“In the U.S. alone, we throw away 37 million tons of wood waste,” said Eric Law, co-founder and CEO of Urban Machine. “That’s about half of what we harvest every year.” Law saw tremendous opportunity in being able to reclaim used wood from demolition sites, and waste pieces from new construction. He and his Bay-area startup team are aiming to eliminate that waste and reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry. Toward that end, today Urban Machine announced the close of its $5.6 million seed round, led by Lowercarbon Capital and joined by GV, Union Labs and Catapult Ventures.

Law came up with the idea for the company while working in his previous role in the construction industry. “In my last job I was digging into how to save waste from construction sites,” he explained. “I found that steel and concrete already have recycle paths. But wood is sent to the landfill because of metal.” Specifically, metal fasteners–nails, screws, and staples–make reclaimed wood uneconomic to reuse. “I reached out to Andrew [Gillies, the company’s co-founder and CTO], who I’d worked with previously, and asked him, ‘Can we automate this?’” Andrew recruited Alex Thiele, co-founder and Lead Software Engineer, and they founded the company in late 2021 with the aim of reclaiming lumber, glulam (laminated engineered wood), and heavy timber. A benchtop prototype of their system was completed by Q3 of 2021, and the company raised its pre-seed funding round in Q4 of last year.

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