Editor’s note: Startup Spotlight is a regular feature at WRAL TechWire, including as part of our Startup Monday package which includes Triangle Startup Guide updates, calendars of events and an exclusive guide to Triangle meetups. 

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DURHAM – Sustainable building materials company Plantd recently announced a $10 million Series A funding round. The three co-founders, CEO Josh Dorfman and engineers Huade Tan and Nathan Silvernail, have said they plan to use this round of funding to “establish their agriculture supply chain.” 

WRAL TechWire’s Sarah Glova spoke to the Durham-based startup to learn more about the work of turning grass into carbon-negative building materials.

The Agricultural Supply Chain

The first thing the team explained is why they’re focused on creating an alternative to the lumber-based materials that are so common in construction, like traditional OSB boards (oriented strand boards—basically, manufactured plywood). 

“When you think about standard OSB, or professional lumber, or anything with construction materials, you’re usually drawn to trees,” said Dorfman. “For decades, we’ve been farming trees for that product, and now we’re coming to realize that doesn’t work, right? That’s actually one of the main reasons for all the climate problems that we’re seeing.” 

According to Dorfman, in order to pivot away from trees as a “biomass source” for construction materials, we have to develop the agricultural supply chain—alternative plants that work for construction without the negative climate effects. 

“And right now, that just doesn’t exist,” said Dorfman. “So in order for us to solve the problem on the tech side, we have to first solve the problem on the agricultural supply chain side. So we’re just developing all of that ourselves.”

Plantd offers a construction materials product—structural panels for homebuilding—that are made not from lumber but from perennial grass. 

“We’ve identified a blend of perennial grasses that we’re not comfortable disclosing at this point, we’re doing a lot of proprietary work on it, but it is a perennial grass, so it comes up on its own, every year, and that’s really important from a carbon accounting point of view,” said Dorfman. “It requires very few inputs to be able to reach some really extraordinary yields, versus, say, something that you’re growing as an annual crop, like corn or soy, where you have to put a lot of fertilizer, and there’s a lot of tractor passes throughout a growing season.” 

“Carbon-Negative”

The Plantd panel product is “carbon-negative,” meaning that producing the product actually removes carbon from our atmosphere. 

According to Tan, the work of removing carbon from the atmosphere is mostly taken care of by the plant itself. 

“The chemistry of taking very low parts-per-million carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turning it into a solid, is, essentially, the process of growing—and that’s really hard. That’s something that, even with modern science and engineering, it’s very difficult,” said Tan. “So, from the engineering perspective, we’re doing our best to be as efficient as possible and not release any more of that CO2 that the plant originally captured.” 

In other words—the plant absorbs the CO2. So Plantd’s job, then, is to transform the plant into a construction material without releasing too much of the CO2 back into the atmosphere. 

“Our engineering efforts are to minimize the amount of energy, minimize the amount of fossil fuels, that we have to burn to convert that solid into something that someone actually wants,” said Tan. “And that’s just the art of turning it into a panel product.” 

Right now, Plantd is focused on the panel product, but the idea is that this process could be replicated to build any construction material in the future. 

“We can have one production line that is running structural panels for walls or roofs, that’s our starting point,” said Dorfman. “But the same core production technology that enables us to build those structural panels 7/16th inch thick can also be tuned to produce something that’s thicker and enable us to quickly move into a product like engineered studs or engineered two-by-fours.”

Dorfman said they could eventually create the timber-based products that are used in tall buildings, whether that’s mass timber or cross-laminated timber. 

“We can move into those types of product categories as well, and do it in a very small manufacturing footprint, which is a capability that just simply does not exist in the world today,” said Dorfman.

A Desktop Printer for Manufacturing

From the sound of it, identifying the proprietary grass blend was only the first step—the production process is also key. That’s why, according to the founders, the company is focused on building the construction materials factories of the future. 

“I like to tell people were making, essentially, the desktop printer equivalent of an engineering material mill,” said Tan. “If you look at how these factories are built currently, they are massive infrastructure projects, the size of a small town, and they burn as much energy as a small town. Our production process will be a machine you can put into a building, like an Amazon warehouse, or any warehouse. So essentially, it’s like installing a printer and plugging it in, and you have an OSB factory, effectively.”

The plan is for the factories to be 100% electric so that they’re both low carbon and low operating cost. 

