This Startup Invented Wood That’s Stronger Than Steel.

Maryland-based InventWood is doing just what its name implies: inventing a new type of wood. The new building material consists of wood and a high-tech process involving heat, pressure, and food industry chemicals.

The result of their tinkering is called Superwood.

“Traditionally, people who worked with wood tried to do things to protect the wood,” says InventWood CEO Alex Lau. “But no one had actually figured out how to make wood fundamentally stronger.”

Superwood can be made of any type of wood—including woodchips and bamboo. The process to create it involves “cooking” proprietary food industry chemicals into the wood at under 200 degrees Celsius, Lau says, then applying pressure. (The process differs from pressure-treated wood, which also uses pressure to force chemicals into wood, but seeks to improve durability, rather than strength.) 

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What results is a material that is denser than wood that naturally comes from trees, and is much stronger. Steel, for example, has a strength of about 400 megapascals, which measure yield and tensile strength. Superwood has a strength of 600 megapascals.

The key to Superwood’s strength is cellulose, a superabundant organic material that makes up the primary structural component of plants. Cellulose nanocrystals are even stronger than carbon fibers, Lau says. To enhance that strength, the process, developed by InventWood founder and University of Maryland professor Liangbing Hu, entailed compressing cellulose until the fibers bond together and then using lignin, a natural polymer found in wood, to hold the cellulose in place.

“This has the potential to be the default way to build,” Lau says. “You’ll build buildings that are lighter, that are cheaper to build, that are faster to build, and safer to live in, and that feel more comfortable.”

InventWood’s various shades. Photo: Courtesy company

Hu founded InventWood in 2016, and published a high profile article on his research in the journal Nature in 2018. InventWood was predominantly focused on research and development until Lau joined in 2021 to help commercialize the technology. That same year, the company landed a $20 million SCALEUP grant from the Department of Energy for innovations with the potential to reduce emissions and advance research and development in the U.S.

Wood is typically considered a more environmentally-friendly building material than steel or concrete. Steel accounts for as much as 9 percent of global CO2 emissions and entails using coal to reach scorching temperatures of as high as 1,600 degrees Celsius in order to make the iron required. There are a number of companies working on cleaning up this industry. 

Concrete is similarly responsible for an estimated 9 percent of annual CO2 emissions because of how energy intensive it is to make cement, the powdered binder that is an ingredient in concrete. Like iron, in order to make cement, limestone must be heated, using fossil fuels, to about 1,450 degrees Celsius, Scientific American reported. 

Wood isn’t perfect, though. A 2023 report from the World Resources Institute raises concerns about the carbon footprint of using wood, mass timber in particular, for large-scale construction.

Lau says one of the benefits of Superwood is that it can be made using almost any kind of wood, including fast-growing bamboo. InventWood plans initially to use reclaimed trees from  urban forests. Its first wood will be sourced from waste trees near its manufacturing facility in Maryland. The company also plans to work with Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood. 

Other concerns around building with wood involve seismic activity. Shiling Pei, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado School of Mines, was the lead investigator of a 2023 experiment that tested the ability of a 10-story structure, made mostly of wood, to withstand magnitude-6.7 and magnitude-7.7 earthquakes. The only damage sustained by the structure was to drywall and steel clips. 

Could Superwood perform the same way?

“What matters most is not the material itself, what matters most is the connection you make,” says Pei. “With a typical wood building, you look at what gets damaged, mostly the wood pieces are still there but the connections get ripped off.”

Pei says Superwood seems like a “fascinating product,” but says he needs to know more about the workability of the wood—how it works with connectors including screws, nails, or bolts— when assessing its ability to withstand extreme load conditions like hurricanes and earthquakes. That said, Pei says there is always industry demand for high strength-to-weight-ratio products—or stronger products that are lighter.

“The question is how large of a piece they can produce of the material and how expensive it is,” he says.

Lau declined to share exact pricing of the product, but says it will be priced similarly to tropical hardwoods or walnut. InventWood plans to kick off manufacturing at its Maryland facility, and publicly launches this summer.