Cambium is Developing an AI System Designed to Convert Waste Wood Into Functional Lumber

Across cities and suburbs in America, a common scene unfolds: trees are cut down and shredded instead of being repurposed into lumber.

For Ben Christensen, this waste never sat right. Growing up in New Mexico surrounded by towering pines—and with a family deeply rooted in the timber industry, including his carpenter father—he developed a strong respect for trees.

According to Christensen, the biggest hurdle to repurposing wood is logistics. “Tree care services are incentivized to move quickly to their next job,” he told TechCrunch. “If dropping off logs for reuse means going out of their way, it’s just not feasible.

Seeing an opportunity in this inefficiency, Christensen co-founded Cambium with Marisa Repka and Theo Hooker. The startup focuses on salvaging wood that would otherwise be chipped or burned, using software to streamline coordination across the supply chain.

Cambium’s key value proposition is helping businesses buy or sell more wood, offering improved service and stable, long-term contracts. To ensure consistency from historically variable wood sources, the company has developed specialized processing techniques.

Cambium’s Own High-Quality Wood Products

Beyond optimizing the supply chain, Cambium also creates its own products. It collaborates with suppliers and mills to produce high-quality wood materials, selling them to companies like Room & Board and Steelcase.

Additionally, Cambium manufactures cross-laminated timber—an engineered wood formed into structural panels—through partnerships with industry leaders such as Mercer Mass Timber, SmartLam, Sterling Structural, and Vaagen Timbers.

Salvaging wood isn’t just a business opportunity—it’s also a climate-conscious one. “Every time you transport wood 10 miles instead of 1,000, there’s a real carbon benefit. And every time you keep a tree standing in the forest, there’s a real carbon benefit,” said Cambium CEO Ben Christensen.

While a few large timber companies dominate the industry, the rest of the market is highly fragmented. “It typically takes eight to ten businesses to get materials to an end customer,” Christensen explained.

Each step involves a transaction, which is where Cambium’s software plays a key role. The startup currently works with around 350 companies, including tree care services, trucking firms, and sawmills—many of which still rely on pen-and-paper operations and are hesitant to digitize.

Selling Opportunities, Not Just Software

Instead of selling software, Cambium pitches tangible business opportunities. “If you call my uncle and try to sell him wood software, good luck—that’s a short conversation,” Christensen said. “But if you call him and say, ‘Hey, I want to buy 40,000 board-feet of four-quarter white oak from you every 60 days,’ he’s in. He’ll grab a pen and paper and start talking.”

By tracking transactions across the entire supply chain, Cambium is amassing valuable industry data, which it’s using to develop an AI-driven system that simplifies record-keeping for traditionally offline businesses.

To scale its platform and refine its AI, Cambium has raised $18.5 million in funding, led by VoLo Earth Ventures, with participation from 81 Collection, Alumni Ventures, Dangerous Ventures, Groundswell, MaC Venture Capital, NEA, Rise of the Rest, Soma Capital, Tunitas Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Understorey, and Woven Earth.

Right now, Cambium attracts businesses by offering them customers, but Christensen envisions the next version of the platform helping them manage their books without disrupting their existing workflows. The AI will extract information from phone calls and automatically populate fields in a database.

“It’s about understanding how people in this industry prefer to communicate,” Christensen said. “If you’re driving a truck, you’re not on a laptop. You want a text or a voice call. We’re making things as simple as possible.”

Read the original aeticle on: TechCrunch

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