Hard Tech to Market: Supercarb’s New Class of Fiber Could Change How Performance Clothing Is Made

Stories of Activate Fellows and alumni turning scientific breakthroughs into hard-tech impact.

The $2T textile industry is approaching a reckoning, as its problems grow too big to ignore: A carbon footprint higher than international aviation and shipping combined. Performancewear laced with PFAS. Flame-protective clothing made of petrochemicals. Synthetic fabrics that shed microplastics with every wash—and eventually turn into plastic pollution that never goes away.

Consumers are increasingly demanding alternatives, but today’s non-synthetic options have their own glaring environmental costs. Cotton not only requires an enormous amount of water to process but accounts for 24% of all the insecticides used in agriculture. Meanwhile, viscose and lyocell, derived from wood pulp, require cutting down hundreds of millions of trees each year.

It all seems bleak until you meet Supercarb (Hitesh Manglani, Cohort 2024), whose innovations in plastic-free textiles could rewrite the future of the industry.

The company’s bio-based fibers are high-performance (soft, fast-drying, antibacterial, and flame-resistant) and sustainable—made with materials rescued from everyday waste streams, 38x less water-intensive than cotton, biodegradable, and free of toxic waste byproducts.

Supercarb’s founder and CEO, Hitesh Manglani, comes from a multi-generational textile family in India. He is a scientist and textile engineer, but a stint in food science inspired the epiphany behind Supercarb. Manglani realized that polymers built from uronic acid—found in roughly 300 billion kilograms of seaweed, citrus, apple, grape, potato, and sugar beet waste each year—could become the building blocks of textile fibers. The result is a new class of fibers made from carbohydrates, hence the company’s name.

Manglani founded Supercarb in 2023 and became an Activate Fellow in Cohort 2024. He recently completed his two-year fellowship—run in partnership with Cyclotron Road, a node of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Commercialization's Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP)—punctuated by the launch of Supercarb’s debut product: the world’s first climbing shirt made using seaweed. After a 200%-funded Kickstarter campaign over the summer, the Chalk Up Tee will soon be out in the world, to be worn by rock climbers and many others eager to experience Supercarb’s textile breakthrough for themselves.

Behind the scenes, the San Francisco-based advanced materials company has been gaining commercial traction, designed to be able to use the same machinery as incumbent technologies and therefore scale rapidly with the right partnerships. So far, Supercarb has cultivated a pipeline of 25+ global apparel brand partners and secured paid pilots with a well-known global sportswear brand as well as a leading protective clothing brand.

The future is looking safer and sustainable with Supercarb reimagining fashion and home textiles. We caught up with Manglani to hear more about his journey and where Supercarb is headed next.

Why textiles?

I was born into a textiles family, and I was always surrounded by my dad’s fabrics. We were pretty poor growing up, with six of us sleeping in the same room—me, my sisters, and my mom and dad. I remember reading comics in my dad’s storeroom, with inventory stacked above and below me. I think my deep love for this field began there.

I went to the National Institute of Technology in India and became a mechanical engineer. From there I went to work for India’s Department of Atomic Energy at the Nuclear Fuel Complex, which provides fuel to 21 reactors. And then I went into the automotive sector as a robotics engineer. These were great opportunities, but I was not satisfied.

I wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps—not so much from a retail perspective, but from a science perspective. I wanted to know the complex science that happens before you swipe a credit card and buy a piece of clothing. So I ended up moving to the U.S. and going to NC State University’s Wilson College of Textiles, where I learned the physics and chemistry behind the fabrics we wear everyday.

I wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps—not so much from a retail perspective, but from a science perspective.

So, how did you make a t-shirt from seaweed?

Supercarb is a materials science technology platform that upcycles agricultural waste into high-performance textiles. One of the first waste streams we’ve started with is seaweed. We use seaweed from Chile, extracting uronic acid macromolecules that we convert into fibers. We blended these fibers with cotton, modal, and spandex to make our first product targeted toward the climbing community.

A materials science player launching a garment itself is actually quite different, because we’re usually B2B-focused. But the Chalk Up Tee is a demonstration of our ability to take a molecule from seaweed all the way to garment—and that we can deliver at a fast pace as we partner with bigger players in the market.

