Four classmates. One idea: grow the structure.
Zoeus Materials started in a university lab and became a worker-owned cooperative. We're a small team building carbon-negative structural compounds — and the company that makes them is owned by the people who do.
Grown from four corners of the world.
Four classmates who turned a university lab project into a worker-owned company.
Camila Bustamante
Synthetic biologist who built the first bench-scale bioreactor that grew a load-bearing coupon.
Marcus Coleman
Structural engineer who spent a decade sizing steel and concrete before deciding the material itself had to change.
Nida Sethi
Polymer chemist behind the chitin-alignment process that gives Chitospan its specific strength.
Lena Vogel
Process engineer who turned a lab protocol into three continuous, room-temperature production lines.
From a materials lab to a cooperative
We met as classmates at Oklahoma State University, four students who had arrived in Stillwater from four different corners of the world — the United States, Chile, Pakistan, and Germany. What we shared was a conviction that the built environment couldn't keep being smelted and quarried into existence.
Zoeus began as a class project and a borrowed bioreactor. When it became a company, we made a deliberate choice about how to build it: we turned Zoeus into a cooperative. It is fully employee-owned and operated — every worker-owner has a stake and a voice.
Today we're around 40 people across research, manufacturing, and engineering, still guided by the same idea we had as students: structure should be grown, not smelted.
Help us write the first case studies.
Zoeus is looking for launch partners to pilot our compounds on real projects and build the data behind grown structure. Tell us what you're building.