Business
New types of engineered wood are ready for building sites
Technology Reporter
InventWoodCould your house take a bullet for you?
Clad it with a new type of modified wood, and it might, says Alex Lau, co-founder and executive chairman of InventWood.
The US-based company has developed Superwood – a modified wood it claims is stronger than steel.
During lab tests, a gas gun fired a bullet-like projectile at thin pieces of wood, including an early version of the company’s product.
While the projectile blasted straight through the natural wood, it failed to penetrate the heavily modified version.
Mr Lau suggests that the product could have military applications, such as in battlefield shelters, but admits they “haven’t tried dropping bombs on it”.
In the race to decarbonise construction, materials such as concrete – associated with high greenhouse gas emissions – are coming under ever-greater scrutiny.
Wood-based construction, proponents say, can actually help in the fight against climate change by storing large amounts of carbon long-term.
But natural timber is not always strong enough for certain applications and it can degrade when exposed to moisture or wood-gobbling insects.
That’s where engineered wood products come in. They promise to be significantly stronger and more resilient – reliable enough, even, to form the structural frames of skyscrapers. The construction industry is increasingly pushing wood to new limits.
“You can almost massage the wood so you’re squeezing air and imperfections out,” explains Mr Lau as he describes the process of treating timber with chemicals to remove lignin, a polymer found in wood, and then compressing it extremely firmly to reduce its volume by around 80%.
This has the effect of creating additional hydrogen bonds within the material, adds Mr Lau, significantly strengthening it even though it becomes much thinner than the original timber.
A key advantage, InventWood says, is in retaining the wood’s attractive grain in the finished product.
Getty ImagesInventWood has spent years refining its process – it used to take more than a week. Now, staff can make a piece of Superwood in hours.
The company will use wood from poplar trees initially but Mr Lau says it’s also possible to use bamboo.
“We can grow suitable bamboo feedstock in like three or four years,” he says. “It’s really an efficient way to draw down carbon from the atmosphere.”
There are already a range of engineered and modified wood products on the market. Take glulam, or glue-laminated timber, in which layers of wood with the grain facing in the same direction are glued together to make strong, moisture-resistant beams.
Cross-laminated timber (CLT), meanwhile, involves stacking layers of wood with the grain in alternating directions, to make panels for walls and floors. Like an ultra-tough plywood.
Using CLT instead of concrete to build a community centre could reduce carbon emissions associated with the construction and operation of the building by nearly 10%, a study published in June suggested.
Superwood isn’t designed to compete with these products, says Mr Lau. But it could provide a more aesthetically pleasing, and structurally sound, finishing layer to them, for example. Or, it could function as a durable external cladding.
It’s a “promising” technology, says Morwenna Spear, research fellow at Bangor University’s BioComposites Centre.
Though she points out that, in environments such as the UK, wood that is used externally on buildings must cope with weather that cycles from wet to dry extremely frequently. “I’d want to see some data coming from them about that,” she says.
Getty ImagesOther companies are working on different engineered wood products.
Pollmeier in Germany, for example, has BauBuche – a laminated veneer lumber, very thin layers of wood pressed and glued together – made using beech. That’s interesting because beech is not generally considered the first choice for construction.
“By processing it into veneers, Pollmeier found a way to use it much more structurally,” explains Michael Ramage, director of the Centre for Natural Material Innovation at the University of Cambridge.
There’s also 3RT in Australia, which uses thin veneer sheets of low-value trees or “pulp logs”.
It allows them to mimic the structure and density of much more valuable hardwood. The product has recently been used in large window frames and also to make kitchen cabinets, furniture and the treads of internal staircases.
With so many wood products emerging, Dr Spear says that architects and designers today have much more choice in terms of how they use wood in a building.
“It may be that we think of these new products almost as pseudo-species,” she says. “It just increases that palette of options to people.”
Getty ImagesThere are still barriers to wood in construction, though, says Prof Ramage: “Is the mortgage the same rate as a mortgage on a concrete building? Is the insurance the same price?”
He advocates for the wider adoption of wood products chiefly because of their ability to store carbon over many years, though he notes that there are some jobs wood can’t do. “We’re always going to need concrete in the ground for foundations,” he says.
Mr Lau points out that, after the devastating wildfires that hit Los Angeles in January, some people have questioned the wisdom of using wood as a building material. But he insists that Superwood has proved fire-resistant in tests.
Separately, the wood has also survived exposure to wood-eating insects, adds Mr Lau. While it is tougher to work with than natural timber, it can still be sawn in a traditional manner with carbide or diamond-tipped blades.
