A startup is using AI to turn wasted wood – destined for the chipper or scrap – into cross-laminated timber and other higher-value timber products. Founded by Ben Christenson, Marisa Repka, and Theo Hooker, the DC-based Cambium has already raised millions in VC funding and is busy building a fully recyclable supply chain for forest products.
“We’re building a better value chain where you can use local material, you can use salvaged material, and all of that is connected to that through our technology,” Mr Christensen exclusively told TechCrunch’s Podcast last year. “So that’s what we do: we deliver carbon-smart wood, locally salvaged wood, tracked on our technology, to large buyers to build buildings, build furniture, and use any sort of thing that you use wood for. And we do that in a really efficient and cost-competitive way.”
“Demand for more sustainable wood has been growing in recent years,” Christensen said, “but before Cambium, there was not a good system to find the recycled wood.” According to Christensen, just 5% to 10% of wood waste gets reused, with the vast majority of wood ending up in landfills – in nearly every case, the main reason is coordination: “If you’re a tree care service, you’re only incentivised to get to your next booking,” he said. So “if you drive out of your way to drop off logs somewhere that would reuse them, it won’t work.”
The main selling point is that it helps companies on both sides of the transition.
In addition, it promises better service and more consistent, long-term contracts. It does this by developing products, working with suppliers and mills to make them, and then selling them to retailers. As well as selling furniture-grade lumber, it also produces cross-laminated timber, where it works in partnership with many of the country’s largest manufacturers, including Mercer Mass Timber, SmartLam, Sterling Structural, and Vaagen Timbers.
Using salvaged wood is more than just a business opportunity; it’s also climate-friendly. “Every time you move wood ten miles instead of 1,000, there’s a real carbon benefit. And every time you keep a tree alive in the forest, there’s a real carbon benefit,” Christensen said. And whilst a handful of large timber companies dominate the market, the market is otherwise highly fragmented. “It generally takes eight to ten businesses to get material to an end customer,” Christensen said.
There’s a transaction at each step, which is where Cambium’s software comes in.
The startup works with 350 entities, including tree care companies, trucking companies, and sawmills. According to Christensen, most of them haven’t digitised their operations, who said they aren’t particularly interested in doing so. Cambium pitches customers on the business opportunities, not the software.
“If you call my uncle and try to sell him wood software, good luck. That’s a short conversation,” Christensen said. “But if you call him and you say, ‘Hey, I want to buy 40,000 board feet of four-quarter white oak from you, and I want to buy it from you every 60 days.’ He’s like, ‘Heck yeah, let me get out my pen and paper. Let’s have a conversation.’”
By getting a window into transactions at every step of the value chain, Cambium also gathers large amounts of data about how the timber industry works. And with that data, it uses AI to help pen-and-paper businesses digitise their books.
To build the model and expand the platform, Cambium has already raised more than US $18.5 million from investors led by VoLo Earth Ventures. Other participating investors include 81 Collection, Alumni Ventures, Dangerous Ventures, Groundswell, MaC Venture Capital, NEA, Rise of the Rest, Soma Capital, Tunitas Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Understorey, and Woven Earth.
As it stands, Cambium attracts companies to the platform by offering them access to customers, but Christensen said he wants the next version to change how they keep their books without changing much about how they operate their business.
The goal, he said, is to use the AI under development to extract information from phone calls and drop it into the proper field in a database: “It’s about understanding how people in this industry want to receive information. If you’re driving a truck, you’re not on a laptop. You want to get a text; you want to get a voice call,” Christensen said. “Those are the things that we’re doing that make it really simple.”
- Please Note: This article uses extracts from two articles originally published by TechCrunch. For more information, visit the original article here.
