Supersede Secures $5M in Catalytic Debt to Scale Sustainable Building Materials
Marine-grade plywood has been stealing checks for decades. Swells when wet. Breeds mold like it’s paying rent. Gets chewed up by termites. Yet entire industries kept treating it like the last honest guy at the bar. Supersede walked into that mess, looked around, and decided building materials shouldn’t tap out the second weather enters the conversation.
That question just pulled in another $5M in catalytic debt funding from Closed Loop Partners, specifically Closed Loop Catalytic Capital & Private Credit. Not vanity capital. Not “growth at all costs” theater. Real money aimed at real manufacturing capacity. The kind of financing tied directly to production equipment for Supersede’s new Midwest facility launching this summer. Even the loan structure has teeth. The interest mechanism rewards higher recycled material content in the finished product. Imagine that. Capital finally acting like it read the assignment.
Sean Petterson, CEO, Jordan Darling, COO, and Shane Kenyon, Head of Engineering, are building something that sits right in the middle of materials science, industrial manufacturing, and economic reality. Which is usually where the adults enter the room. Sean Petterson already knows what scaling industrial hardware looks like after building StrongArm Technologies into a company that reached a $200M valuation before acquisition. Jordan Darling came out of Nikola Powersports and Free Form Factory with patents, scars, and enough manufacturing knowledge to know where legacy systems crack under pressure. Shane Kenyon engineered the guts of the operation, developing structural panels from recycled post-industrial polypropylene that can step directly into the ring with marine plywood and OSB without acting precious about it.
Supersede Marine Board is waterproof, rot-proof, mold-proof, splinter-proof, recyclable, and ASTM-certified with 0% water absorption, 0% swelling, 0% termite damage, and 0% fungi. Which sounds less like a building material and more like something the lumber industry hopes accidentally falls into the ocean and never comes back. It cuts, drills, laminates, and installs with standard tools while delivering 1.7x the fastener retention of marine-grade plywood. Same workflow. Better outcome. That’s how disruption actually enters an industry. Quietly. Through the loading dock.
The part investors should really pay attention to is the manufacturing philosophy underneath all this. Supersede is building localized micro-plants near feedstock waste streams, turning industrial plastic waste into structural material while reducing transport costs and supply chain volatility. In a market where lumber pricing can move like a guy day-trading crypto after 3 espressos, stability becomes a competitive weapon.
Closed Loop Partners saw it twice. They participated in the earlier $10M seed financing and came back again. That second check always talks louder than the first one. Especially when the modular construction market is projected to climb toward $228.66B over the next decade and every industry from marine to RVs to housing is starving for materials that survive reality instead of marketing decks.