Hydrotropes are compounds able to enhance the solubility of hydrophobic substances in aqueous media and therefore are widely used in the formulation of drugs, cleaning and personal care products. In this work, it is shown that ionic liquids are a new class of powerful catan-ionic hydrotropes where both the cation and the anion synergistically contribute to increase the solubility of biomolecules in water. The effects of the ionic liquid chemical structures, their concentration and of the temperature on the solubility of different biomolecules were evaluated and compared with the performance of conventional hydrotropes. The solubility of two selected biomolecules was studied in the whole composition range, from pure water to pure ionic liquids, and an increase in the solubility of up to 40-fold was observed, con-firming the potential of ionic liquids to act as hydrotropes. The underlying molecular phenomena responsible for the enhanced solubility were investigated by Dynamic Light Scattering, NMR and molecular dynamics simulations and result from the formation of ionic-liquid-solute aggregates. Finally, it was demonstrated that hydrotropy induced by ionic liquids can be used to recover solutes from aqueous media by precipitation, simply by using water as anti-solvent. The results here reported have a significant impact in the understanding of the role of ionic liquids aqueous solutions in the extraction of added-value compounds from biomass as well as in the design of novel processes for their recovery from aqueous media.