Dr. Luke Haverhals an analytical chemist/materials scientist turned entrepreneur (Founder & CEO of Natural Fiber Welding) working to produce circular, high performance materials & products. He has expertise in scalable business + technology solutions for the circular economy. He is experienced with natural materials, nanomaterials, manufacturing technologies, and automation. He is an NSF I-Corps @ DoD graduate and an Unreasonable Group Fellow.

Luke founded NFW to leverage the amazing abundance, diversity, and redundancy of natural materials.  More new tonnage of plant materials grows in a day on the planet than the total tonnage of all synthetic materials (e.g., plastics) produced by people in years. Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) is a patented fabrication platform that enables new high performance materials for fashion, footwear, interiors, and beyond. NFW leverages the most abundant high performance materials that nature provides to create complex, all-natural composites that can not be manufactured in any other way. Production of amazing nutrient-based high performance materials are being scaled by the NFW team right now and range from ‘practical’ solutions to recycle billions of pounds of cotton and zero plastic all-natural plant-based leather-like materials, to ‘exotic’ clean water applications and even wearable capacitive energy storage. NFW is working with partners like Ralph Lauren, Allbirds, Richemont, et cetera to scale material and product solutions that solve global problems.