Atoco featured in WIRED Middle East
In this interview, published in WIRED Middle East on February 12, 2026, our VP of Business Development, Magnus Bach, unfolds how we leverage nano-engineered reticular materials to build transformative carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting technologies.
Professor Omar Yaghi’s Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2025 recognised a breakthrough that was decades in the making. His research on reticular materials, which are frameworks built from molecular building blocks with high-surface area and selectivity, made it possible to design materials at the atomic level.
Now, through Atoco, the startup founded on those breakthroughs, Yaghi is applying that science to two of the world’s most urgent challenges: water scarcity and carbon emissions.
A Palestinian scientist born to refugees in Jordan, Yaghi experienced water scarcity first-hand in his childhood. As Atoco’s founder and chief science officer, he sees science as a way to solve real problems. The company is not focused on licensing technology, but on making water more accessible in stressed regions and building carbon-capture solutions that can scale.
Yaghi works with the R&D team every week, helping to guide the product so the science is applied where it matters most. The team’s approach is straightforward: use nanoengineered materials to make atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) and carbon capture work at industrial scale, even in some of the driest places on earth.
“We really do not want to provide incremental improvements on existing technologies,” says Magnus Bach, VP of business development at Atoco. “We want to take a step back, make use of nanotechnology and reticular materials in ways they’ve never been used before and by doing so, completely change the game – at least to the extent that we can.”
These materials stand out because the team can control their structure with atomic precision. In one example, moving a single atom increased water uptake by about 30%. “That’s what we mean by atomic precision and the age of precision materials,” Bach says. This level of control means the materials can be designed for specific uses. Atoco’s main focus is on carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting, which is the process of pulling water from the air, even when humidity is low.