CO2 Clothing Technology Is Closer Than You Think — And Fashion Giants Are Taking Notice
Every second, a garbage truck's worth of clothes is thrown away somewhere on earth. The fashion industry now produces more carbon pollution than international aviation and shipping put together. If you have ever wondered whether anything real is being done about it — something beyond recycling bins and vague sustainability pledges — the answer is yes. A biotech startup called Rubi is making fabric directly from captured carbon dioxide, and some of the world's biggest clothing brands are already lining up.
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| Credit: Rubi |
What Is Rubi and Why Does It Matter Right Now
Rubi is a startup that has found a way to produce cellulose — the raw material used to make lyocell and viscose fabrics — using carbon dioxide as the primary ingredient. Instead of cutting down trees from plantations or rainforests, Rubi captures waste CO2 and runs it through a cascade of enzymes that convert it into textile-grade cellulose pulp.
The company was co-founded by twin sisters Neeka and Leila Mashouf. Neeka, a materials scientist and CEO, described their approach as "basically taking the machinery of biology outside of the cell." Rather than relying on engineered bacteria or chemical catalysts, the sisters turned to enzymes after studying every available option. Enzymes, Neeka explained, are already used at massive industrial scale — in food production, wastewater treatment, and dozens of other sectors — making them a practical and cost-effective tool for their process.
The choice was deliberate, not just innovative. The enzyme industry is enormous, costs are manageable, and the infrastructure already exists. That makes scaling far more realistic than many green-tech alternatives that require entirely new supply chains from scratch.
The $7.5 Million Raise That Signals a Turning Point for Sustainable Fashion
Rubi recently closed a $7.5 million funding round to build a demonstration-scale version of its production system. The round was led by AP Ventures and FH One Investments, with additional backing from CMPC Ventures, H&M Group, Talis Capital, and Understorey Ventures. The investment will fund a facility designed to produce tens of tons of CO2-derived cellulose material.
What makes this raise significant is not just the dollar amount — it is who is at the table. H&M Group investing directly in a material startup is a strong signal that major fashion brands are no longer treating green material science as a PR exercise. They are starting to write checks.
The startup has already booked more than $60 million in non-binding off-take agreements with partners, a figure that suggests serious commercial intent beyond the lab stage. That kind of pipeline does not come from a science project. It comes from a product that buyers believe will actually arrive at scale.
H&M, Patagonia, and Walmart Are Already Testing the Fabric
Rubi has worked with fifteen pilot partners to test its CO2-derived material in real product development. The list includes H&M, Patagonia, and Walmart — three brands that operate at vastly different price points but share one common challenge: their customers and regulators are asking harder questions about where materials come from.
Lyocell and viscose are already popular in fashion because of how they feel against the skin and how they drape. They are found in everything from budget fast fashion to premium sustainable collections. The problem has always been that making them requires trees — often from managed plantations, but sometimes from old-growth or rainforest sources — combined with energy-intensive chemical processing. Rubi's technology would replace that entire upstream chain with a process that starts at a carbon capture point.
For a brand like Patagonia, which has built its identity around environmental accountability, the ability to trace fabric back to captured emissions rather than felled trees is a meaningful upgrade. For H&M, which has faced scrutiny over greenwashing claims in recent years, it represents a more defensible sustainability story. For Walmart, the scale potential matters most — any technology that can produce textile-grade pulp cheaply and cleanly at volume is commercially attractive.
Why the U.S. Textile Supply Chain Creates an Unusual Opportunity
One of the more overlooked dimensions of Rubi's pitch is geographic. The United States currently has no domestic source of textile-grade cellulose pulp. All of it is imported. Neeka Mashouf pointed out that American manufacturers and brands have expressed real interest in being able to source that material domestically — a supply chain advantage that has nothing to do with sustainability and everything to do with resilience and cost.
"These textile and raw material supply chains are very long," she said. The opportunity to produce textile-grade cellulose inside the country, at competitive cost, using a waste product like CO2, is the kind of pitch that resonates both with climate-focused investors and with procurement teams who lived through pandemic-era supply chain disruptions.
This dual appeal — environmental and logistical — may be one of the strongest arguments Rubi has for rapid adoption. Technologies that only make sense from a values perspective tend to move slowly. Technologies that also make economic and operational sense move much faster.
How Enzymes Became the Secret Ingredient in CO2 Fashion
The decision to use enzymes rather than engineered microbes or synthetic chemistry was made early and with clear reasoning. When Neeka and her sister Leila, then a Harvard Medical School student, surveyed the landscape of carbon-to-material technologies, they found enzymes were both the most scalable and the most cost-viable route.
Enzymes do specific chemical jobs with remarkable precision. In Rubi's process, a sequence — or cascade — of enzymes takes waste CO2 and progressively converts it into the cellulose compounds needed for fiber production. Each enzyme in the cascade handles a distinct step, reducing the need for extreme temperatures, pressures, or toxic solvents that characterize conventional cellulose manufacturing.
The result is a process that can, in principle, be located wherever CO2 is being captured — industrial facilities, cement plants, power generation sites — and produce fabric-ready material at that source. That distributed model could fundamentally change how textile raw materials move through global supply chains.
Can Fashion Actually Clean Up Its Act
The fashion industry generates an estimated 10 percent of global carbon emissions annually. Despite years of sustainability commitments, most major brands have made only marginal progress because the problem sits deep in their supply chains — in the farms, forests, and chemical plants that produce raw fibers before a single garment is ever cut or sewn.
Technologies like Rubi's matter precisely because they attack that upstream problem directly. Recycling programs help, but they address the end of a garment's life, not its beginning. If the cellulose that goes into a shirt can be made from CO2 that would otherwise enter the atmosphere, the carbon math of fashion changes in a fundamental way.
That is not a guarantee. Demonstration-scale production is not commercial-scale production. Non-binding off-take agreements are not purchase orders. The journey from promising startup to mainstream fiber supplier is long and filled with engineering, regulatory, and cost hurdles that even well-funded companies sometimes cannot clear.
But the signal from this funding round is hard to dismiss. When global fashion brands start putting money into the companies that make their raw materials — not just signing pledges or publishing sustainability reports — something structural is beginning to shift. Rubi may be one of the clearest examples yet of where that shift is heading.
What Comes Next for Rubi and CO2-Derived Fabric
With the $7.5 million raise now closed, Rubi's immediate focus is on building out its demonstration-scale system and proving that it can consistently produce textile-grade cellulose at the volumes its pilot partners need for real product lines. If that demonstration succeeds, the path toward commercial agreements — binding ones — becomes considerably shorter.
The next twelve to eighteen months will be critical. Fashion industry timelines are long; brands typically plan collections one to two years out. For Rubi's material to appear in retail products from its current pilot partners, the production system needs to be reliable and the material needs to perform consistently through dyeing, weaving, and finishing processes.
The science is compelling. The commercial interest is real. The question now is execution — and whether a startup built around enzymes, captured carbon, and twin sisters from California can help rewrite where clothes come from.
