Plantd Co-founder, Huade Tan: Innovating Carbon Capture With Building Materials

Huade Tan, co-founder and CTO of Plantd, joins me to explain how two former SpaceX engineers ended up building carbon-capturing structural panels out of a North Carolina tobacco field. The conversation covers how Plantd chose its plant feedstock, why the team deliberately passed on the carbon-credit market in favor of a real product business, and what five years of hardware iteration looks like when you're building an industrial press that hasn't been attempted by a US company since the 1960s or '70s. Huade walks through the full process, from cloning a sterile perennial grass to harvesting it with a modified tobacco harvester to pressing it into finished building panels, and shares the numbers behind the business: $40 to $45 million raised from seed through Series B, and a 2024 deal with national homebuilder D.R. Horton to supply 10 million panels for roughly 90,000 homes. What sets this episode apart is how directly Huade connects his engineering background at SpaceX to the problems he's solving now, including a five-step framework for building hardware that the team is still applying today. It's a grounded, technical look at what it takes to build a genuine hardware moat in an industry that hasn't seen real innovation in decades

Timestamps:

00:00 Cold open

00:23 Thank you to our sponsors: NC Idea, Ballentine, Bank of America

01:31 Welcome to the episode: introducing Huade Tan and Plantd

01:57 The pitch: two SpaceX engineers, carbon capture, and plywood-like panels

03:34 Huade joins the show

04:01 Huade's background: building life support systems for Crew Dragon at SpaceX

05:27 Education path and Nathan's aerospace background

06:39 Why North Carolina: population growth trends since 2018

07:34 From Crew Dragon's "bubble" to the idea for Plantd

10:14 The founding question: what do you build from captured carbon?