We shouldn’t forget the importance of recycling old timber amidst the rise of highly engineered wood products, though, says Dr Spear. Researchers in the UK have shown that waste wood from demolished buildings can be repurposed in CLT-style panels.
Plus, you probably already have a significant number of recycled wood products in your own home, demonstrating that novel ways of using wood really have become quite mainstream these days. “So much of our furniture is made… of particle board – a huge proportion of that comes from recycled timber,” says Dr Spear.
£2.7 million government fund for regulation reforms
Speaking at Mansion House yesterday, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced a £2.7m fund for AI regulation reforms, aiming to speed up innovation while ensuring oversight and boosting the UK’s tech competitiveness.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has unveiled a package of measures aimed at reshaping the UK’s approach to AI regulation.
Kyle has been vocal about AI policy in recent months, previously urging UK workers to embrace AI or risk falling behind.
Speaking at Mansion House on Wednesday, Kyle announced a £2.7 million government fund to help regulators pilot AI systems across sectors, including energy, aviation and nuclear oversight. The move forms part of a wider push to reduce regulatory burdens and position Britain as a global centre for AI investment.
“We want you to keep investing here, keep building here, list here, scale here. If you invest in Britain, you’ll share in that competitive edge,” Kyle said.
Support for regulators and new AI industry standards
The funding will back initiatives such as Ofgem’s development of AI tools to speed up clean energy approvals, the Civil Aviation Authority’s use of AI to analyse air accident reports, and projects to improve nuclear waste management. Kyle says the aim is to fast-track approvals, cut delays, and support safe adoption of new technologies.
Alongside the regulator fund, the government confirmed plans for what it calls a “dedicated AI assurance profession”, supported by an £11 million innovation fund. The assurance roadmap sets out the creation of professional standards, ethical codes, and certification schemes to oversee AI deployment.
Stuart Harvey, chief executive of Datactics, welcomed the government’s direction on AI innovation, saying: “Peter Kyle’s call for AI reform is a welcome step towards making AI regulation more responsive to business needs. Too often, innovation is slowed not by lack of ambition, but by unclear governance and fragmented oversight. Creating space for innovation through AI-specific regulatory sandboxes and improving access to technical infrastructure would be a meaningful shift…”
Balancing growth with oversight
This latest pledge is tied to record levels of private AI investment in the UK, with £2.9 billion channelled into the sector last year.
It comes amid ongoing debates over the government’s AI policy direction, including recent changes to the AI Safety Institute.
Amid AI safety concerns, the Labour government has been exploring various ways to boost UK AI adoption, including discussions of a national ChatGPT subscription deal.
Senior vice president international at Absolute Security, Andy Ward, urged the government to tread with caution. “AI offers huge promise to improve detection, speed up response times, and strengthen defences, but without robust strategies for cyber resilience and real-time visibility, organisations risk sleepwalking into deeper vulnerabilities,” he noted.
Shawn Shen is the 28-year-old cofounder and CEO of Memories.ai, a startup that builds AI to see and understand visual data. He got a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge before joining Meta as a research scientist. Late last year, Shen left Meta to launch his startup, raising an $8 million seed round this summer backed by Samsung and others.
Meta has supercharged the Silicon Valley talent wars by making staggering, nine-figure offers for some AI researchers and starting a new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs. That’s sparked tensions in its sprawling AI operations, with some Meta staff leaving.
Memories.ai announced Thursday that it’s offering up to $2 million compensation packages for researchers from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, xAI, and others. It also recently hired Chi-Hao Wu, a former Meta research scientist, as its chief AI officer.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Shen. It has been edited for length and clarity. Meta and Microsoft declined to comment. Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Why I’m offering AI researchers $2 million
It’s because of the talent war that was started by Mark Zuckerberg. I used to work at Meta, and I speak with my former colleagues often about this. When I heard about their compensation packages, I was shocked — it’s really in the tens of millions range. But it shows that in this age, AI researchers who make the best models and stand at the frontier of technology are really worth this amount of money.
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We’re building an AI model that can see and remember just like humans. The things that we are working on are very niche. So we are looking for people who are really, really good at the whole field of understanding video data.
We’re not worried about running out of money
We are welcoming people who want to take more equity compared to cash, which means that it won’t shrink our runway by a huge amount. The exact cash-versus-equity split will depend on the person we hire. We will treat these hires as founding members, not as employees. Anyways, equity is where you can get a hundred or even a thousand times return in the future.
We are thinking of hiring three to five people in the next 6 months, and another five to ten in the next 12 months. We plan to raise more money, too.
