Mothership Materials
Ag waste to power the bioeconomy
INVESTMENT COHORT / Q1 2025
INVESTMENT STAGE / Seed
Mothership Materials generates virgin biomaterials from food and agricultural waste using a proprietary mechanism and process that is similar to the fractional distillation process used in the fossil fuel industry. This process extracts different biomaterials and biochemicals from the waste that serves as Mothership Materials' feed stock. The biomaterials produced by Mothership Materials serve as high-value feedstock for businesses in industries such as food, beauty & cosmetics, textiles, and pharmaceuticals, to name a few.
For example; Mothership Materials' process can extract Essential Oils, Cellulose, and Pectin from orange peels. Essential Oils are used in Beauty & Cosmetics, and Household Cleaning Products; Cellulose is used in Textiles and Packaging, and; Pectin is used in Food and Pharmaceuticals.
Mothership Materials provides a domestic source for specialized biomaterials inputs that often require custom molecular precision and tuning during the manufacturing process. The team has demonstrated the capacity to accomplish this at lab scale, and has designed a machine and equipment that can be built and deployed anywhere in the world. Initial focus is on the United States.
CO-INVESTORS
“What is REFASHIOND’s value add in a nutshell? Evangelism, Curated Connections, and Responsive Partnership.
I am so aware that when we win, you win. And because you are such an evangelist for us, I’m an evangelist for you. If you’re gonna go out there and you’re gonna say my name in all those rooms. I have a responsibility to you, just as you have one to me. I feel that very deeply, because you are genuinely an extension of my team.”
“I have started four companies and exited two of them, so I have met a lot of investors. Lisa Morales-Hellebo is not one of them. She is a builder who happens to write checks.
REFASHIOND incubated Mothership Materials before there was much to incubate. In the time since, Lisa has done the work most investors describe rather than do: she sat inside the business, not across from it.
The clearest example is our story. We were a company with real science and a hard time explaining it — a technology looking for a category. Lisa reframed us from a clean beauty ingredients company to feedstock infrastructure for biomanufacturing, an industry constrained not by demand but by the inputs it cannot get. That single reframe changed who took the meeting. She then worked with me to rebuild the decks around it — investor and sales both — line by line, visual by visual, page by page, until the argument held under pressure. She found the public comparable that made our physics-based technology and unit economics legible to people who had never thought about agricultural waste. She rehearsed the room with me before I walked into it.
That work helped me to close an oversubscribed round, after REFASHIOND invested.
Since then she has kept going: opening doors into global supply chains at a level a five-person company has no business reaching, structuring the commercial and partnership agreements that make those doors safe to walk through, and telling me the unwelcome thing first when it matters. Her judgment on where an opportunity is weak has saved us more than her enthusiasm ever has — and the enthusiasm is considerable.
If you are building something genuinely new in advanced materials, manufacturing, or supply chain, and you can get Lisa on your cap table, take the meeting twice. She is the rare investor who makes the company better rather than merely funded.”
