How Plantd identified business process inefficiencies as a competitive wedge in building materials | Nathan Silvernail

Jan 12, 2026

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Plantd is reinventing engineered lumber by replacing trees with rapidly renewable biomass, scaling manufacturing technology that costs 100x less than traditional OSB production. With customers including DR Horton and growing demand across furniture, RV, and international markets, Plantd has attracted partnerships throughout the building materials industry. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Nathan Silvernail, Co-Founder & CEO at Plantd, to explore how his decade at SpaceX shaped his approach to building a capital-intensive hardware company that could transform the $65 billion engineered lumber market.

Topics Discussed

Building continuous OSB production systems versus $500M batch presses used by incumbents
Securing DR Horton, furniture manufacturers, and building material companies as early customers
Managing the bifurcation between OPEX-intensive manual processes and CAPEX transitions to AI robotic vision systems
Designing machines for 400,000 panels/year output with sub-one-year payback at scale
Navigating opinion-based building inspection processes where "no two blocks in this entire country build a house the same way"
The strategic calculus of positioning away from climate tech to avoid green premium assumptions
Scaling from pilot production to deploying 25-30 machines to meet current demand pipeline
Achieving 70-layer panel construction versus 6-8 layers in timber-based OSB

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