Back in 2018, materials scientist Liangbing Hu figured out how to make a "superwood," a kind of wood that is not only stronger than traditional wood sliced from trees but also stronger and even lighter than steel.
Years later, Hu's startup company, InventWood, is claiming that its Superwood could replace up to 80 percent of the steel used worldwide and cut over 2 gigatons of CO₂ emissions in the process. It's got 50 percent more tensile strength than steel, low expansion and contraction, and a Class A fire rating, which means it's way more likely to survive a fire than most other construction materials on Earth.
The company just landed $15 million in Series A funding to build its first factory, less than 10 years after Hu invented Superwood in a laboratory at the University of Maryland.
But, despite all the hype, InventWood isn't exactly trying to immediately replace your building's foundation with Superwood yet. They're starting small by using Superwood for building skins and decorative surfaces.
CEO Alex Lau says the goal is to eventually move into structural materials. But for now, the game plan is to avoid the downfalls of other promising startups, including expanding too quickly.
This is especially true when you're dealing with the material that will be used in construction. This is a thing that's going to be used to build homes, schools, hospitals, office buildings. Humans are going to work in it, live in it, and hopefully not die in it because it was faulty from the start. As such, it takes years of testing and waiting through a slow-moving approvals process before it can be fully trusted to be the literal foundation of our homes and workplaces.
Superwood begins its life as a regular old wood. From there, scientists remove a polymer called lignin that naturally occurs in wood. It's what makes wood tough to begin with. They take out just enough of it so that cellulose fibers in the wood can still bond.
Then they compress it at 150 degrees Fahrenheit to collapse its cellular structure, making the wood thinner than it was originally, while also making it significantly stronger. Basically, they identified inefficiencies in wood, eliminated them, and supposedly turned it into a much better, much stronger version of what it already was. A superwood, if you will.
All that compression and removal of wood's natural weaknesses make Superwood resistant to rot, termites, moisture, fungi, and fire. It even protects against projectiles, which should make hammering nails to hang a family photo just a bit more difficult.
Again, it'll be a while before you see Superwood commercially available on a large scale. But seeing as the manufacturing process has been trimmed down from weeks to just a few hours, it may not be too long before Superwood shows up in the lumbar section of your local Home Depot.