Woodoo, a French startup, was founded in 2016 with technology to upgrade all wood species into high-performance advanced materials. It was born from 5 years of intensive research in cellulosic nano-technology.
Their CEO, Timothée Boitouzet is a young architect trained in Japan; he has worked for prestigious firms like Kengo Kuma, SANAA, and Herzog & De Meuron. Passionate about materials, he then moved to the United States in 2010 to conduct research at Harvard and MIT. He continued his work in France from 2012, until finding a brilliant solution to improve the wood.
This “augmented” wood has had its lignin content reduced. Woodoo extracts lignin, a kind of glue that attracts insects while making the wood rigid and putrescible, then replace it with an ultra-resistant polymer to turn the wood into a rot-proof, malleable, translucent, and fire-resistant material ideal for construction, as it maintains the wood’s structural integrity. At the end of our manufacturing process, the result is a 3D wood material with an unprecedented translucency, perfectly adapted to functional automotive interior instrument panel surface.
For maximum impact, they focus most on unused, low-grade wood species. In parallel, Woodoo’s process produces highly pure lignin, which can be sold as a byproduct to the specialty chemistry market to transform waste into additional revenue.
