- 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.
Wageningen-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.
New Dawn Bio was founded in 2023 by Tom Clement (CEO) and Kianti Figler (COO). The company began on Wageningen Campus — Europe’s leading agricultural research hub — in September 2023, before relocating to Groningen. The press release describes it as “Founded in Amsterdam” in the About section, but the company has operated from Wageningen and Groningen throughout its history. Clement also co-founded the Plant Cell Institute in 2023, an open-knowledge-sharing network of researchers and startups focused on plant cell applications — a deliberate move to accelerate the broader field, not just his own company.
The team brings together expertise from Harvard Medical School, the University of Amsterdam, and ETH Zurich, covering plant biotechnology, biopolymer engineering, bioinformatics, bioprinting, and additive manufacturing. New Dawn Bio is also a participant in the Eurostars-funded BRANCH project, in partnership with LIST (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology), focused on developing the first cultured wood prototype at scale.
The process starts with stem cells harvested from trees. Rather than growing an entire organism, New Dawn Bio multiplies those cells in bioreactors and gives them the same biological signals they would receive inside a living tree trunk — guiding them to harden into wood tissue in the exact shape of the desired end product. The result is premium wood grown up to 10,000 times faster than conventional forestry, produced directly in its final form without a saw or router touching it.
The implications for material waste are significant. Conventional lumber production cuts rectangular planks from round trunks, discarding a substantial portion of each tree. New Dawn Bio’s shaped-wood process eliminates that waste entirely, reducing customers’ cost of goods sold by up to 80% — a claim the company attributes to eliminating sawing, routing, drilling, and gluing steps. Current samples are hand-sized; the company has demonstrated wood from six different tree species in cell culture, with the largest early sample roughly the size of a postage stamp. Tabletop-scale production is the next milestone.
Why now
The world loses 5.3 million hectares of tropical forest each year. Wood demand is not going away — the global wood and timber products market was valued at $992 billion in 2024 — and conventional supply chains are under mounting environmental and regulatory pressure. As TFN has documented in its coverage of the Netherlands’ deep tech ecosystem, Dutch deep-tech startups are increasingly targeting large, overlooked material science problems that software alone cannot solve.
“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.” — Tom Clement, co-founder and CEO, New Dawn Bio.
“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.” — Janneke Niessen, Founding Partner, CapitalT.
CapitalT, Amsterdam-based, focuses on pre-seed and seed investments in ClimateTech and Future of Work. Its portfolio includes TestGorilla, a talent assessment platform that has raised over $70 million and is used by more than 10,000 companies globally; Overstory, an AI-powered vegetation intelligence platform for grid resilience; and eComID, an AI-powered shopping passport for fashion brands. Norrsken Evolve is the impact-focused early-stage fund of Norrsken Foundation, backed by Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth, which has previously backed climate and health startups across Europe. Ontdekkers Group and angel investor Jelle Prins join as new backers.
The competitive landscape
New Dawn Bio’s most direct peer is Foray Bioscience, an MIT spin-off based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has raised approximately $3.4 million to grow wood-based materials and perfumes from plant cells. Foray uses leaf cells rather than stem cells, and focuses on cosmetics and fragrance applications before structural wood, whereas New Dawn Bio targets premium structural wood in its final shape from day one. A third category of wood alternative — mycelium-based composites — is being developed by companies such as Ecovative Design, which has raised over $60 million, though mycelium produces foam-like materials rather than true wood with wood’s structural properties. What distinguishes New Dawn Bio is its focus on growing actual wood tissue — with the same cellular structure as tree-sourced timber — rather than a wood-like substitute or extract.
Market context
According to Grand View Research, the global wood and timber products market was valued at $992.43 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.25 trillion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 4.7%. The sustainable wood products segment specifically is estimated at $150 billion in 2025 and growing at 7% annually.
The harder question New Dawn Bio must answer is not whether the world needs a better way to produce wood. It clearly does. The question is whether a biological process that currently produces hand-sized samples can reach industrial scale before the climate and material pressures it is designed to solve force the market to settle for less elegant alternatives.
