Indie Bio - Demo Day #3 - MycoWorks

hi I'm Sofia Wang I am the CEO of Michael works Michael works is a biomaterials company that is changing the way things are made and we're starting today with leather leather has been around a long time it's beautiful durable functional it's primal it's a hide it feels good to the touch it delivers status luxury and comfort and we love it because it's natural but leather is a co-product of the livestock industry think of the resources and time this takes this industry uses 50% of this country's water supply and 30% of the Earth's landmass this industry produces 18% of the Earth's greenhouse gas emissions and producing leather is costly and wasteful only 30% of an untreated hide gets turned into leather the risk of thrown away tanneries produced toxic toxic wastes subject to regulatory fines and human health violations and because leather is tied to livestock price and quality are vulnerable to climate and availability but people love leather cattle populations grow with human populations at 3% a year but the global leather goods market and consumer demand is growing at a rate of 4 to 7% a year so desire and demand aren't going anywhere and neither are the problems this is an opportunity micro Works has an amazing answer and it comes of course from nature our technology is based on mushrooms one of the most abundant resources on the planet the root fibers of mushrooms are called mycelium and it's a naturally strong fiber that grows on almost anything under the Sun we have discovered a way to turn mycelium and agricultural waste into a natural alternative to leather so we're not replacing leather we have something even better people are always blown away by how much our material feels like leather that's because like leather it's a skin it was grown it was alive it's organic it's also durable it holds up to industrial sewing and fabrication and our mechanical tests show that our materials out form deer and lamb's leather and synthetic leather in tensile strength tests it's versatile we've created a nearly endless range of colors and finishes and it's engineer Bowl so we can customize growth to express express patterns and textures we can customize for thickness density and three-dimensional features you can't do this with animals you also can't grow an animal to create a hide of any size and shape we can do this with our technology when we first started at indy bio we had grown a piece that was one square inch within a month we had grown a sheet that was 2 by 3 feet within two months we had grown a space the size of a full-scale cowhide that's one cow saved and we're quickly we're quickly scaling beyond that so we're scaling fast we can do that because our process is rapid compare the two weeks it takes us right now to grow a sheet of our leather to the average three years it takes to raise an animal to maturity to harvest to hide so this is an ultra sustainable technology with no downsides our closed-loop process has low water and energy requirements we can grow multiple sheets on the same AG waste which means this is a carbon negative process and at the end of product life our leathers biodegradable and mycelium is a benefit to the earth not a pollutant best of all our low complexity process means that we can compete with leather right now in our first year of pilot production will be making sheets of our leather at $50 a square foot we can compete with exotic leathers used by manufacturers of high-end Footwear that's our first target market with greater volumes we'll be able to bring the cost down to $30 a square foot will compete with top quality leathers and Serve manufacturers of premium footwear apparel and accessories and within 4 years we're going to bring our raw material production in-house which will drop our costs down to $5 a square foot which means we can compete with nearly any leather on the market will serve manufacturers of mass-market leather goods no we can scale with these projections because we're scaling our scaling our modeling or scale up on systems already in place to produce edible mushrooms in commercial volumes so we'll use similar tech and reorient it towards making materials we know we can make a hundred fifty thousand square feet of this leather in a six thousand square foot facility so we already know what we need because this infrastructure already exists we'll be competing with natural leather conventional leather synthetic leather and bio fabricated leather but unlike us these competitors do not have a solution that's scalable sustainable animal-free and low-cost right now the markets are huge of the 23 billion square feet of leather produced every year the largest outlet for that is Footwear valued at 47 billion dollars the leather goods market is valued at 200 billion dollars in footwear represents almost 60 percent of that market we've got great traction I can't disclose names but we're working with to global Footwear manufacturers and a global apparel manufacturer all household names to get our leather into products next year our patents been granted we've filed another one for this tech we'll have a full product datasheet and a pilot facility by the end of the year pilot production starts next year we'll scale to commercial volumes in the following year and that'll allow us to expand beyond Footwear to other leather goods markets we have an amazing production research team and we are so proud to be working with our advisors dr. Drew endy co-founder of the BioBricks foundation dr. Amanda parks of manufacturer New York who shares our commitment to innovating fashion with technology and Kevin byuk of lyft economy who shares our commitment to social impact and sustainability our CTO Phil Ross invented the field of myko texture and he has 20 years experience developing mycelium as a structural material our senior adviser Eddie pavel has 20 years of executive management experience and I started working with Phil 10 years ago when no one had heard of my Co texture and I'm so proud to have helped bring this tech to where it is today mushrooms we've known their culinary and medicinal value for a long time and we're only now starting to unleash their potential as a structural material mushroom materials are now been used in packaging furniture interior design and more and we are so excited to be bringing mushroom leather to the world we're already making product this this is just the start there are so many industries that we're going to change for the better as one of our partners likes to say we are in the cusp of the Maiko cultural revolution we are raising a 2.3 million seed to scale to pilot and grow our team our round is firming up so please get in touch to help bring this amazing technology to the world and please come see us after the presentations and see and feel for yourself what we've made thank you you

Channel: IndieBio

Views: 82,182

Rating: 4.921824 out of 5

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Id: gZQGeQp4v-4

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2016