Ulupreneur Marisa Repka, co-founder of Cambium, has always been passionate about the environment. While working toward a master’s degree in environmental management at the Yale School of Forestry, she met her future co-founder and now CEO, Ben Christensen, who was pursuing the same degree and shared her passion for recreational soccer. Ben had many ideas about how natural climate solutions might be financed more sustainably. His enthusiasm was contagious, and as they wrapped up their master’s program they raised initial seed capital and grant dollars through the Nature Conservancy’s natural climate solutions accelerator program to launch the venture. Theo Hooker, joined Ben and Marisa as a co-founder.
As the pandemic hit, the spring of 2020 seemed like a crazy time to start working on a startup. Marisa recounted that just about everything felt uncertain then, but the trio felt it was the right time to work on something completely out of the box and make a run for it—and so, they founded Cambium.
Cambium targets wood impacted by the four Ds: disease, decay, disaster, and development.”
The company partners with local arborists and millers to rescue, repurpose, and upcycle this wood, keeping it out of landfills. .
We caught up with Marisa as the firm wrapped up an $18.5M Series A round that brought their funding total to $28M.
Why are you passionate about Cambium?
We’re really trying to introduce technology to the full life cycle of wood products, and thinking about how we can source materials for the built environment more sustainably. And when we started the company, really, we were looking at that from this circular economy model: there’s a lot of natural resources that currently don’t have good outlets, whether that is trees from urban areas that are chipped or mulched or landfilled. Or we looked at fuel load reduction treatments, wildfire mediation beetle infestation, any number of forest blights— there’s just a lot of biomass that land managers have a hard time dealing with. At the same time, we watched lumber be transacted around the world; sometimes it would get sent to Asia to be finished into products that came back to the US.
It seemed like there was this kind of disconnect between a natural resource that was available in our backyards—one that was currently considered a waste stream—and an opportunity to really upcycle that into something valuable.”
Cambium’s product is called Smart Wood, what is it?
It’s a more sustainable lumber. We work with a network of a couple hundred saw mills across the US to connect salvage logs with saw mills that want to procure that material, and then process it into lumber. We sell that lumber in a variety of products, whether that’s furniture, millwork and flooring products, or just wholesale lumber to other wood-product manufacturers. We sell primarily to furniture and millwork; nowadays, mass timber is the other sort of primary outlet. We try to connect that product to end users, whether it be a furniture manufacturer who will make it into a table or a mass timber manufacturer who will press it into panels.
How did you get your first customers?
There were a lot of cold calls and emails. We’ve always been looking at leading-edge companies that are interested in procuring more sustainable materials. So, we’ve always found folks through green building and design communities or corporate sustainability networks. I think that was our avenue of initial outreach and engagement.
Also, a portion of our customers are actual land managers—the people who are handling tree removals due to disaster, disease, development, decay, or the tree services that are looking to dispose of logs after they’ve taken down a hazard removal. We’d often go to conferences to meet them or would reach out through our networks.
Any advice for founders fundraising?
It’s always tough to decide whether we should be concentrating on building the business or reaching out to potential investors to help get us to the next step”
It’s sometimes learning how to read that timeline and decide strategically whether this is the moment to invest in trying to really set a new course versus can we finish out and really prove the concept at the stage that we’re in right now and deliver those results that investors are going to be looking for?
I think we’ve always looked at it in terms of how a new investor relationship could really add something beyond capital. You’re always looking for that thought partnership—and for an investor who really wants to build the business and step into that ownership of the company with you. You want to know they will be there to troubleshoot problems when things go wrong, or to help open doors, make new introductions, and really help grow the business.
Dreams for Cambium
We have big aspirations. Timber is such a large industry; it would be exciting to see us both scale within the wood products space, where I think there’s a ton of headroom to grow, and branch out into additional materials as well. There’s a lot of other potential. I think we would probably continue to stay within the realm of the built environment: steel and concrete and other kinds of structural elements would make a lot of sense, but that’s probably a ways down the road.
