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At first glance, it seems like an interesting proposition. Insulating one’s home with what is, in essence, fungus. But the visionaries behind the Estonian startup Myceen think they are on to something as the mycelium acts as a natural glue removing the need for toxic glues and chemicals. By using sawdust collected from paper mills and feeding this raw material to mycelium, the Tallinn-based company can produce products in various shapes of remarkable consistency. To date, Myceen has made mycelium lamps, acoustic panels, and furniture blocks.
According to CEO and Cofounder Siim Karro, the real demand could be in the building sector.
“We are developing this for building materials and have been working on developing insulation,” says Karro. “We see a lot of potential here because the renovation wave is coming to Europe.”
He cites the European Union’s 2023 Energy Efficiency Directive, which mandates that buildings in the EU be energy efficient by 2030. To do this, they must incorporate materials to reduce their energy consumption, and one way of doing so will be to use natural building materials like Myceen’s mycelium-produced insulation blocks.
“Seventy-five percent of the buildings in Europe are inefficient,” says Karro. “So there will be a huge demand for materials that can make buildings more efficient.”
But can blocks of what is essentially sterilized dead mycelium really compete with conventional building materials in terms of performance and cost? According to Karro, they are more economical, given that they are produced from leftovers from other industries and grow at nearly room temperature. “We don’t have to source new materials, and we need much less energy,” he says. And they perform as well as conventional insulation materials, he says. In fact, a new study is underway to prove just that in their pilot house in the middle of Tallinn.
The Ability to Scale
For the company, the promise of becoming a major source of sustainable insulation is attractive but will also require the ability to scale. Since it was founded in 2021, it has already moved facilities once and now occupies space at Naked-Island, a hub in Tallinn’s Paljasaare district (Paljasaare means ‘naked island’ in Estonian). It has also developed a successful business — last year, Myceen shipped products to clients in 15 countries, ranging from the US to Singapore.
Now Myceen, which has ten staffers, is looking to move again and is working on raising €2 million in seed funding in the form of investments and grants to set up a new pilot factory. The company counts among its existing backers a host of Estonian investors, including the Estonian Research Council, and Enterprise Estonia, but also the German Ministry of Culture, and Mistletoe, a Japanese private equity firm.
Myceen has received funding under the European Union co-funded Cross-Sectoral Mobility Measure to hire a material scientist and expand its R&D team.
Any financing the company raises will not only go into supporting the rampup of production, but into investing in R&D. Myceen’s research focus continues to be on material science and has a strong internal team. This consists of mycologists, biotechnologists, material scientists and chemists who are doing innovative work.
Estonia is a country known for its information technology startups, but Myceen has required new skills, such as in automation, as the company looks to create the machinery that could support the mass production of insulation blocks or acoustic panels. For Karro himself, a graduate of the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) who studied spatial design and interior architecture, it’s also been something of a learning curve, though one he greatly enjoys, as he is constantly learning.
An Infinite Resource
For a time, Karro was running the ship nearly on his own. He co-founded Myceen with Erki Nagla, a mushroom grower and enthusiast who was involved in a project to remediate the soil of Estonia’s Ida-Viru County, which had suffered from decades of industrial pollution, using mushrooms. While researching the properties of mushrooms at EKA, Karro and Nagla understood how mushrooms could be used to filter or decompose not only toxic compounds but also industrial leftovers, such as sawdust. Together with Karl Pärtel, who has a background in business and industrial ecology, they set up the company during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Originally, they focused on producing compostable lamps and furniture blocks — an early customer was Wise, the Estonian fintech, now headquartered in London, which had learned about these new “mushroom lamps” by word of mouth. Scaling from creating prototypes to filling their first orders wasn’t a challenge though. As Karro notes, mycelium is an infinite resource. It can be stored and easily multiplied, and its growth potential is exponential.
The raw materials, too, are easy to obtain, and after they are sterilized through high temperature and pressure, the mycelium goes to work. After a few days, the material is strong enough that the molds can be removed, and the shape of the product is in place. After that, it’s heated to kill the fungal growth. This means that any concerns about having fungus growing in one’s home are unfounded.
The firm’s products also caught the attention of the UK’s Northumbria University, which wanted to use its acoustic wall panels in an exhibition called the Future of Home Design at the Museum of the Home in London. The exhibit provides a look into the evolution of home design. Myceen’s products were featured in the exhibit’s Innovo Room of the Future, naturally. According to Karro, Myceen worked with Northumbria University’s Interaction Research Studio to develop custom mycelium-based acoustic and insulation wall panels capable of integrating smart devices.
“It was a good collaborative process,” he says, noting the exhibit should be open for years.
Test house featuring Myceen’s insulation materials
Another interesting collaboration closer to home has been with EKA and TalTech in Tallinn, where on 8 November, a new collaborative structure called PAKK Pavilion, named after the Timber Architecture Research Center (PAKK), was opened across from EKA’s main building on the edge of Tallinn’s Kalamaja District. Karro describes the new test house as the outcome of a desire between Myceen and its academic partners to “create something future oriented and research based.”
Within the test house, the performance of Myceen’s mycelium-based insulation will be assessed and compared to conventional materials. The data garnered from this endeavor can then be used to assure the building sector of the materials’ trustworthiness and help to support its adoption in construction. The company has multiple house producers lined up for their insulation material to use in housing projects from 2025 onwards.
This article is written by Justin Petrone. This article was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through Estonian Research Council.
If you are interested how Estonian researchers make buildings greener and more efficient, read more about how Estonian architect is looking for the perfect wooden lego blocks
