Our Mission
To unlock nature's manufacturing strategies for abundant advanced materials
We are building programmable protein-based composites, an entirely new class of material where performance is directed through multi-scale assembly rather than limited by toxic or rare elements.
We Believe
Three Convictions Behind the Work
- Architecture matters as much as ingredients. Nature's highest performing materials aren't defined only by what they're made of, but by how they're built.
- Abundance runs through self-assembly. The key to an abundant material future lies in our ability to manipulate self-assembly from the nano-scale to the macro-scale, for materials at the kilogram scale.
- This is the moment it becomes possible. Artificial intelligence and synthetic biology poise us at a point where we can begin to rapidly accelerate the performance and reach of materials into new capabilities for humanity.
History
Manufacturing Has Always Defined What's Possible
We call it the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, as if the metals themselves changed the world. They didn't. It was the development of smelting, casting, and forging that reshaped societies. The metals were always in the ground. Manufacturing is what made them matter.
Photolithography and clean-room fabrication gave us the information age. Silicon was abundant long before anyone built a transistor on it. Every civilizational leap follows the same pattern: a manufacturing breakthrough unlocks what a raw material can become.
We are building the manufacturing platform for the next epoch.
Approach
Nature's Manufacturing Strategies
The highest-performance materials in biology, from spider silk to bone to abalone shell, don't derive their properties from exotic chemistry. They derive them from hierarchical architecture: precisely controlled assembly from the nanoscale to the macroscale, where structure at every length scale contributes to the final performance envelope.
Changing the assembly changes the outcome. We build the tools to exploit that at the speed and cost of fiber manufacturing, tuning mechanical, electrical, optical, chemical, and magnetic properties on a millimeter-by-millimeter basis.
Engineered proteins are now viable manufacturing feedstocks. We pair them with novel phase-change triggers for self-assembly, microfluidic dope preparation, and spinning techniques including contact pulling, electrospinning, and microfluidic spinning. Critically, these processes scale out rather than up: the biophysics stay identical at every production unit, so we parallelize without the regime changes that typically derail biomaterial scaling.
We predict and program material outcomes. We don't discover them by accident.
Vision
Fibers Everywhere
Fibers are one of the oldest technologies on the planet, and one of the most pervasive. In nature, they template the mineralization of bone and the formation of glass spicules in sponges. They make up the fundamental structural units of wood, muscle, tendon, and silk. Our own technological world mirrors this: textiles, cables, composites, optical networks. Civilization is, in a very literal sense, built on fibers.
What if fibers could sense, conduct, compute, and self-heal?
Build With Us
We partner with researchers, industrial teams, and funding organizations working at the frontier of materials, manufacturing, and the systems they enable.
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