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What We Do
Millions of barrels of oilfield produced water carry valuable minerals back underground every day. HydroBIND designs the capture media our partners will use to recover them: high-value critical minerals, nutrients for fertilizer, salts for dust control and deicing, and feedstock for high-strength alloys. Our long-term goal goes further: media that help turn harsh brine wastewater into net-new fresh water.
Technology
The BIND platform
BIND (Biological Ion Nano-Delivery) is our protein design platform. We design proteins with AI-guided tools, screen every design in molecular-dynamics simulations against the full mix of ions found in Williston Basin brine, and carry the best candidates into our wet lab in Williston, North Dakota, for expression, purification and testing. Our location in the heart of the Bakken gives us direct access to real produced water and to our partners.
Selectivity is the whole game. The valuable ions in produced water are vastly outnumbered by sodium, so a capture material has to pick out its target and ignore everything else. It also has to survive the water itself, an extreme, hypersaline environment. Our proteins are designed to hold up under those conditions, and the engineering behind that resilience is proprietary. We design against Williston Basin produced water on purpose: it is among the most difficult brines to design for, so what works here opens the door to a broad range of other waters and applications.
Where we are
Milestones
• Friends-and-family funding round
• $160K non-dilutive grant from the North Dakota Agricultural Products Utilization Commission (APUC), December 2025
• DEQ-approved wet lab in Williston, North Dakota
• First designed proteins ready for lab validation, October 2026
• gener8tor gBETA Fargo, Fall 2026 cohort
• Member of NVIDIA Inception, AWS Activate, the Google for Startups Cloud Program and Microsoft for Startups, with in-kind cloud credits for our simulation work
Team
Steve Kemp, Founder and CEO. Leads protein design, strategy and partnerships.
Joe Kemp, Lead Experimental Biologist. Runs expression, purification and assays in our Williston lab.