
- Founded
- 2022
- Employees*
- 4
- Funding to Date*
- $600,000
- Website
- www.mothershipmaterials.com/
The $5 trillion bioeconomy aims to produce next-generation food, fuels, and fabrics, but it faces a critical bottleneck: a shortage of affordable, carbon-negative feedstocks. Global demand for sugars and cellulose will soon outstrip supply, threatening cost and scalability challenges for industries like precision fermentation, bioplastics, upcycled textiles, and green building materials. Meanwhile, 2 billion tons of agricultural waste are burned or left to rot annually, emitting methane and CO₂—a missed $2.6 trillion opportunity.
New York-based Mothership Materials solves these challenges by transforming agricultural waste into circular feedstocks for the bioeconomy. The company’s patented TRACE™ platform operates directly at the waste source—whether on farms or industrial sites—using solar energy to extract sugars, cellulose, and other high-value molecules. Mothership Materials can already produce sugar and cellulose at a lower cost than conventional suppliers, making them competitive in this $500 billion market.
TRACE™’s modular, input-agnostic design allows it to process diverse waste streams, while its co-valorization capabilities extract multiple nutrients simultaneously, reducing costs and driving circularity. Once deployed, TRACE™ mitigates up to 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agricultural waste while offsetting the carbon footprints of conventional farming and food processing. While in the IndieBio program, the company signed 5 global corporate contracts, began paid pilots, and expects to be in market within eight months of program completion.
Jo Marini, 4x founder and MBA professor, and Agnes Ostafin, PhD, chemical physicist and expert in materials science, launched Mothership Materials in 2022. They aim to build a circular supply chain for the bioeconomy and empower industries to decarbonize.