New Dawn Bio has closed a €2.1m pre-seed round led by Dutch founder-led fund CapitalT.
Norrsken Evolve and Dutch holding company Ontdekkers Group also joined the round, as did a number of angel investors including Cradle co-founder Jelle Prins.
New Dawn Bio is grows wood, but without planting a single tree. Working out of Wageningen, Netherlands, founders Tom Clement and Kianti Figler have figured out a way to harvest stem cells directly from trees and multiply them in bioreactors.
Then the technology guides the cells to differentiate and harden into solid timber – shaped, from the outset, into a finished product. No logging. No sawing. No planting. The company claims the process runs up to 10,000 times faster than conventional forestry.
New Dawn Bio already has physical prototypes in hand. Clement tells Impact Loop that the company is expecting to sign its first commercial partnership imminently.
'Never done a biotech investment before'
For CapitalT, the deal is an unusual one. The Amsterdam-based fund mostly backs software.
Founding partner Janneke Niessen – a serial entrepreneur who founded and exited two companies before turning investor – says the team was what gave them the conviction to invest.
"We haven't done a biotech investment before," Niessen tells Impact Loop via video call. "But we really, really were impressed by Tom and Kianti. The energy, their vision, their drive – that's what excited us initially."
CapitalT's thesis is more focused on the founders themselves than the sector they build in. The firm screens founding teams using a proprietary data-driven framework covering personality traits, passion type, grit and team cohesion – an attempt to systematise what most early-stage investors still do on gut instinct. It's also a tactic designed to select more diverse founders.
"A lot of the decisions around teams are made based on gut instinct," says Niessen. "And that often involves a lot of bias – people don't do that intentionally, but it's just human."
While New Dawn Bio it marks CapitalT's first investment in biotech, it deepens what has quietly become a forestry cluster in CapitalT's portfolio.
The firm has already invested in Overstory, which uses satellite imagery and AI to monitor trees threatening power lines, and Airforestry, a Swedish startup whose drones can harvest entire trees from the sky.
CapitalT's second fund, which marked its first close at €50m last year, is now four investments deep, Niessen says.
'We're running out of trees'
The world lost 4.3m hectares of tropical primary forest in 2025 – still 46% higher than a decade ago, according to figures from the World Resources Institute.
New Dawn Bio thinks its cultured wood could stem some of the demand for logged wood products, and offer the forestry industry a more sustainable alternative.
"Entire industries aren't able to make the products their customers want because we're running out of trees," he tells Impact Loop.
Clement uses the example of balsa wood, a critical structure component in wind turbine blades, which is already subject to considerable supply constraints and price volatility.
"As far as we can see, cultured wood is the only way forward," he says.
The economics, Clement argues, work in New Dawn Bio's favour in a way they haven't for other cultured biology startups, like those make protein, for example.
As the founder explains, wood varies widely in price – between commodity timber and the rarest luxury grades – allowing the company to enter at the premium end and work down over time. Plus, the plant cell culture is significantly cheaper to run than animal cell culture, he points out.
New Dawn Bio isn't the only company looking to scale this technology, either. US-based Foray Bio, founded by a researcher who completed a PhD at MIT studying cultured wood, is a named competitor. At least two other groups are building in stealth.
For now, the Dutch startup's main focus is on securing customers for its first trial products.
"We will soon be selecting one partner in an exclusive niche market of extremely high-value products containing rare wood material, and provide them with the rarest wood of all to produce a limited series from," he says.
Update 4/6/2026 09:43: Impact Loop was informed that New Dawn Bio was based in Groningen. However, the company is in fact based in Wageningen.