2
But I think the other really interesting part of the--and perhaps adding on to the conversation you were just having, the other interesting aspect that we experienced was our process put us in front of a lot of really, really sophisticated investors. And
that was important for us, right? In our business, which is a technology-heavy manufacturing business, you really want to have very sophisticated investors investing in each round.
And you saw that a little bit with the PIPE, right? You saw some of the most sophisticated investors on the planet really were investing in a PIPE. And so the
SPAC gave us the ability to talk to a wide variety of those kinds of sophisticated investors, instead of it being driven by just a single conversation or something along those lines.
Akiko Fujita
And John, it really does feel like there
are so many companies who are scrambling to get ahead of regulation as (INAUDIBLE) hear talks of a carbon tax, further disclosure rules. Im wondering how that has led to an uptick in activity for your company. How significant has that been?
John Bissell
Yeah, its been an incredible run-up of urgency over the last, Id say, sort of 12 to 18 months, give or take. And what weve seen is just overwhelming amounts of demand, frankly speaking. That was actually a significant driver. You
know, there was (INAUDIBLE) a question earlier of well, why SPAC for fundraising; but its also why now, right? Why raise additional capital right now?
And for us it is our customersIm now speaking broadly, righthave really gone from this is an important strategic initiative to this is a
problem that really needs to be solved very, very quickly, right, from their perspective. And so that was part of what was driving the urgency to go get significant additional capital, in order to put more steel on the ground to produce more of
these carbon negative products for our customers.
Akiko Fujita
When you talk about the innovation in this space, there has been so much money poured into technology for carbon capture. And when you look at the overall
number in terms of how much carbon needs to be removed, I mean, it does seem pretty daunting. Im looking at the UN numbers, 100 billion to 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide that needs to be removed.
What do you say to those critics who say that carbon capture is not the long-term answer here? Thats really just sort of the quick fix that people are
going for, because they dont want to be taxed on the other end on their carbon footprint.
John Bissell
Yeah. I mean, I think were focused on the scale of the problem, right, and how do you match the right kinds of technological and manufacturing and sort
of business tools to the scale of that problem. And for us, thats a massive opportunity, right? Were going after, as you say, not only is it a huge carbon problem that has to be solved, but were talking about materials which are
some of the most consumed materials by humankind, and trying to pair the two of those. How do we take this huge problem and this huge quantity of materials that we use and back them up to each other, and sort of solve the problem with the volume of
materials, right?
Origin Materials
Tuesday, February 24, 2021 - 2:00 p.m. EST