Let’s talk alchemy, Houston-style. Not the medieval kind with wizards and cauldrons, this is 2025, and the team at Elemental Advanced Materials is out here turning trash into treasure with tech that actually delivers. We’re talking plastic bags and gas by-products reborn as carbon nanomaterials and clean hydrogen. Not “clean-ish.” Not “net-neutral if you squint.” Real clean. Commercial scale. Proven patents. And now? $20 million in fresh fuel to scale it up.
Props to Founder and CTO Ron Presswood and Co-Founder and Director of Strategy Ian Bishop, who’ve been chasing this vision since the early 2000s, before climate tech had a name, a market, or a unicorn poster child. That kind of grind doesn’t fit neatly into a startup pitch deck. It takes 20+ years of R&D with Texas A&M, Auburn, University of Houston, and more than a few “what ifs” and late nights staring at samples and spreadsheets. And when the chemistry finally clicked, it didn’t just work, it outworked the competition.
This is where Taranis Carbon Ventures enters like the smart money does, with conviction. Backed by the Perenco Group and laser-focused on carbon circularity, Taranis Carbon Ventures didn’t invest in potential, they bet on proof. Elemental Advanced Materials’s patented, single-step process converts hydrocarbon-rich waste into >99% pure carbon nanomaterials and hydrogen, CO₂e-neutral, zero waste stream, and low energy. Translation: no mining, no multistage mess, just results.
The result? Commercial production of Carbon Nano Onions started in May 2024. Applications? Cement, composites, electronics, batteries, lubricants. These aren’t lab toys. This is infrastructure-level material science. This is Elemental Advanced Materials embedding performance into the supply chains that run industries, and doing it without burning the planet to keep the lights on.
And yeah, it’s a seven-person team out of Houston right now. Seven. Scaling on skeleton crew mode, while staring down a graphene market projected to 7x by 2034. The play? Use the $20M to level up production, tap into critical mineral recovery from e-waste, and hit volume, quality, and cost targets without breaking stride.
Rob Van Paasschen is driving finance, Thuan Vu is engineering the backbone, and Tom Samuels is steering from the board after a stint in the CEO seat. And while David Hudson handed the CEO reins back in February 2025, he helped push the company through key milestones that paved the way for this round. It’s a tight crew, with a long arc of impact ahead.
There’s no gimmick here. Just patented tech, brutal focus, and a real shot at reshaping what sustainability actually means for heavy industry. Elemental Advanced Materials isn’t making carbon cleaner, they’re making it work smarter. And that’s a material advantage.
