Our Story
Since 2010. It started with a single burning field.
Our Story
In 2010, our founder traded Silicon Valley for his family’s coconut plantation in the Philippines.
After every harvest, husks and fronds that could have been building material burned in open fields, because no one paid for them.
He gave himself six months.
Six months became ten years.
We worked alongside coconut farmers and their families. We built pilot factories far from the grid, and we kept going through typhoons and the long work of inventing something new. When a typhoon damaged our family home, the work became personal in a way it had not been before.
The breakthrough came in two parts. The first was a dependable way to make load-bearing board from coconut residue without synthetic binders, developed at our research facility in the United States beginning in 2019. The second was a way to make that board at production scale in remote plantations with no grid. Our Innovation Center in the Philippines is where we proved the two together.
Our next step is the first kit house.
Matthew left a career in Silicon Valley software for the plantation in 2010 and has stayed with the problem since. His contribution is the system itself: a manufacturing platform that goes to the coconut instead of bringing the coconut to a factory. It deploys into remote plantations with no grid and no paved-road requirement.
Robert is the reason the material exists. He developed the binderless board at our research facility in the United States, through thousands of pressings, before he took it to the Philippines, where he and our Filipino team made it work at scale. He knew which properties to build toward because he knew what they were for: the kit houses he designed for public housing. He engineered the board to the house. He is a master craftsman and an engineer.