Maryland Startup Set to Produce Wood-Based Material Stronger Than Steel

A Maryland startup, Inventwood, will soon commercialize a wood-based material that has harder properties than steel.

It all started with research in 2018, when Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, came up with a way to transform common wood into a material that is stronger than steel. But Hu didn't have the ability to scale up the results of his research to an industrial level: "I'm a university professor. I don't really know what to do," he had said at the time.

But rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years perfecting the technology, reducing the time it took to produce the material from more than a week to just a few hours. Soon, the material was ready for commercialization. At that point, the professor decided to license the technology to a Maryland startup, InventWood. The first batches of the new material, called Superwood, will be produced starting this summer.

To build its facility, InventWood raised $15 million from a venture led by the Grantham Foundation with participation from Baruch Future Ventures, Builders Vision and Muus Climate Partners.

InventWood’s Superwood starts with ordinary wood, which is made up of two main compounds, cellulose and lignin. The goal is to strengthen the cellulose that’s already in the wood. “The cellulose nanocrystal is actually stronger than a carbon fiber,” said Alex Lau, CEO of Inventwood. The company treats it with chemicals that change its molecular structure, Lau explained, and then compresses the result to increase the hydrogen bonds between the cellulose molecules. “The material can be made four times denser, but it’s actually 10 times stronger because of the extra bonds that are created,” Lau said.