Yulex founder Jeff Martin joins the QuberTech board

Yulex founder Jeff Martin has joined the QuberTech board. Hear in his own words why a natural rubber pioneer is backing UK grown rubber from dandelions.

We are pleased to welcome Jeff Martin to the board of QuberTech. Jeff has spent his career building companies in the natural rubber industry, and for the past year he has been advising us on our work producing natural rubber from dandelions. In the film above he explains, in his own words, why he has taken a seat on the board.

Who Jeff Martin is

Jeff founded Yulex Corporation in Arizona in 2000 and built the first commercial production of natural rubber latex in the United States, extracted from guayule, a desert shrub. Yulex went on to develop a plant based foam that replaced neoprene in wetsuits with Patagonia. He was Yulex's founding chief executive until 2023 and remains involved in its innovation programmes. He also founded American Biorubber, which works on guayule seed and plant genetics, and he advises companies around the world developing alternative sources of natural rubber, including dandelion.

Why QuberTech

In the film, Jeff says the rubber industry needs the guidance of a company like QuberTech: the scientists, the collaborations and the gene editing technology needed to move natural rubber forward. That is a fair description of what we do. We engineer dandelions to produce natural rubber at commercially useful yields, grown in soil-free environments here in the UK, so that manufacturers are not wholly dependent on rubber trees from a narrow tropical belt.

We work with the John Innes Centre and LettUs Grow in the QuBOOSTR consortium, supported by Defra's Farming Innovation Programme delivered with Innovate UK, and earlier this year we raised £3.4 million in grant funding and equity investment to take the platform towards pilot scale.

Britain's place in the rubber story

As Jeff points out, the British have been part of the natural rubber industry from the beginning. In 1876 it was a British collector, Henry Wickham, who shipped rubber seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens, and from Kew the seedlings went on to Ceylon and Malaya, where the plantation industry that still supplies most of the world's natural rubber was born. Jeff sees QuberTech as the next generation of that story: rubber grown in Britain once more, this time from dandelions rather than trees.

What Jeff brings

Jeff has already done what we are setting out to do. He domesticated a new rubber crop, proved the material with demanding brands and took the technology to commercial scale. His experience with investors, manufacturers and brands, and his knowledge of the global natural rubber supply chain, will be a real asset as we move from the laboratory towards commercial deployment.

Talk to us

If you are a manufacturer, brand or investor interested in a UK source of natural rubber, get in touch through our contact page.