Today, we are honored to announce that we have raised $85 million in funding to scale production of high-performance, all-natural, circular materials products coming to market with a wide array of global brand partners. The visionary investors backing our truly circular materials include: Evolution VC Partners, Tattarang, Lewis & Clark AgriFood, Collaborative Fund, AiiM Partners, Engine No.1, Raga Partners, Tidal Impact, Scrum Ventures, Gaingels, BMW i Ventures, Ralph Lauren, Advantage Capital, and Central Illinois Angels.
Our partners come from around the world but unite under a single mission to make the world more sustainable though abundant and renewable material-rich, plastic-free products. Together, we are investing in the flourishing of people, land, and the world at large.
But this is just the beginning. NFW exists to unlock nature’s potential, giving industries and innovators categorically new material platforms to design and create responsibly. We are on our way to bring shockingly sustainable solutions to even more leading global brands.
A world without compromise
As our CEO and founder Luke Haverhals stated: “We envision a world that doesn’t rely on plastic, where abundant natural materials enable people and the planet to thrive together. We’re here to leave the world better than we found it and we look forward to working with our brand partners to build a comprehensively circular coalition for the planet.”
More new plant matter grows in an average day on earth than the sum total of all the petroleum-derived materials produced in a year by people. Yet, the textile industry is dependent on plastics, despite there being an essentially limitless supply of natural, circular materials that can be regeneratively sourced — from green plants and sunlight.
We’re at a critical point, both for ourselves and for future generations. When it comes to the future of a habitable environment and the security of abundant resources, we need to intervene, and quickly, with comprehensively sustainable business models and technologies.
At NFW, we’ve spent the last seven years creating an entirely new sustainable and circular supply chain by strictly leveraging the abundance of plants. We are leading the way in a truly circular economy. We are designing, engineering, and architecting a scalable ecosystem of comprehensively sustainable materials.
Our categorically new, plant-not-plastic-based materials, MIRUM® and CLARUS®, bring the high-performance aspects that the world once thought was only possible through synthetics.
You can read more about each of our materials here: MIRUM® and CLARUS®.
Today, we get to celebrate the growth of our company with the support of a global community to meet global demand.
Better, together
We’re partnering with the boldest thinkers and most visionary brands to move the material economy towards a truly sustainable future.
At the 2022 Australian Open, we launched a first-to-market product innovation, the RLX CLARUS® Polo Shirt.
Chaco, a Wolverine Worldwide brand, is in market with recycled cotton CLARUS® shoe uppers that displace synthetic uppers.
MIRUM® has been featured by global brands including Alexander McQueen (MCQ), PANGAIA, Bellroy, H&M and Camper.
We are aggressively moving towards major partner and customer relationships to disrupt the footwear industry. For the first time, in a scalable and high performance way, we will make every part of the shoe from natural inputs. NFW has an ecosystem of regenerative and circular materials that makes this possible.
We’re in incredible company, and we’re just getting started.
Our road to the future
We sincerely thank all of our wonderful investors, brand partners and employees who are making this possible. We genuinely see a plastic-free future. This will take a coalition and a whole lot of work, but we will push together to make this a reality.
Everyone we work with is forward thinking and true revolutionaries who want to make the future better than the present. With these new investments, we can continue our march on global industry disruption, more shockingly sustainable solutions. We have a tremendous amount of work in front of us, but the best is yet to come.
