It’s a scene that plays out in cities and suburbs across America: A tree gets cut down, and instead of being milled into lumber, the whole thing gets shredded.
There are a range of reasons why, none of which have sat well with Ben Christensen. Christensen grew up in New Mexico among the state’s towering pines, and if that wasn’t enough to instill a healthy respect for trees, his family is steeped in timber, including his father who is a carpenter and woodworker.
In nearly every case, the biggest reason that wood gets wasted is coordination, Christensen said. “If you’re a tree care service, you’re incentivized to get to your next booking,” he told TechCrunch. “If you have to drive out of your way to drop off logs somewhere that would reuse them, it’s not going to work.”
Christensen, along with Marisa Repka and Theo Hooker, sensed opportunity in the wasted wood, founding Cambium. The startup reuses wood that would otherwise be sent to the chipper or the burn pile, and it does that mostly through software to connect and coordinate disparate parts of the supply chain.
Cambium’s main selling point is that they can help companies buy or sell more wood, depending on which side of the transaction they’re on. The startup promises better service and more consistent, long-term contracts.
Part of the way it does that is by developing its own products. Cambium has developed techniques to ensure consistency from historically inconsistent sources of wood. It works with suppliers and mills to make the products, and it sells the products to companies like Room and Board and Steelcase.
In addition to selling furniture grade lumber, Cambium also produces cross-laminated timber, an engineered wood that’s formed into panels, working in partnership with manufacturers including Mercer Mass Timber, SmartLam, Sterling Structural, and Vaagen Timbers.
Using salvaged wood is more than just a business opportunity, it’s a climate friendly one as well. “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.
A handful of large timber companies dominate the market, but outside of that, it’s highly fragmented. “It generally takes eight to ten businesses to get material to an end customer,” said Christensen, Cambium’s CEO.
At each step, there’s a transaction, which is where Cambium’s software comes in. The startup currently works with around 350 different entities, including tree care companies, trucking companies, and saw mills. Most of them haven’t digitized their operations, Christensen said, and absent a good reason, they aren’t really 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 is gathering large amounts of data about how the timber industry works. With that data, it’s developing an AI that can help pen-and-paper businesses like his uncle’s to digitize their books.
To build the models and expand the platform, Cambium raised $18.5 million led by VoLo Earth Ventures, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. 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.
Currently, Cambium attracts companies to the platform by offering them access to customers, but Christensen said he wants the next version to change the way 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.”
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