PlantSwitch discloses a fully sold $13M round for crop-waste plastic

Why it matters

PlantSwitch has moved from selling agave straws door-to-door to financing industrial resin production. The $13M filing raises the stakes on whether its crop-waste material can work at factory scale.

PlantSwitch disclosed a fully sold $12,999,998 securities offering in an SEC filing on September 14th, giving founders Dillon Baxter and Maxime Blandin fresh capital for their attempt to replace petroleum plastic with material made from crop waste.

The Form D says the first sale occurred on July 6th. PlantSwitch sold the full amount offered, with nothing remaining, to three investors. The filing identifies neither those investors nor a lead, valuation or use of proceeds. It also does not establish the precise date on which the offering became fully subscribed.

That limited disclosure matters because PlantSwitch is pursuing a capital-intensive version of the compostable-materials business. Baxter and Blandin are manufacturing resin and finished foodservice products rather than licensing a laboratory process or selling a packaging concept. Their central bet is that agricultural residues such as rice hulls and wheat straw can become a practical feedstock for cups, cutlery, straws and lids without forcing customers to replace conventional plastics machinery.

From golf teammates to a materials plant

Baxter and Blandin met as golf teammates at Southern Methodist University. Baxter studied finance and alternative asset management while playing Division I golf on academic and athletic scholarships, according to PlantSwitch's account of its founders. Blandin moved from Martinique to the United States at 13, studied economics at SMU on a golf scholarship and later played professional golf on the European Tour.

The two began discussing plant-based plastic in late 2019 after using paper straws that became soggy or failed. Blandin has tied his interest in the problem to seeing marine pollution and microplastics while growing up in the Caribbean. Their early product was an agave-based straw, which they sold door-to-door to restaurants in Dallas.

Baxter had encountered bioplastics while researching small and midsize manufacturers during a private-equity internship. He briefly accepted an investment-banking job after college, then returned to PlantSwitch after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted restaurant sales. Forbes later included both founders in its 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry coverage.

PlantSwitch eventually moved beyond straws and developed CompostZero, a proprietary resin intended for use on existing plastic-processing equipment. That compatibility is commercially important. A compostable material that requires customers or converters to install new production lines carries another layer of cost and execution risk. PlantSwitch is instead asking manufacturers to change the input material while retaining much of their installed equipment.

The round follows a manufacturing buildout

PlantSwitch's earlier financing shows where much of the founders' effort has gone. PlantSwitch announced a $3.25 million seed round in February 2022. A $7.7 million early-growth financing followed in 2023 with participation from NexPoint Capital. In February 2024, Business North Carolina reported an $8 million raise intended to support a manufacturing plant in Sanford, North Carolina.

Those reported financings should not be mechanically added together because the available accounts do not establish whether every figure represents a separate pool of capital. The new SEC filing, however, describes a distinct 2026 offering with its own first-sale date and three investors.

PlantSwitch's Sanford operation covers roughly 50,000 to 52,000 square feet and is designed for approximately 50 million pounds of annual resin capacity, according to North Carolina Biotechnology Center coverage. Rated capacity is different from output: PlantSwitch has not published figures establishing current utilization, revenue or gross margins. The Form D also lists a Miami address, while the manufacturing operation remains associated with Sanford.

The new capital therefore arrives after Baxter and Blandin made the expensive transition from selling finished straws to operating an integrated materials platform. Production scale, yield, feedstock consistency and customer qualification will determine whether CompostZero can compete with petroleum-based products. A $13 million financing can fund part of that work, though the filing gives no allocation for the proceeds.

Compostability has to survive scrutiny

PlantSwitch says CompostZero fully disintegrated in home-compost conditions in just under 10 weeks during independent testing by Normec Group. PlantSwitch also says the material leaves zero microplastics. The available materials do not include the full testing protocol, exact composting conditions or certification documents, so those claims remain attributable to PlantSwitch rather than independently reproducible from the public record.

That distinction has commercial consequences. The Federal Trade Commission's Green Guides say compostable claims require evidence that a product will break down safely and in a timely manner under the conditions consumers are likely to encounter. For PlantSwitch, proving performance at scale includes both how the material behaves during use and what happens after disposal.

PlantSwitch names Walmart, Taylor Farms, Live Nation, Starlink and Wonder among customers or organizations that have evaluated its products. Those relationships come from PlantSwitch materials and secondary reporting rather than the securities filing. PlantSwitch also displays a running claim that its products have prevented 881,849 pounds of plastic from entering the waste stream, without publishing the measurement period or an independent audit.

The customer list still points to the market Baxter and Blandin are trying to win: buyers with large volumes of single-use foodservice items and public waste-reduction targets. Those accounts can support manufacturing scale, but they can also concentrate revenue and demand extensive product testing before wider deployment.

PlantSwitch is raising into an active period for alternative materials. Shellworks, which makes a fermentation-derived material called Vivomer, raised $15 million in March 2026. Teknor Apex acquired Danimer Scientific in June 2025, showing the consolidation pressure facing developers that must finance production before reaching durable scale.

Baxter and Blandin have already crossed the line from a replacement straw to a factory-backed resin supplier. The newly disclosed financing gives them another $13 million to prove that crop waste can support an industrial materials business, with the hardest operating metrics still held outside the filing.