Alexandria, Va.-based Matium, an emerging SaaS platform for materials manufacturers, has raised $1.78 million from unidentified investors in a seed round, according to a listing on Crunchbase.
Co-founded by Baltimore-based Bailey Robin, who serves as the CEO, and his cousin Alex Lambrides, Matium calls itself an Enterprise Resource Trading Platform (ERTP), enabling businesses to exchange materials and services. Its marketplace connects buyers, suppliers, and servicers in the manufacturing and materials industries, and additionally enables shipping services.
“In late 2020, I called my talented engineer and cousin Alex Lambrides with a plea to help me fix how this industry works,” Robin, who brings a B.S.E in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, recently wrote on LinkedIn. “The mission was simple, remove waste from the world in all forms — starting with the plastics process.”
Lambrides committed “immediately and went on to quit his job and put the company on his back to build a full-service platform for brokers, recyclers, and manufacturers to manage their materials, services, and shipping,” said Robin, who previously founded and still runs logistics brokerage Tomorrowmade.
Robin’s latest entrepreneurial has leveraged experience gathered during his four-year stint at BACH Polymers, and supplemented it with solid research. Armed with “notepads, and a couple [of] Plastics News articles,” he learnt more about the industry. He said he also spent hours on Google Maps’ satellite view, tracing railroad tracks to plants, before making cold calls to companies in a bid to understand their needs.
Lambrides, who serves as the startup’s chief technology officer, has a B.S.E. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, development experience, and “exceptional drive,” according to his bio on Matium’s website. He previously worked at Brightspot, a developer of content management solutions, and Viasat.
Matium’s platform has been tested by some early adopters and plans to open it up to others in “a few more weeks.”
