Strong by Form raises €5.8M Series A to scale structural wood tech into Europe's concrete market

Strong by Form (Madrid) has raised €5.8 million ($6.6 million) in a Series A round led by boisei investments, a US-based family office and "tech for good" venture studio. CMPC Ventures — the Chilean forestry group that led the company's seed round — rejoins the cap table alongside VX Ventures, Ternel, Savia Ventures, Teampact Ventures, Axel Carbon, and FINSA. The funding takes Woodflow-core, the company's structural floor slab, from advanced prototyping (TRL 6) into European certification and market entry over the next two years.

Founded in Chile and now headquartered in Madrid, Strong by Form also operates from Santiago and Stuttgart. The company licenses its Woodflow technology to mass-timber and CLT producers rather than manufacturing; its commercial model depends on those partners incorporating the technology into their own product lines.

The case against concrete, on concrete's terms

Cement and steel account for a disproportionate share of the construction sector's embodied carbon. Mass timber has been proposed as a lower-carbon alternative for two decades; the problem is that standard structural timber products — cross-laminated timber above all — cannot yet match concrete's economics across the full range of building types. Strong by Form's premise is that the argument must be won on cost and structural performance, not on a sustainability premium that buyers may not price. Concrete slabs represent a roughly $120 billion global market; CLT captures less than $1.5 billion of it.

Woodflow-core is a structural slab designed for high-rise and industrial buildings, lighter than concrete and engineered to use up to 75% fewer trees than comparable mass-timber products. The mechanism is computational: a design layer places structural fibre only where a building actually needs load-bearing capacity — mimicking the way a tree adds material under stress rather than uniformly throughout its trunk. That precision lets the company work with a wider range of wood species (reducing dependence on the pine and spruce monocultures conventional structural timber demands) and with a larger fraction of each tree — up to 90%, against roughly 40% for conventional milling.

Andrés Mitnik, CEO and co-founder: "We take the tree, transform it into flakes, and then recompose those flakes. That allows us to use very low-grade wood, including wood that currently has no commercial value."

Asset-light, partner-dependent

Strong by Form's business model is deliberately capital-light. Partnering with mass-timber producers rather than competing with them, the company offers those manufacturers a route into a market up to 80 times larger than CLT's current segment while improving their margins by up to 50%. Assembly partners handle site-specific tailoring, keeping Strong by Form out of the operational complexity of individual construction sites.

Woodflow-skin — an ultra-thin architectural cladding — is already sold commercially in the US, UK, and Europe, including in rail interiors developed through a Deutsche Bahn open-innovation competition. Woodflow-core is on a longer timeline: the €5.8 million will fund European manufacturing capacity, certification tests, and initial deployments with construction partners in Spain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, with Vinci Construction providing the primary route into French and European building projects.

Three forestry companies sit among the round's investors; CMPC's re-participation from seed is the clearest institutional validation. George Perry, President of boisei labs, gave the thesis plainly: "Strong by Form is exactly the kind of company we back: deep science applied to one of the largest decarbonization challenges on the planet, with a business model that wins on economics alone, not on goodwill."

The structural floor is a harder commercial sale than the cladding. Building codes, certification timelines, and structural liability mean every new jurisdiction is a separate process. €5.8 million is early-stage capital for a $120 billion market — the size of the Series A says something about where on the industrial-readiness curve the company sits.