Swiss scaleup Bcomp manufactures natural fiber composites using flax. BMW, Volvo and Polestar already use Bcomp’s sustainable lightweighting material for body- and interior panels to reduce weight and plastic use. In motorsports, Bcomp replaces carbon fiber with natural fibers in body parts at a matching performance. The stiffness at minimal weight is possible thanks to Bcomp’s patented powerRibs™ technology, a reinforcement grid on the hidden “b-side” of the parts. Next to the automotive industry, there are use cases for Bcomp’s technology in boats, trains, and airplanes. Bcomp has a production site in Fribourg (Switzerland) and currently employs around 70 people. Verve Ventures invested in Bcomp after its CHF 32 million Series B financing round in 2022 led by BMW i Ventures.

Material sciences is at the heart of what Bcomp does. Where does your passion for materials come from?

Already in high school, I knew that I wanted to build or create something. But I wasn’t so sure about what to study. It was a lucky coincidence that I chose material sciences. I remember a visitor’s day at EPFL. My father, who was a chemical engineer, told me to check it out. At that time material sciences was still a very small branch of studies at EPFL. They struggled a bit to attract students for it so they had to come up with a good marketing strategy. On that day, several very passionate PhD students were giving presentations using tennis rackets and other concrete examples of applied material science. It worked for me since I was always a big sports fan.

Science is one thing, but what triggered your passion for entrepreneurship?

Even though I knew that I didn’t want to pursue a scientific career, I did a Ph.D. because the timing was right, and I had the opportunity to do a project on a subject matter that really triggered my interest. The first time I was exposed to topics around entrepreneurship was through the VentureLab program and the events they organized. I was fascinated, and it was at the same time that I met my co-founders Julien, Cyrille, and Andreas. As a first project, we started manufacturing lightweight skis in Julien’s garage. They turned out quite nice, and we started to further explore the potential of using natural fibers in composites based on their outstanding damping and lightweighting properties.

After finishing your Ph.D., you worked in a large aluminum company. What did you learn?

I learned that I wasn’t made for the corporate world. I produced PowerPoint slides to convince risk-averse people to do something new. After a while, I quit and we established Bcomp and raised our Seed round in 2012. There weren’t many tech entrepreneurs in Fribourg then, but there were already structures in place to help them, namely the foundation Seed Capital Fribourg and FriUp. We worked with balsa wood and flax and found an early adopter for our product in Faction Skis and co-founder Tony McWilliam. The French freeskier Candide Thovex became an ambassador of their brand, skiing a pro model using our lightweighting technology. Looking back at that time, it was quite rock-n-roll, but I don’t think there is a way around such a phase to start a materials tech company.

A few years later, Bcomp pivoted towards motorsport. Why?

Several reasons came together. The potential of our sports business was limited. Bcomp would have stayed a cool but small company, which wasn’t what our Seed investors had signed up for, and Julien and I saw great potential to scale the company within the Mobility sector. We identified that Motorsports was the perfect stepping stone to transit from our heritage Recreational market into the large-scale Automotive industry, while continuing to serve and develop the Recreational market. Once our Motorsports customers have validated our products for their race cars, we could then collaborate with them to transfer them into road-homologated cars, significantly scale our business, and start having a real impact. We call this our “race-to-road strategy, a plan that has taken time but has so far worked out brilliantly. Our Series A in 2017 paved the way to professionalize our team and bring in the competencies and talent necessary to address this market.

How did you convince motorsports companies to work with a small unknown supplier?

The defining moment was when a picture of a race-modified Tesla with bodywork from Bcomp came out. Most parts of a race car that are made out of carbon fiber can be replaced with our flax-based material. The car in question was made for the Electric GT, a racing series for electric cars that never saw the light, unfortunately. However, this picture created a lot of pull within the established players who thought that Tesla wasn’t beating them only in the electrification race but also, as the picture showed, in new materials. It didn’t take long until we got a call from Porsche Motorsport and others.

And then?

We worked on a tight deadline and were able to deliver because we’re not just producing parts, we understand the whole engineering process. The Porsche GT4 with Bcomp’s material was launched in 2019. When we presented some of the parts at the leading international composites show in Paris, we weren’t an unknown startup anymore. We were a Porsche supplier, and soon after we convinced many players in the field because, again, we can offer Swiss engineering support. We also had a significant tailwind. Carbon parts can leave splinters on the race track which can lead to tire failure. Once the technical director of one of the largest motorsport series saw that natural fibers could replace carbon parts, the legal framework was adapted to prescribe natural fiber composites in specific parts.

Motorsport is, well, a very fast industry. What about the production of series cars?

Motorsport never was the endgame for us, it was the entry door to the car industry. And this industry has exacting standards. For a startup, it is incredibly tough to get a foothold in the car industry. We started the first talks in 2015, and people asked us: Do you have what it takes to survive the next seven years because that is how long it will take you to get approved as a supplier? We thought, of course, that we could do it much faster. Courage and naivete are sometimes indistinguishable. In the end, these people were right regarding the timeline, but we are still around and just started delivering into the first serial car programs.

