It’s a scene that airs in cities and suburbs across the United States: A tree is cut down, not ground into wood, but chopped.
There are many reasons why none of them sit well with Ben Christensen. Christensen grew up in the towering pine trees in New Mexico, and if that wasn’t enough to instill healthy respect for the trees, his family was immersed in the wood, including his father, a carpenter and carpenter.
Christensen said that in almost every case, the biggest reason Wood wasted is coordination. “If you’re a tree care service, you’ll inspire the next booking,” he told TechCrunch. “If you have to do everything you can to put down its reused log, that won’t work.”
Christensen and Marisa Repka and Theo Hooker feel opportunities on waste wood cambium. The startup will send the wood recovery to the chipper or combustion stack and is mainly connected and coordinated through software. Different parts of the supply chain.
The main selling point of Cambium is that they can help companies buy or sell more wood, depending on which side of the deal. The startup promises better services and more consistent long-term contracts.
Part of this is developing your own products. Cambium has developed technology to ensure consistency of historically inconsistent wood sources. It works with suppliers and factories to produce products and sells them to companies such as rooms, boards and steel boxes.
In addition to selling furniture-grade wood, Cambium also produces trans-laminated wood, an engineered wood made into panels, working with manufacturers including Mercer Mass Timber, Smartlam, Sterling Structure and Vaagen Timbers.
Using salvaged wood is not just a business opportunity, it is also a climate-friendly wood. “Whenever you move the wood ten miles instead of 1,000, there is a real carbon benefit. Whenever you live a tree in the forest, there is a real carbon benefit,” Christensen said.
A few large timber companies dominate the market, but beyond that, it is highly fragmented. “It usually takes eight to ten businesses to deliver the material to the end customer,” said Christensen, CEO of Cambium.
In each step, there is a transaction, which is where Cambium’s software is located. The startup currently works with about 350 different entities, including tree care companies, truck companies and sawmills. Christensen said most of them didn’t digitize their business, and they weren’t interested in it for good reason.
Cambium will provide customers with business opportunities, not software. “If you call my uncle and try to sell him wood software, good luck. It’s a short conversation,” Christensen said. “But if you call him and say, ‘Hey, I want to buy 40,000 feet of quarter white oak from you, I want to buy it from you every 60 days.” He’s like, ‘Oh my gosh , let me take out my pen and paper. Let’s talk about it. ”’
By getting windows to deals in every step of the value chain, Cambium is collecting a lot of data on how the wood industry works. With this data, it is developing an AI that can help pen and paper businesses like his uncle to digitize books.
To build the model and expand the platform, Cambium raised $18.5 million, led by Volo Earth Ventures, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Other participating investors include 81 Collections, Alumni Ventures, Dangerous Ventures, Earth Games, Mac Venture Capital, NEA, the rest of the Rise, Soma Capital, Tunitas Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Kundeskorey and Woven Earth.
Currently, Cambium attracts companies to the platform by providing customers with access to them, but Christensen said he hopes the next release changes the way they keep books without changing the way they do business. The goal is to use the AI under development to extract information from the phone and put it into appropriate fields in the database, he said.
“It’s about understanding how people in the industry want to receive information. If you drive a truck, you’re not on your laptop. You want to get text, you want to get voice calls,” Christensen said. “That’s what we’re doing, making it very simple.”
