It’s a scene that unfolds in cities and suburbs all over the United States. Instead of cutting down the trees and grinding them into timber, everything is shredded.
For no reason, none of them sat well with Ben Christensen. Christensen grew up in New Mexico in the state’s towering pines. If it wasn’t enough to give healthy respect to the wood, his family has soaked up the wood, including his father, a carpenter and a woodworker.
In almost every case, adjustments are the biggest reason wood is wasted, Christensen said. “If you’re a tree care service, you’re incentivized to reach your next appointment,” he told TechCrunch. “If you have to keep your logs out of the way to drop them down where they’re reusing them, that doesn’t work.”
Christensen felt the opportunity to establish Cambium from wasted wood, along with Marisa Repka and Theo Hooker. Startups will reuse the wood that would otherwise be sent to chippers or burn piles. It does it primarily through software to connect and coordinate different parts of the supply chain.
The main selling point of Cambium is that it can help businesses buy and sell more wood depending on which side of the transaction they are. The startup promises better service and more consistent long-term contracts.
Part of the way to do that is to develop your own products. Cambium has developed techniques to ensure consistency from historically inconsistent wood sources. We work with suppliers and factories to manufacture products and sell products to businesses such as rooms and boards and steel cases.
In addition to selling furniture-grade wood, Cambium also produces cross-linked wood, engineering wood formed on panels, and works with manufacturers such as Mercer’s popular wood, smart ram, sterling structure, and Wagen wood. I’ll work.
Using rescued wood is more than just a business opportunity, and is also climate-friendly. “Every time you move 10 miles of wood instead of 1,000, there is a real carbon benefit. And every time you keep the tree alive in the woods, there is a real carbon benefit,” Christensen said. Ta.
A small number of large timber companies dominate the market, but the rest are very fragmented. Christensen, CEO of Cambium, said:
Each step has a transaction that features Cambium software. Currently, the startup works with around 350 different entities, including tree care companies, trucking companies and Saw Mills. Most of them aren’t digitizing their business, Christensen said, and there’s no good reason why they’re not really interested in doing so.
Cambium sells customers about business opportunities rather than software. “If you call my uncle and try to sell him wood software, I wish him good luck. That’s a short conversation,” Christensen said. “But if you call him and say, ‘Hey, I want to buy 40,000 board feet of white oak from you, but I want to buy it from you every 60 days.” He said, “Yeah, let me take my pen and paper out. Let’s have a conversation.”
By getting a window into transactions at every step of the value chain, Cambium collects a wealth of data on how the timber industry works. Using that data, we develop AI that will help pen and paper businesses like our uncles turn their books into digital.
To build the model and expand the platform, Cambium raised $18.5 million, led by Volo Earth Ventures, and spoke exclusively to TechCrunch. Other participating investors include 81 collections, Alumni Ventures, Dangerous Ventures, Ground Swell, Mac Venture Capital, NEA, Rise of the Soma Capital, Tunitas Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Austorey, and Woven Earth.
Currently, Cambium is attracting businesses to the platform by providing access to customers, but Christensen hopes to change the next version of how the book is maintained without much change about how it operates. He said he was there. The goal is to use AI in development to extract information from phones and drop it into the appropriate fields in the database.
“It’s about understanding how people in this industry want to receive information. If you’re driving a truck, you’re not on your laptop. You want to get text, you want to receive voice calls.” Christensen said. “These are what we do.
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