Just in case you missed it, one of our Lake Nona Incubator clients, Soarce, was featured on Wesh 2 News on July 2. Here’s a snippet of the story:
ORLANDO, Fla. —
We usually don’t think about all the things we touch and interact with every day, whether they’re metal, plastic, or something else. But that’s all a homegrown team of engineers does, as they turn plants into the next generation of tech and things you use every day.
All that science happens inside a warehouse in Lake Nona, where the Soarce team creates something they hope changes the way things are made.
“Cellulose is the most abundant polymer on the planet,” CEO Derek Staltzman said. “It’s actually found in the majority of biomass; trees, grasses, things like that.”
Co-founders Staltzman and Mason Mincey, who’s also chief operating officer, learned about cellulose from books on material science in a library. Soon enough, they consulted the modern library of YouTube, where they connected with a researcher-turned-mentor in Finland. They applied their engineering backgrounds to study what they say is like “the rebar inside of a plant,” which can be eight times stronger than steel.
“What we’re doing is that we have a process that allows us to take that, extract it and utilize it in a variety of new products,” Staltzman said.
One of those products is like a jelly, called “Seabind” because it can come from seaweed, and they say it can make concrete 30% stronger, to flex instead of crack under pressure, or withstand strong hurricanes.
