Dennis Nobelius: So, what’s next? Full‑scale industrialization
We are very proud to have previously shared our leapfrogging customers NIKE plus H&M Group together with our launch partners Gap, Houdini, and Target. Commercially, we are now close securing enough volume for the Vietnam plant to reach the project financing threshold. We have top investors onboard showing trust leading #TheGreatTextileShift with TPG Rise Climate, Leitmotif, Gitan VC, Norrsken VC, IMAS Foundation, Volvo Cars, H&M Group, and Vargas. We are progressing strongly on the feedstock side with a solid supply identified for the Vietnam plant, and tech-wise we have a robust plan built around core tech choice and partners. More to follow later.
So, what's next? Industrialization!
Time to industrialize. Key partners onboard – ABB and Jeplan. We are a textile impact company, but we are also a big industrialization scale up to build a chemical plant. Not a small feat. Securing the transformation from textile waste into a profitable business bringing about true circularity – that's the holy grail. Starting with polyester. Avoiding landfill and incineration. Taking care of what's already out there and using that as raw material for a new business to come.
To make this a reality, we are now grateful to share that we are teaming up with a startup long term innovator in the industry Jeplan – and a 100+ year giant inautomation – ABB. One from Japan and one from Switzerland/Sweden. Leveraging decade long experiences in textile-to-textile challenges and innovations together with the heavy lifting and muscles from ABB.
Why is this of interest?
Solving the textile challenges requires deep partnerships, moving from strategic collaborations to actual operations. Across the entire small to big, new to experienced, value chain. For ABB, to the creation of the Pulp, Paper and Fiber business division highlights the potential of a new business area building on long term and deep expertise from pulp and paper into the textile industry. Using Syre as testbench and partner. And for Jeplan, being able to look into optimizing our business by co-developing areas like valorization of byproducts and more. I was impressed by their innovative approach and look forward to continuing to work with Masaki and team around our tech opportunities. And also leveraging their access to a larger scale demo facility in Southern Japan. To run colored, complex feedstock jointly and more.
Partnerships to scale
Accelerating the transition and optimizing our resources, I can also share that we are continuing to work with our polymerization partner Selenis as previously announced. Primarily via their European polymerization units which in combination with our pilot line facility in Mebane already have enabled us to accelerate to multi-ton scale faster than planned. This also marks a shift for us: we are now building up and leveraging global units of operations and existing facilities to scale our tech, and hence we no longer need to build up the previously shared blueprint unit in Cedar Creek. As a scaleup, not all routes are clear from the beginning and now we have found an even faster route to industrialization. We are agile enough to shift track when a faster route is found. Our main promise will always be speed and scale to market and right now we are 100% focused on accelerating to Vietnam on time.
Meaning – with our HQ in Sweden, R&D in the US, and Building an Operations team out of Vietnam, we are now truly set up for next phase of industrialization. Adding to that, now teaming up with Japan, Switzerland, and Sweden through ABB and Jeplan to bring innovations and high-precision chemical engineering and automation to Vietnam sounds like truly leveraging the global skillset to bring about The Great Textile Shift. Thanks ABB and Jeplan for teaming up with us. And stay tuned... more partnerships to come – impact is never done alone.
Dennis