ZILA BioWorks Builds the Carbon-Storing Epoxy From Hemp

For a material that holds together everything from wind turbine blades to surfboards, epoxy resin has a surprisingly simple origin story: oil. It is a petrochemical, through and through. ZILA BioWorks, a quiet company based in Renton, Washington, has spent a decade trying to rewrite that story. Its answer grows in a field. The company is developing a bio-epoxy resin derived from industrial hemp, promising to lock away carbon from the atmosphere instead of pumping more out of the ground [CB Insights]. The bet is that performance and price can meet, creating a drop-in green alternative for manufacturers who are suddenly being asked to account for the carbon in their glue.

The hemp-based wedge

ZILA’s patent-pending formula replaces the petroleum-based backbone of conventional epoxy with oil extracted from industrial hemp. The company claims the resulting thermoset plastic matches the chemical resistance, heat tolerance, and structural integrity of its fossil-fuel cousins, making it suitable for high-performance composites, industrial coatings, and adhesives [SP-Edge, Zoominfo]. The environmental pitch is straightforward. Hemp plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow; ZILA says each unit of its resin sequesters about 0.065kg of CO2 [Crunchbase]. The resin is also predominantly BPA-free, a selling point for indoor applications like hospital floor coatings or school materials where toxin exposure is a concern [CB Insights]. For manufacturers in outdoor recreation, construction, and energy infrastructure, the proposition is a direct swap: same application process, different environmental ledger.

A long road to commercial resin

Founded in 2014, ZILA BioWorks represents a patient kind of climate tech. The company’s known funding is modest, totaling an estimated $650,000 from a 2021 debt round and a 2022 convertible note led by Tall Grass Ventures [CB Insights, Crunchbase]. This is not the capital stack of a software sprint. It is the slow, chemical engineering grind of formulating, testing, and certifying a new industrial material. The team has been building through that grind. Jason Puracal, the CEO and co-founder, is the public face, presenting the hemp-epoxy concept in investor forums [Chemanager Online]. Keithanne Mockaitis, Director of Innovation, holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell, lending scientific heft to the development work [Cornell Chronicle]. The board includes Joby Titus, listed as a lead investor and advisory board member [ZoomInfo]. It is a small group betting that regulatory tailwinds and corporate decarbonization pledges will finally pull a bio-based epoxy across the commercial finish line.

The performance-price paradox

The ambition is clear, but the path is littered with the skeletons of promising biomaterials that couldn’t clear the twin hurdles of performance and cost. Epoxy is a ruthlessly competitive, globally scaled market dominated by chemical giants like Hexion and Huntsman. These incumbents produce vast volumes at razor-thin margins, and their products are the known, trusted quantity in every engineer’s specification sheet. For ZILA to win a purchase order, its resin must do more than just be green. It must cure at the right speed, bond with the same strength, and survive the same environmental stress,all at a price that doesn’t explode a bill of materials. The company’s light public footprint means there are no named case studies or disclosed major customer deployments to prove it has cleared these bars. The risk is that ZILA remains a compelling science project, rather than a volume supplier.

The math, however, hints at the scale of the opportunity if it works. Global epoxy resin demand is measured in millions of tons annually. If ZILA’s resin captures 65 grams of CO2 per kilogram produced, scaling to just 10,000 tons of annual production would sequester 650 metric tons of CO2 each year. That is a rounding error in global emissions, but it is a tangible, market-driven wedge into the fossil carbon locked in our built environment. For ZILA BioWorks to matter, it must ultimately beat not a startup, but an incumbent like Hexion on the factory floor, gram for gram and dollar for dollar.

Sources

1. [CB Insights] ZILA BioWorks Company Profile | https://www.cbinsights.com/company/zila-works
2. [Crunchbase, Feb 2021] ZILA BioWorks Debt Financing | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/zila-works-debt-financing--e015e531
3. [Crunchbase, Jul 2022] Tall Grass Ventures Activity | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tall-grass-ventures/investor_summary/overview_timeline
4. [SP-Edge] ZILA BioWorks Company Profile | https://sp-edge.com/companies/1295901
5. [Zoominfo] ZILA BioWorks Company Profile | https://www.zoominfo.com/c/zila-works-llc/460659684
6. [Chemanager Online] ZILA BioWorks Revolutionizing Plastics | https://chemanager-online.com/en/news/zila-bioworks-revolutionizing-plastics
7. [Cornell Chronicle, Aug 2025] Keithanne Mockaitis Profile | https://news.cornell.edu/chronindex/2025/08
8. [ZoomInfo] ZILA BioWorks Leadership | https://www.zoominfo.com/c/zila-works-llc/460659684
9. [ISC3] Start-up ZILA BioWorks | https://www.isc3.org/page/start-up-zila-bioworks