The Entrepreneurs
- Derek Saltzman, CEO, 26
- Mason Mincey, COO, 26
- Patrick Michel, Chief of Sales, 27
- Matthew Jaeger, CFO, 26
Co-founders of Soarce, Orlando
Derek Saltzman and Mason Mincey were freshmen roommates at the University of Central Florida. “We came in as bright-eyed aerospace engineering students. We were really nerdy in the beginning,” recalls Saltzman. Nerdy — and ambitious. Little did they know back in 2016 that they would be starting a company together within a year.
But they bonded quickly, caught the entrepreneurial bug at UCF’s Blackstone LaunchPad program and in 2017 launched their first business, SOAR Aerospace, making drone parts out of carbon fiber. “I don’t think we’d be where we are today without that program,” says Mincey.
Running SOAR was fun for a couple of years. Fellow UCF students Patrick Michel and Matthew Jaeger joined as cofounders, bringing sales and finance skills to the team. But then they hit a wall: “We were like we don’t really want to be manufacturing these materials anymore because we didn’t feel we’re making a big impact,” says Saltzman.
While exploring what they could do next, Saltzman and Mincey were inspired by a YouTube video by Meri Lundahl, a Finnish chemical engineer and researcher, who was demonstrating making threads from plant materials, and they reached out to her. She gave them guidance on her process and would become a key advisor for the next iterations of their company.
During this transition period, “we went deep into academia and research,” Saltzman says. Mincey and Saltzman changed their majors to materials engineering and their interest grew in nanomaterials. They worked as lab mates at a UCF research lab focused on materials for space applications and together helped the university secure over $1 million in grants and partnerships with NASA. Mincey was also a researcher for the global sustainability-focused nonprofit Textile Exchange.
Learning that the textile industry is ranked as the second-or third-most polluting industry in the world from clothing waste to CO2 emissions, “we thought, hey, material engineers kind of got us into this problem with plastics and textiles. Material engineers can get us out of this problem, too,” Saltzman recalls. SOAR became Soarce, with a vision “to solve some of society’s biggest climate challenges through renewable and high-performance material innovation.”
The founders went full throttle, experimenting in a makeshift lab in a garage. They created sustainable fabrics from seaweed and took part in leAD, an incubator backed by the Adidas family. They began working with a shoe designer on a prototype using their sustainable innovations.
Along this journey, the Soarce team developed a suite of chemicals from seaweed and other sustainable materials that deliver color fastness and improved durability to a fabric; they used chemistry to create their own seaweed-based “leather.” The founders also learned that the struggle to maintain color fastness was a barrier to innovation and revenue for the fashion industry, particularly luxury brands.
So how is Soarce financing all this experimentation? Investors in young startups are often betting on the founders, rather than the idea, as a startup likely goes through several iterations, as Soarce did. Early this year, this young team closed a $1.45-million pre-seed financing round from investors including Boost VC, considered one of Silicon Valley’s top deep-tech investment firms focused on early-stage startups, and Founders Factory, a London-based venture studio and fund.
Keeping them going was this key lesson from Boost’s accelerator program, says Mincey: “Be the cockroach. The best founders understand that you need to stay alive as long as possible to crack the formula needed to change the world.”
This year, Founders Factory’s six-month Blue Action Accelerator, focused on climate-technology innovation, is helping Soarce with fundraising, business development, supply chain management and introductions to luxury fashion brands. The founders learned that while the first generation of climate technology brought advances to companies at a cost, Climate 2.0 innovators must create scalable innovations that will generate revenue gains for companies while creating massive impact, Mincey says.
Indeed, Soarce’s first product now ready for sales is not a sustainable leather alternative, of which there are many competitors, but rather their proprietary bio-based chemistries, called Searamic, which can be added to a manufacturing process to turn any leather or fabric into a high-performing one that resists color fading, blocks UV light, and is fire resistant, the company asserts. Soarce is introducing the product to fashion companies by first proving to them that it can pass their own color tests; a pilot program with a large luxury brand is under way.
Longer term, Soarce isn’t ruling out also selling fabrics made with seaweed, but its Searamic additives can deliver the climate impact it sought to make. The fashion industry is a notorious polluter, responsible for 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions globally, more than aviation and maritime shipping combined. Over half of those textile emissions come during the processing stage when clothing is dyed and treated.
In January, Soarce presented to some of the top designers in the world at the Biofabricate conference in Paris, and more recently its product was featured at two sustainable fashion exhibitions in Miami. Part of the UCF Business Innovation Program, Soarce now occupies two manufacturing labs in Lake Nona, an area brimming with engineers and tech startups. The team has grown to 11 people, including a strategic advisor with experience scaling a company to a $3-billion exit value. The founders plan to raise seed funding within the next year to build their pilot manufacturing facility.
“We’ve been busy. This should be a breakout year for us,” Mincey says.