Mahesh Konduru is Chief Executive Officer of Momentum Technologies, which recovers lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements from battery scrap, magnet swarf and mining tailings. Its Membrane Solvent Extraction process was developed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the Department of Energy's Critical Materials Innovation Hub. In 2025 the company produced commercial-grade battery materials at better than 99% purity, recovered more than 90% of the lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earths it processed, and signed supply agreements and letters of intent representing over $150 million of potential revenue.
His argument for the business is a constraint argument. "The biggest threat to the mine-to-magnet and mine-to-battery supply chain is the processing bottleneck," he told the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in December 2025, testifying that Momentum's modular plants can be built in about a year against three to five for a conventional facility, and that federal money should de-risk a first module rather than fund a whole plant. He was appointed in 2024 to the Commerce Department's Industry Trade Advisory Committee on Critical Minerals and Non-Ferrous Metals.
Before Momentum he ran ProSep, the Houston produced-water and inline mixing company, joining as Chief Financial Officer and Head of Operations and becoming chief executive; he has been non-executive Chair of its board since 2023. Earlier he was a principal at Potomac Energy Fund, worked at Braemar Energy Ventures, structured transactions and led engineering diligence on solar projects of $400 million and up at the Department of Energy's loan programs office, and engineered emission control technologies at Johnson Matthey. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Akron and an MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management.