Spending so much on talent will help, not hurt, our fundraising
As long as we have the ability to consistently attract top AI talent, raising additional capital will not be a problem. The capital markets are eager to back companies that can do this. Just look at how much Thinking Machines Labs has raised or how much Fei-Fei Li’s startup has raised. As long as an AI company can recruit the best AI people, they can really just go through any kind of economic period.
Meta’s constant reorgs help our hiring efforts
Meta is constantly doing reorganizations. Your manager and your goals can change every few months. For some researchers, it can be really frustrating and feel like a waste of time. So yes, I think that’s a driver for people to leave Meta and join other companies, especially startups.
There’s other reasons people might leave. I think the biggest one is what Mark (Zuckerberg) has said: in an age that’s evolving so fast, the biggest risk is not taking any risks. So why not do that and potentially change the world as part of a trillion-dollar company?
We have already hired Eddy Wu, our Chief AI Officer who was my manager’s manager at Meta. He’s making a similar amount to what we’re offering the new people. He was on their generative AI team, which is now Meta Superintelligence Labs. And we are already talking to a few other people from MSL and some others from Google DeepMind.
I learned a lot of great things from Meta
I definitely learned a lot from Meta because Meta is very bottom-up. So you see a lot of innovations across different departments. Things like multimodal, visual, and super-personalized AI — everyone is so open to talking about their ideas. I met with so many talented people. I made an effort to meet three to four of them every week to talk about our hobbies and future goals.
It really shaped my future and gave me a clear road map. But in the end, the reason I left Meta is that I wanted to start a great company.
Amazon is about to enter the AI agent race in a big way, giving the tech giant another chance to make progress in the lucrative enterprise software market.
The Seattle-based company is testing new agentic, AI-powered workspace software called Quick Suite, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider.
Quick Suite empowers “every business user to make better decisions, faster, and act on them swiftly by unifying Al agents for business insights, deep research, and automation into a single experience,” according to one of the documents, marked confidential.
Several companies have been given a private preview of the new technology, and Amazon recently sent out invitations for an internal beta test.
Quick Suite positions AWS to compete more aggressively in AI with agent-driven automation. Agents are the latest frontier in generative AI, designed to take action and independently use tools to complete tasks. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Salesforce — along with a host of smaller startups — are racing to be the main providers of agentic tools.
Another crack at SaaS
This is also another chance for Amazon to make a dent in the huge market for enterprise software and applications, known as SaaS. While the company is a pioneer in cloud computing, it’s made less of a mark so far with software that runs on top of this infrastructure.
“With over 40% of business users expected to adopt Al-enhanced work environments soon, AWS is positioned to lead this shift by providing integrated solutions that help organizations — including our own — effectively deploy and scale Al agents in the workplace,” Amazon’s beta test invitation states.
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Business Insider previously reported that Amazon was working on a unified “agentic” AI workspace, internally codenamed Q Business Suite, with “Quick” floated as a potential brand name.
“We are seeing strong growth of Amazon Q Business with customers like Remitly, Nasdaq, and Smartsheet, along with partners like Zoom and Asana, adopting it to provide employees with generative AI assistance to transform how work gets done,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
“Similarly, we are seeing customers like BMW and GoDaddy embrace Amazon QuickSight in order to make data-driven decisions quickly,” the spokesperson added. “We’re building on this strong response with even more innovation to help customers realize the benefits of agentic AI in the workplace.”
Merging existing AWS products
Quick Suite will merge some of AWS’s existing products, such as its data analysis platform QuickSight and its AI chatbot Q Business, while also adding a new product called Quick Flows, according to another of the documents.
Quick Flows provides pre-built workflows that let customers automate tasks through natural language prompts, one of the documents explained.
Quick Suite will include a “deep research agent” to generate reports from company and external data, and will also enable customers to create custom agents for “specific business functions or team needs,” which can then be shared across their organization, one of the documents said.
Beta testers and early feedback
Amazon is inviting a “select group of beta testers” for Quick Suite and has already offered a “private preview” to at least 50 companies, the documents said.
It’s unclear when Amazon plans to officially launch Quick Suite. The tentative launch date has already been delayed from mid-July to September, one of the documents said.
Quick Suite has received mixed feedback from beta users, according to one of the internal documents.
Customers praised its simpler setup and more intuitive design compared to Q Business, as well as its “compelling” deep research feature for both internal and external use. The ability to connect with external tools, such as Atlassian’s Jira, has also been well received.
At the same time, some testers reported frustrations with networking limitations in virtual cloud environments and onerous permission requirements for linking data sources. Early users include BMW, Intuit, and Koch Industries, the document said.
Quick Suite’s launch represents a turning point in AWS’s AI application strategy. Q Business had been intended as the company’s flagship offering for business users, but AWS is now making Quick Suite a priority, as BI previously reported.
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