In a loading dock on Research Way NW in Calgary, a small team is trying to do something the carbon fiber industry has chased for two decades: make the stuff cheap. CarboMat Inc., a 2022 spinout from the University of Calgary, is converting asphaltenes (the heavy, gummy fraction left over after upgrading bitumen) into carbon fibers and battery anode materials [CarboMat Inc.]. The pitch is almost too tidy for a province whose economy still runs on oil sands: take the part of the barrel nobody wants, and turn it into the part of an electric vehicle that everyone does.
The company is led by Shabab Saad, CEO and co-founder, a chemical engineer with a B.Sc. from the University of New Mexico and an M.Sc. from Calgary, where his graduate work focused on carbon fibers [CarboMat Inc.]. The thesis CarboMat is commercializing is what Saad calls an end-to-end, less GHG-intensive process for producing low-cost, high-value carbon fibers from oil sands asphaltenes [CarboMat Inc.]. In November 2025, CarboMat signed a strategic partnership with 8 Clockwise to scale production of sustainable carbon fibers and battery materials [Business Wire, Nov 2025], its first publicly disclosed commercial relationship.
The bet
Carbon fiber is one of those materials that has been five years away from mass adoption for about thirty years. The bottleneck is feedstock. Roughly half the cost of a finished carbon fiber tow is the polyacrylonitrile (PAN) precursor, a petrochemical input with its own emissions tail. CarboMat's wedge is to skip PAN entirely and start from asphaltenes, which Alberta produces as a by-product of bitumen upgrading and currently struggles to monetize for anything except road binder and boiler fuel. If the chemistry works at scale, the input cost approaches the cost of handling industrial waste, which is to say, very little.
The same precursor chemistry, with different processing, yields hard carbon and graphitic anode materials for lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries. That dual-product story (composites on one side, anodes on the other) is what lets a seed-stage hardware company in Calgary credibly use the phrase "venture scale" without anyone laughing.
Why it could be big
The tailwinds are real. Western governments are spending heavily to onshore battery materials, and carbon fiber demand from wind blades, pressure vessels for hydrogen, and lightweight EV structures keeps outrunning supply. CarboMat has been validated by the people closest to the feedstock: it took a Phase II award in Alberta Innovates' Carbon Fibre Grand Challenge [CarboMat Inc.], joined the 2023/24 cohort of Creative Destruction Lab's Rockies stream [Creative Destruction Lab], and was named one of 20 finalists for the JEC World 2025 Startup Booster, with judges from Airbus, Mercedes-Benz, and ExxonMobil [CarboMat Inc.]. The disclosed funding is modest, around CA$1.05 million in grant capital led by Alberta Innovates and roughly $760,000 in a 2024 seed round [JEC].
Alberta Innovates grant (CA$M) | 1.05 | CA$M
Disclosed seed (CA$M, approx) | 1.04 | CA$M
A back of envelope on the prize: global carbon fiber demand is roughly 130,000 tonnes per year, and finished tow sells in the $20 to $40 per kilogram range depending on grade. If CarboMat can land asphaltene-derived fiber at even half the cost of PAN-based incumbents, and capture one percent of the market within a decade, that is 1,300 tonnes a year at, say, $15 per kilogram of revenue, or roughly $20 million in topline from a single product line. The anode opportunity is larger and uglier, because the Chinese cost curve on synthetic graphite is brutal, but the same tonne of asphaltene processed twice gives you two shots at the basket.
The team and traction
CarboMat remains small and concentrated around Saad, who in 2022 received the GRInSTEM Award for his work on the asphaltene-to-fiber process [CarboMat Inc.]. The company runs lab services out of its Calgary facility, offering paid testing on third-party samples [CarboMat Inc.], a sensible way for a materials startup to generate non-dilutive revenue while the pilot line is being built. The 8 Clockwise partnership announced in November is the clearest signal yet that CarboMat is moving from grant-funded R&D toward something that ships in a drum [Business Wire, Nov 2025].
The honest counterfactual
Asphaltene-derived carbon fiber is an old idea. Researchers at the University of Kentucky, ORNL, and several Japanese groups have published on pitch-based and asphaltene-based precursors for years, and none have dislodged PAN at scale. Mechanical properties (tensile strength, modulus) from heavy hydrocarbon precursors have historically lagged aerospace-grade PAN fiber, which limits the addressable market to industrial and automotive grades where price matters more than performance. Bulls answer: industrial and automotive grades are exactly where the volume growth is, and CarboMat's Alberta Innovates Phase II selection was made by a panel evaluating process economics and fiber properties together [CarboMat Inc.]. The company is targeting the part of the market where its cost advantage compounds, not the part where Toray and Hexcel have spent forty years building moats.
What to watch
The next twelve months should answer two questions. First, does the 8 Clockwise partnership produce a disclosed offtake or pilot tonnage figure, which would convert the company from grant-funded chemistry into a commercial supplier. Second, does CarboMat raise a priced Series A on the back of it. Watch for an Alberta-led round with strategic participation from a battery or composites incumbent, which is the most natural path given the cap table so far. A pilot line announcement in Calgary or Edmonton would be the tell.
The incumbent CarboMat must beat: Toray Industries, whose Torayca PAN-based carbon fiber has set the price and performance benchmark for the industry since the 1970s. Cheap asphaltene fiber does not need to match Toray's aerospace grades. It needs to make Toray's industrial grades look expensive.