What makes it so hard to become a supplier to the car industry?

The International Standard for Automotive Quality Management System developed by IATF, the International Automotive Task Force, is a set of rules that governs almost every aspect of what we do for the automotive industry, it ranges from company strategy to the way we roll up our powerRibs™ in the production line. We need to show every aspect of production and how it relates to other steps, what the quality standards are for each step, what could go wrong, and how we mitigate that risk. For us, it meant that, again, we had to bring in experienced quality managers with an industrial mindset, and project managers understanding the rules of the automotive playbook. Luckily, there is a lot of deep quality and production knowledge in our region, and we now manage to attract internationally experienced automotive professionals from renowned global companies.

That sounds a bit different than building stuff in a garage.

Every time you bring in new disciplines into a company, it creates tension and the organization needs to find a new balance. From a managerial perspective, you need to learn to think in terms of quality management, and the challenge is how much you want to curtail the freedom of the R&D and production team to change things. But the IATF rules go even further than what we do in-house. It means that we also have to train and audit our suppliers. Now, the companies from which we buy flax yarns usually serve customers in the fashion industry. These producers have been doing great, they don’t really need new customers like us, who, on top, have very specific requirements. They are family companies with a long tradition. Why would they want to deal with the hassle of an audit and invest money in spare capacity because maybe at one point in the future, we need a lot of material that will end up in a car instead of a shirt?

Indeed, why would they?

Thanks to the length of the automotive vehicle programs, we can offer them long-term guarantees they would never get in the fashion textile industry. This is one of the arguments that has helped us to convince our key partners. In general, I guess as an entrepreneur you need to be convincing and optimistic about the future. You need to earn the trust of people. I can’t count anymore how many people told us that what we do cannot be done. If you’re working on something that is hard, this attracts elite employees, which is what you need to get it done.

Let’s talk about Bcomp’s product. Natural fiber composites aren’t anything new. The infamous Trabant produced in Eastern Germany already had a body made out of cotton fiber and plastic. Where is the innovation?

You can go much further back than this example, even our earliest ancestors built their first huts with earth bricks reinforced with straw. Bcomp boosts natural fibers to the point where they become high-performance materials that can replace carbon fiber. This was our first innovation. We achieve it by imitating nature. Think about how tree leaves get their structural strength from the veins that run across them. We mimic this principle with our powerRibs™. This patented approach allows significant weight and plastic reduction and hence saves emissions. This helps car manufacturers decarbonize their supply chain. There are other reasons why natural fibers haven’t seen widespread adoption in cars yet, such as their intrinsic sensitivity to moisture and UV light. We spend a lot of R&D developing solutions to fulfill the requirements for interior- and exterior parts such as scratch-, UV- and moisture resistance so that the optics of the parts don’t change over time. By doing so, we developed additional intellectual property to maintain our head start versus the competition.

How expensive is the material compared to standard plastic components?

It is more expensive, but there is a certain willingness to pay for weight and CO2 footprint reduction. But this willingness varies, which is why the material gets adopted in more high-end cars first.

Bcomp’s products have now found their way into mass-produced cars such as the new Volvo EX30. What comes next after convincing the early adopters?

Our sales pipeline is filled to the brim, now we need to scale our production. Our factory here in Switzerland serves as the blueprint for establishing factories in the relevant car-producing countries, namely the US and China. We need to establish commercial and operational capacity and we need to replicate our supply chains.

Selling to every car company on the planet looks like a tall order for a company with 70 employees.

The car companies decide to work with us, but we deal with component manufacturers that supply entire parts to the automotive industry. Luckily, this is a consolidated industry with only a handful of players.

But for now, Bcomp’s material is just an option in some smaller vehicle programs.

If you’re a car manufacturer dealing with an innovative new material this is the way to reduce risks. First, as you say, it’s an option in a new smaller series. But keep in mind that from our view, small in this context already means two orders of magnitude more parts than we sell to a motorsport customer per year. We’re happy to grow with big but still manageable steps.

Once you’re in a vehicle program, you can sell your product until the program ends. If Bcomp manages to get into some high-volume programs as standard content, the company could achieve several hundred million in turnover each year.

Correct, but it will still take us a couple of years to get there.

And that doesn’t even take other uses in mass transport into account. In fact, Bcomp just revealed a bus cover.

Buses, trains, ships, airplanes, the list goes on. We don’t see ourselves just as a car supplier but as a material tech company. At one point you’ll even find our materials in products where weight doesn’t play a role, just because of the high-performance look it has.

What is the end goal?

We don’t strive for a quick exit, we want to maximize our impact along our 3 main pillars: financial success, innovation, and sustainability. We measure the amount of carbon emissions saved, for every euro of Bcomp material sold, we avoid approximately 1 kilogram of CO2. At one point we also want to establish circularity of our products by taking them back, shredding them, and reusing them as a compound. We have already validated this in our lab. In a way, we’re just getting started.