New Dawn Bio has raised a €2.1 million oversubscribed pre-seed round led by CapitalT to develop the world’s first cultured wood — premium timber grown from tree stem cells in bioreactors, with no logging required.
The technology produces wood up to 10,000 times faster than conventional forestry and can reduce customers’ cost of goods sold by up to 80% by eliminating waste from sawing, routing, drilling, and gluing.
With 5.3 million hectares of tropical forest lost every year, the approach has the potential to prevent up to 2.1 gigatons of CO₂ emissions annually while preserving forests that host over half of Earth’s biodiversity.
Humans have been cutting down trees to make wooden planks for millennia. The process is fundamentally absurd: you grow a round trunk, cut rectangular pieces from it, and discard the rest. Tom Clement, a systems biologist who studied bioinformatics at Wageningen University, spent years wondering why nobody had simply grown the wood cells directly — in the shape you actually needed. Now he has a company doing exactly that.
Groningen-based New Dawn Bio has closed an oversubscribed €2.1 million pre-seed round led by Amsterdam-based CapitalT, with participation from Norrsken Evolve, Ontdekkers Group, and angel investors including Jelle Prins. The funding will advance product development and expand an interdisciplinary R&D team operating at the intersection of cell biology, materials engineering, physics, and process engineering.
