Dutch startup New Dawn Bio raises €2.1 million to grow wood from tree stem cells in bioreactors

New Dawn Bio, a Wageningen-based DeepTech startup claiming to be developing the world’s first cultured wood, has closed its €2.1 million oversubscribed pre-seed funding round to advance product development and expand the interdisciplinary R&D team.

The round was led by CapitalT, with participation from Norrsken Evolve, Ontdekkers Group and a group of prominent angel investors, including Jelle Prins, co-founder of Cradle. 

“Wood has been a pinnacle to mankind for millennia, yet we still haven’t figured out a better way than to cut rectangular boards and beams from round tree trunks. For the first time in history, we can now grow pre-shaped premium wood. This funding lets us turn our breakthrough into a product that industries can actually use,” explained Tom Clement, co-founder and CEO at New Dawn Bio.

Founded in 2024 by Clement and Kianti Figler (COO), New Dawn Bio grows wood from tree stem cells in bioreactors, eliminating the need for logging and enabling materials to be produced directly in their final form.

The company explains that its technology harvests stem cells from trees, multiplies them in bioreactors, and directs the cells to harden into the shape of the desired end product. New Dawn Bio asserts that this process produces high-quality wood grown up to 10,000 times faster than conventional forestry, without any logging.

New Dawn Bio claims that its approach has the potential to save up to 2.1 gigatons of direct CO₂ emissions annually while preserving forests that host over half of Earth’s biodiversity. The company’s shaped-wood process can also reduce customers’ cost of goods sold by up to 80%, eliminating waste from sawing, routing, drilling, and glueing.

“New Dawn Bio represents exactly the kind of deep-tech, impact-driven company CapitalT exists to back. Tom and Kianti have assembled a world-class team tackling a problem that is both massive in scale and largely overlooked. Cultured wood has the potential to transform entire supply chains while making a meaningful contribution to the planet. We’re proud to lead this round,” commented Janneke Niessen, founding partner at CapitalT.

The company plans to use this fresh capital toward advancing product development of cultured wood and expanding the company’s interdisciplinary R&D team, which operates at the intersection of cell biology, materials engineering, physics, and process engineering. 

The team brings together expertise in plant biotechnology, biopolymer engineering, bioinformatics, bioprinting and additive manufacturing, from leading institutions such as Harvard Medical School, University of Amsterdam and ETH Zurich.

New Dawn Bio is a participant in the Eurostars-funded BRANCH project in partnership with LIST (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology).

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