“If you look at one of these typical mills that are the size of the small town, they have massive smokestacks and emissions control processes to try and reduce the amount of pollution that goes into it,” said Tan. “But at the end of the day, you still don’t want to live next to one of these mills. Whereas we’re going to be fully electric, so there’s going to be, effectively zero emissions—no tailpipes out of our factories, so you can locate these things very close to your customer, very close to where buildings are actually built.”

“You will not find smokestacks on a Plantd manufacturing facility,” added Dorfman.

Support from NC Agriculture draws Plantd to Triangle

Another interesting aspect about Plantd—their potential to partner with North Carolina farmers. 

“We are signing on farmers to grow with us,” said Dorfman. “We just signed a big contract with a farmer in the Roxboro area who will be growing for us starting this spring.”

Dorfman said the team is “excited” about growing partnerships with NC farmers. 

“Tobacco was so important for the state for so long, but you have so many farmers who are transitioning away from tobacco as that industry and opportunity is declining,” said Dorfman, “and we’re seeing an opportunity to work with those types of farmers who are looking to move into a crop that is both economically and environmentally sustainable.” 

Dorfman said that the NC agricultural scene was one of the reasons that the Triangle was “a very logical place” for them to headquarter their startup. 

“As we started building this business, it really became clear that what the Triangle offers for us is a talented workforce, a massively growing housing industry, and access to millions of acres of farmland,” said Dorfman.  

Silvernail said the team also received support from North Carolina’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

“There’s definitely some nuances to developing a new agricultural supply chain that you have to overcome, and I would say, the Department of Agriculture in this state is just amazing,” said Silvernail. “They’ve really helped us figure out how to do that and the different obstacles overcome.”

“When we first got in touch with the Department of Agriculture, what struck me is—and I’ve said this to a number of their employees and managers—they answer the phone on the first ring,” said Dorfman. “The service you get, in the way they want to help farmers and help companies that are going to work in rural economies here to gain their footing, has been tremendous for us.”

Plantd was also among the 26 finalists for an NC IDEA SEED Grant in the Fall 2021 cycle. While they didn’t win the grant, they generated a lot of support for their work. 

“It’s an interesting network. There’s definitely a cool vibe of people that are just around and doing interesting things,” said Tan.

From SpaceX to Sustainable Building Materials

Tan and Silvernail worked together at SpaceX, designing key life-support systems for the Dragon cargo and crew spacecraft.

“The problem we were solving with Dragon was, effectively, you go on a 100-hour road trip in an SUV-sized bubble with three of your friends, and you can’t pull over and can’t roll down the windows,” said Tan. “So literally, the vehicle has to recycle all the water and all the air and keep you alive.”

The work inspired the pair to think about “terrestrial-based life support.”

“Looking at that problem, staring at that problem for eight years, gave us this mental model of, ‘What can we possibly do on the bigger bubble?’” said Tan. “We’re all living in this ‘bigger bubble,’ there’s 8 billion of us, and there’s an indefinite mission duration. What can we do to actually balance the equation of carbon going into the atmosphere versus coming out?” 

Tan and Silvernail were experimenting with materials and carbon capture when Tan met Dorfman in February 2021. At that time, Dorfman was based in Asheville, building a sustainable furniture company with a factory in Hendersonville. 

“Coming through the pandemic, I was getting very frustrated trying to source sustainable materials,” said Dorfman. “With the quality going down, price going up, and supply becoming difficult to access, I was starting to think that materials could be a really massive opportunity from a sustainability perspective.”

When Dorfman connected with Tan, he vented his frustration—and Tan shared how he and Silvernail were thinking about carbon capture and materials. 

“We put these ideas together and instantly realized we could be onto something really massive in terms of its scale and ambition,” said Dorfman. “If we were going to come up with a biomass that could out-compete trees on key characteristics, and we have all of this fiber, how can we do something useful with it? How can we turn it into a product and lock it away for as long as possible? We instantly started thinking that you started turning our attention to the construction industry.”

Solving Climate Change

Dorfman shared that what really drives the team is trying to “solve climate change.” And to do that, Dorfman says, they have to build products that “builders will love.” 

“In order to take carbon out of the atmosphere as fast as possible, and lock it away as fast as possible, we have to deliver an end product to a customer that totally delights that customer in terms of performance, in terms of price, and in terms of ease of installation,” said Dorfman. 

Learn more about Plantd at plantdmaterials.com.