Invest in startups like Cambrium alongside Climate Capital here.
Founders: Mitchell Duffy and Charlie Cotton, PhD
Motto/Mission: Materials that Matter. Our mission is to trigger the next wave of material innovation by harnessing biology’s molecular building blocks. We fundamentally believe that biology’s ability to align economic and environmental incentives makes it the most important manufacturing technology of the 21st century.
Year Founded: 2020
Stage: Seed
Location: Berlin, Germany
_
Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?
Mitchell and Charlie: As of 2020, there are more man-made materials on Earth than biomass. The materials industry is responsible for 23% of greenhouse gas emissions and countless externalities. With the current generation of materials, we must sacrifice either sustainability or performance. At Cambrium, we're working to eliminate this dichotomy. My co-founder Charlie has been driven by this aim throughout his entire career, and I saw a huge path to impact through working on materials, so we founded Cambrium together.
Climate Capital: What are you building?
Mitchell and Charlie: Using our molecular design technology, we create novel materials that don’t sacrifice performance for sustainability in record time. We design, scale, and supply specialty chemicals based on biology’s most innovative building block, structural proteins. Our first product is a skin-identical, vegan collagen, called NovaColl™️. NovaColl™ is used in cosmetic formulations and provides unrivaled efficacy compared to its less sustainable alternatives. Our goal is to enable our customers to produce 10 billion units of consumer products by 2030. Ultimately, we want Cambrium’s chemicals to significantly reduce our reliance on current, polluting materials.
Climate Capital: What is next?
Mitchell and Charlie: Having launched our first product in skincare, we are now expanding into additional verticals such as fashion and nutrition.
Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?
Mitchell and Charlie: company is akin to a multicellular organism. Each person, like each cell in our body, has a role to play. The Cambrium Organism is made up of 25 amazing people (and many hundreds of trillions of cells).
After about 6 months of working together, Charlie, the team, and I laid out the core values of:
1. Interdisciplinarity
2. Vibrancy
3. Boldness
4. Mission-drivenness
5. Curiosity
These values have shaped everything from our interactions to our company direction and hiring decisions.
Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?
Mitchell and Charlie: One of the key challenges biotech companies face is commercialization. Given the R&D-heavy product development, the industry has been plagued by high costs and long timelines, leading to dissatisfied shareholders. A core part of our solution at Cambrium is a tech-driven product development cycle that drastically reduces the length and costs associated with R&D lifecycles. We combine this tech-forward approach with a business model that emphasizes early use-case validation and commercial traction to mitigate these typical challenges.
Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?
Mitchell and Charlie: At the expense of speaking in platitudes and plagiarizing some great people from a Synbiobeta event, I’d have to say our guiding principle this year has been “Do the first thing right”.
Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?
Mitchell and Charlie: If you are interested in making materials that matter we’re always looking for great talent and would be happy to meet you!
If you want to learn more, visit https://www.cambrium.bio/!