Adsorbi, a Gothenburg, Sweden-based company developing bio-based materials, has just raised €360K in Seed funding. In conjunction with the round announcement, CEO & Co-founder Hanna Johansson answered our questions about the company, the products, achievements, as well as future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Hanna, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I’m an engineer in Biotechnology, but I have worked mostly with business development. I’m passionate about new materials and chemistry, but you will not find me in the lab!
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Adsorbi. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
The foundational problem we are working against is that pollutants, indoors as well as outdoors, cause serious health effects. The WHO estimates that indoor pollution caused more than 3 million deaths in 2020.
In industrialised countries, we spend more than 90 percent of our time indoors. Therefore, it’s crucial that the air we breathe there is clean. To get clean air today, we use extensive amounts of fossil materials in air filtration, which is where we can offer a new solution with our wood-based material.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
Our innovative material captures and stores pollutants, just like competitor materials, but with many improvements. We have developed our material to have higher capacity, which means that products like air filters can have a longer lifetime and reduced environmental impact. We can also add functionalities to our materials and create the most optimal material depending on the type of pollutant you want to capture. But most importantly, we use a renewable and sustainable raw material to produce our materials: wood-based cellulose.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please tell us more about it.
We are very happy with our first round of investment, where we raised 360,000 euros from Metsä Spring, Chalmers Ventures, and Jovitech Invest. We now have a dream team of owners with competence in the commercialization of deep tech & materials and cellulose-based applications, which is a perfect fit for us.
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
In parallel with continued development towards market-ready air filter products, we plan to launch our first products during the year.
Our first application area is art conservation, where we will help museums protect artworks against air pollution.
The second one is a project with a sports equipment company, where we will launch bags that remove odors and keep bags & shoes fresh longer.
FinSMEs
28/08/2023