What are your commercial markets, and how is Supercarb beating the incumbents?

We think about our commercial market in two buckets. The first bucket is athleisure and sportswear—a market dominated by a lot of toxic chemistries. One of our key value propositions for this market is that our fibers are inherently antibacterial without the use of silver or zinc (there have been repeated studies about silver having a harmful impact on consumers). Likewise, water repellants are used for moisture repellency or fast-drying properties but often contain PFAS. Supercarb’s fiber is porous, moving moisture by capillary actions without toxic chemicals.

The other bucket is the flame protection apparel space. Kevlar Nomexes and Modacrylix—these fibers are all petrochemical-derived. What we offer is a much higher protection value. Our fiber is inherently flame retardant, a factor measured using the limited oxygen index, or the amount of oxygen needed to burn a material. Kevlar Nomex is around 29%. Supercarb is at 41.7%, according to a third-party verification we just did. That’s a significant gain in performance—and performance-to-cost ratio, since our fibers are also cheaper.

Despite how dense this market is, and how protected it is by incumbents, we just secured a paid pilot in flame protection apparel. It took us a long time to break into this market and it's been an amazing journey.

What milestone do you think would have taken significantly longer without Activate?

That’s easy. We used the funding from Activate to acquire production machinery that allowed us to form fibers that were much closer to a sellable product or what we could produce at a pilot or commercial scale.

Without Activate, this would have required raising a whole financial round. Then we would have needed 12-16 months to acquire the asset and another 12 months to develop something. I would say we saved at least two and a half years because of the financial help from Activate.

We saved at least two and a half years because of the financial help from Activate.

Did anything else stand out about your experience as an Activate Fellow?

Activate’s tagline might as well be “we are in the business of people.” I really appreciate that investing in human beings is the North Star for both Activate and Cyclotron Road.

Yes, you have to go through a six-month application process to prove that your technology can make an impact. But at the end of the day, it’s still a vote of confidence in the person, knowing the idea and the technology will likely change.

What lessons have you learned in your personal journey as a founder?

I used to believe that “grow fast, fail fast” was the only motto. But I was getting exhausted, and it was impacting my happiness. I consistently saw other founders also struggling with happiness, doing too much, and burning out.

Somewhere along the journey, thanks to my Activate managing director Jill having a lot of influence on me, I realized that resting is so important. Rest is part of the work.

Once I started investing in my mental and physical health—including taking up rock climbing—I saw so much benefit. I was thinking more clearly. I was moving much faster. I felt more rested. I felt more happy. It became clear to me that I had been doing it wrong all along by not resting enough and not investing in the side of me that will actually build this company. That realization in the last two years of Activate has been pretty transformational for us or for me.

How has your personal growth influenced the way you lead Supercarb?

It takes time to be able to understand what you are personally motivated by before you can galvanize the rest of the industry. What I’ve finally settled on is a threefold mission for Supercarb. First, we want to solve unsolved problems. Second, we want to leave Earth better than we found it. And third, we invest in the happiness and growth of everyone who joins this mission. I genuinely want anyone who joins Supercarb to be doing their life's work, and that is only possible if everyone is happy, holistically. This is going to sound a little bit crazy, but I’ve been thinking about creating a happiness index for everyone who works here so we can understand and track happiness. I think that might be the key to success at our company.

What do you hope the next 12-18 months look like for Supercarb?

One win would be to close a financial round. All of this commercial traction is galvanizing investments, and we’ve received checks from multiple investors recently.

A second win would be to be able to serve our customers and deliver on the paid pilots that we have received.

Third, once those pilot values have been proven, we want to gain larger joint development and offtake agreements with our brand partners over the longer term.

Who should reach out to you right now?

Investors who are looking to galvanize seaweed as a feedstock, and people who are investing in the blue economy, climate, or advanced materials should definitely be in contact with us. We believe that humans invest in humans—our investors have followed us for months and seen our ability to execute. We invite investors and the community to build a relationship with us and start following our journey.

We’re also looking to connect with brand partners in athleisure, sportswear, industry, and the flame protection apparel space.

And eventually we want to partner with the U.S. military and government, so we’re welcoming connections with leaders who understand how we can serve dual markets.