With the holidays and the new year upon us, it is the perfect time to reflect on this year’s lessons and accomplishments (as I did last year). Pressure is a privilege, and we felt that with gratitude in 2024. It was a hard year for climate tech, and startups in general. But it didn’t slow down DexMat’s epic progress that will carry us through 2025… 2030… and beyond.
Since DexMat’s founding we have achieved a 3000x scale increase while driving down cost 99.6%. We are on track to continue that exponential scaleup, so this year we shifted our focus to building a pipeline of market demand and customer off-take to match it. Our testing and application development with customers and prospects makes us particularly proud—and excited about the years ahead.
DexMat’s Epic Market Development
- Market Development: ↑25% YOY: In 2024 we organically increased our number of deals with scalable commercialization potential by 25%.
- Negotiating 1st multi-year, multi-million dollar offtake agreement: We have negotiations underway for a multi-year, multi-million dollar offtake agreement with a leading automotive supplier and long-time customer who is using Galvorn to enter the $1.4 B thermoelectric generator market with a new flexible, non-toxic thermoelectric device. You can learn more about this type of application here.
- Traction Across 90% of our $580B+ Target Market Segments:
- We have a growing base of customers and prospects testing Galvorn and developing their applications, currently accounting for 90% of the target market segments we’ve identified for Galvorn (totaling just over $580 billion). This includes:
- Four power cable manufacturing companies that are testing Galvorn to develop stronger, lighter conductive cables. With these partners, we can enter the $80B power line and transmission market within 4 years, demonstrating the need for high-performance Galvorn in truly high-volume applications.
- DexMat’s epic progress includes more near-term market entry opportunities:
- An industry-leading textile mill testing Galvorn to develop an antistatic fabric (a $6.7B market) for defense applications. With its high conductivity, initial tests showed that just 4 pounds of Galvorn would be required to displace 1000 pounds of the incumbent material, carbon etched nylon!
- A leading product design firm for outdoor gear and sport brands testing Galvorn to develop a cut-resistant fabric for safety in hockey and other sports (an $8.4B market). You can learn more about Galvorn in this type of application here.
- An innovative golf equipment company testing Galvorn to improve the performance of their golf shafts. This could potentially be our first sports composite application!
Application Development
This foundational testing and development we’re doing with customers and prospects is showing that Galvorn can beat the competition across wiring and harness, advanced textiles, and composite applications.
“Breaking” News – testing 30% higher than target: A couple DexMat customers have been challenged with Galvorn breaking their testing equipment because it is so strong, as was the case with one of our power line and transmission partners. But not before getting results that were 30% higher than target!
It forced us to look into different testing solutions with partners more familiar with testing super-strong textiles, like Kevlar (vs. rigid steel and carbon fiber). Without any refinement or optimization, our first test demonstrated more than 20% higher tensile strength than a carbon fiber composite core, building believers at the company that acquired one of our incumbent material competitors in 2022 for $1.5 billion.
Structural composite testing – coming soon! We are continuing our development work to secure critical 3rd-party testing of Galvorn structural composites (expected Q1 2025) that will allow us to re-engage other interested prospects in the sports composites market ($6.61B), as well as interested prospects in the aviation carbon fiber ($2.67B) and automotive carbon fiber ($45.76B) markets.
Continuous structural composite health monitoring sensors – happening now! Even without the testing of Galvorn structural composite, we have customers developing continuous structural health monitoring sensors with Galvorn; one company is focused on composites in airplane wings, while another is focused on composites in industrial deep sea applications.
Bottom-line: more customers are testing and developing applications with Galvorn, making key progress on the path to commercialization (confidential customers redacted in the pipeline image below).
And as we engage with these customers we pay particular attention to the price and volume requirements that will support market entry, especially which customers have the potential to support our next scaleup milestone of a market development plant producing tonnes of Galvorn.
Growing Our CNT Supply Chain
- We cultivated 3 new fiber-grade carbon nanotube (“CNT”) suppliers (with kilotons of aggregated production capacity).
- One of our new CNT suppliers is priced 90% lower than our top supplier.
- We completed a techno economic analysis (TEA) to demonstrate that CNTs can be produced for exponentially lower prices.
DexMat’s Epic Scaleup
- We doubled Galvorn production speed.
- We 5X’ed our maximum production run volume.
- We set a new record for our longest contiguous fiber produced: 5,400 meters!
- We produced more than 2,000,000 filament-meters in total this year!
- We completed another TEA to demonstrate the capital efficiency of our further scaleup.
It is easy to focus on how much more we have to do, but it is also important to pause sometimes to reflect on just how much we have already accomplished. Working with more customers this year and developing more applications to secure more letters of intent and off-take agreements has been a huge step toward our next scaleup milestone of a market development plant, producing many tons of Galvorn.
DexMat’s epic progress, combined with further expansion of our CNT supply chain and scale up of production, we will shape and scale the broader carbon nanomaterials value chain. The demand for high-performance sustainable carbon is real and growing. Our customers are proving it.
Wishing you and yours happy holidays and a successful and fulfilling 2024!