of the critical metals needed for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, and more. The urgency and importance of this mission has only crystalized further for Doostmohammadi as he’s watched climate change intensify in recent years. 

“We see the climate change and we realize, ‘Okay, now it’s happening. It’s literally happening and we need to take action’,” Doostmohammadi asserted passionately. “It’s already late, but I believe people are understanding right now. But to get there and make sure that we can actually reduce our carbon footprint, reduce the overall climate change and global warming by 1.5 degrees, it’s all not going to happen until we have 100 percent renewable energy with our net zero goals,” he continues. “But to get there, what we need is critical metals. We cannot have any renewable energy without critical metals.”

To achieve this bold vision, Doostmohammadi and his team at pH7 have developed a novel closed-loop process that uses proprietary chemistry combining inorganic, organic, and electro-chemistry together to extract a range of metals, including platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, copper, tin, and nickel (with more in process of being added to the list), from e-waste and low-grade sulfide ores - with no wastewater and minimal consumption of new water, a nod to Doostmohammadi’s passion for water sustainability. 

Their unique approach uses novel ligands and solvents that can be electrochemically regenerated and reused in a closed loop on end-of-life products, bringing critical metals that would otherwise be discarded back into the supply chain, and therefore, reducing pressures on existing mines already struggling to meet demand for the renewable energy transition. Not to mention, with an added focus on low-energy, low-cost operations.

Doostmohammadi emphasized, “Without platinum, without uranium, we’re not going to have any hydrogen technology. Without cobalt, nickel, copper, we’re not going to have any electrification. We’re not going to have any wind turbines…We already mined the earth. We’re running out of new mines. It’s not much more that we can extract. So we have to think about extraction being more practical, being more efficient. We need to think about [the] circular economy.”

The young company’s innovative approach and impact potential have not gone unnoticed. For example, in the past year, pH7 was named to the Global Cleantech 100, recognized as a SET100 Energy Transition Pioneer, and won the prestigious Clean50 and Clean16 Awards in R&D.

Navigating Challenges

But building pH7 into a global player in sustainable mining has required dogged perseverance. This especially showed in the earliest days, when it came to convincing initial investors of the merits of pH7’s novel approach. “Finding the first investor took a while…I started the company during COVID-19 in late 2020,” Doostmohammadi remembered. “Just everyone didn’t know what was going to happen. So finding investment in that era was crazy. It was crazy hard, crazy tough.”

Doostmohammadi’s unrelenting drive carried pH7 through the darkest stretches. He pitched constantly to family, friends, friends of friends, and angel investors, emphasizing his vision. “We did whatever we could, you know, all the strings we pulled,” Doostmohammadi said. 

The strategy was pitching to five to ten people every day, through every available channel. “I believe I pitched just as many people as I could: teams, online, in person, we masked…and then hearing no after no after no,” Doostmohammadi recounted. “The chance that we had was about less than one percent, which is great. You know, it’s still good.”

Then followed participating in accelerator programs like the Creative Destruction Lab, which helped grow pH7’s network of early-stage investors, angel investors, and mentors. 

By 2021, after expanding his pitching audience to the academic scene, Doostmohammadi and pH7 had raised enough money to start their laboratory operations and R&D in partnership with universities: “So even just pitching my idea to professors and universities…We had lots of attraction from university supervisors and professors that they wanted to be involved.” 

It was this track that led them to Dr. Daniel Leznoff, who now sits on pH7’s advisory board. Dr. Leznoff helped Doostmohammadi source top talent from the Simon Fraser University chemistry department. Paired with Canadian government funding through Mitacs, a non-profit organization that helps facilitate partnerships between academia talent and innovative organizations in Canada, pH7 got the assistance it needed to help finance the salaries of its new talent. This strategic move in fundraising and R&D ultimately propelled pH7’s early growth. 

On the R&D front, failure and learning have been constant companions. “During R&D…you have failure every day. Every single day there is a test that doesn’t work,” said Doostmohammadi. “You learn from it. That’s it. I don’t call any of that failure, myself…That’s what I’m telling all of the team. We don’t have any bad tests or failed tests…When you do a test and you don’t get the result that you expect, it’s not failure. You learn from it…and you can do better for the next one.”

And with determination, ingenuity, and grit, pH7 progressed from a few people tinkering with junkyard scrap material in a garage to a full-fledged pilot plant operation extracting critical metals from waste. “It’s an amazing feeling, especially in that scale. We built a meaningful size pilot operation,” Doostmohammadi beamed. “All of your hard work has been responded through this process and now your customers are actually buying it. You receive some feedback from the customers - They love it. Okay, your product is actually amazing. It’s working really good. So amazing feeling, you cannot describe it.”

A Circular Future

From scrappy beginnings, pH7 has now raised around $20 million in capital with another $5 million in government support. A commercial plant will be operational within months. For Doostmohammadi, it’s a dream coming to fruition. 

“The whole journey that you have is how impactful your life has been. And for myself, I believe, if I can have pH7…help the mining industry to get to the sustainability that everyone is looking for…and secure the supply of the materials that we need for net-zero and help them actually increase that supply, that’s the impact that I want to see.”

Having achieved significant milestones in extracting metals from waste, pH7 now sees major opportunities in urban mining and the circular economy. E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream on the planet, with only 17 percent currently being formally recycled as of 2019 (pH7). But a single ton of printed circuit boards from discarded electronics can contain 800 times more gold and 40 times more copper than a ton of conventionally mined ore (pH7). 

pH7’s process is designed to extract metals like such from pre-processed e-waste in a modular, distributed manner, offering a profitable alternative to polluting smelters. By 2025, the company aims to have an operational urban mining pilot plant capable of processing 5,000 kilograms per day of raw materials into approximately 2,500 kilograms of extracted platinum group metals per year. But in addition to e-waste, pH7 has also developed its process to sustainably extract copper from low-grade sulfide ores, demonstrating the versatility of its closed-loop chemistry. 

To fund its growth into these new verticals, pH7 closed an oversubscribed $16 million Series A round in early 2023, co-led by climate-tech investors Pangaea Ventures and TDK Ventures, with participation from other notable funds. The company also secured $850,000 in non-dilutive grant funding from the government of British Columbia, and most recently, was awarded $250,000 in funding from the Mining Innovation Commercialization Accelerator to build out its technology for extracting copper from low-grade sulfide ores.

So for the boy who watched his beloved river vanish and took to entrepreneurship early on, pH7 is a chance to not just build a company, but preserve the planet for future generations. Looking ahead, Doostmohammadi’s ambitions have only grown. He envisions pH7’s sustainable extraction technology becoming the industry standard globally within the next decade.

With Doostmohammadi at the helm, pH7 is on a mission to prove that the mining industry can revolutionize - that the metals needed to power a sustainable future can be sourced sustainably too. For Doostmohammadi, it’s the culmination of a dream that began on the vanishing banks of the Zayandeh River, and he and his team at pH7 won’t rest until they make it a reality worldwide.