Cashmere’s warmth and softness has long been synonymous with luxury. But as price tags have fallen in recent years thanks to surging demand and more high street availability, concerns over fibre quality and the environmental impact of cashmere production have risen.
Cashmere production is incredibly resource intensive: overgrazing from cashmere goats causes land degradation and desertification, washing and preparing cashmere fibres uses vast quantities of water and chemicals that can pollute waterways, and large herds of cashmere goats are required to yield enough fibres to meet demand. An estimated 70 per cent of grassland in Mongolia, where the majority of the world’s cashmere is sourced, is already degraded.
Today, US textile technology startup Everbloom is launching its material technology — a so-called “noble fibre”, the name given to the highest quality natural fibres like pure wool, cashmere and silk — that bypasses the need for fresh yields. But can it stand up to real cashmere?
After spending the last seven years developing the science behind the yet-to-be-named noble fibres, it’s just raised a $10 million seed round from Hoxton Ventures, SOSV, Tuesday Capital, Endgame Capital and Clocktower Ventures to commercial brands. Where sustainable cashmere initiatives normally focus on post-consumer waste like upcycling, Everbloom is working with the textile mills’ pre-consumer cashmere waste and mimicking the production process of synthetic materials but with organic fibres.
“With organic proteins, you had to rely on biology and a certain yield of goats a year,” says co-founder and CEO Simardev Gulati. “But now our scientists have worked out how to play the same games as with synthetics and manipulate cashmere artificially. You can now have the best cashmere fibre you could previously get just twice a year from Mongolia, constantly and at scale.”
By creating a cashmere fibre produced in the US, Everbloom could effectively alleviate pressure on cashmere herders and the environments they work in. A waste-based material would then free up natural cashmere resources to true luxury brands, preserving the fibre and continuing support for herding communities while putting another, less intensive option on the market to help meet demand.
But it’s a tall task. For all their efforts to revolutionise textile production, biomaterial startups often struggle to integrate their tech within fashion’s long-established, complex supply chains. Gulati says Everbloom is already working with half a dozen heritage mills across Italy, including Prada and Zegna Group-owned Filati Biagioli Modesto, and aims to have at least a dozen on board by the end of 2026. The startup also says it’s speaking to several luxury brands about developing exclusive cashmere fibres, launching in the coming months.
How Everbloom’s technology works
Most materials startups focus on post-consumer waste, which accounts for the biggest share of textile waste at around 50 per cent, but Everbloom is using pre-consumer waste from factories and mills to produce its material. These include factory offcuts, scraps, excess yarns and production errors and rejects, which are often discarded despite their high quality.
“This reflects failures and inefficiencies in production, with an estimated 10–20 per cent of fabric lost at the cutting stage alone,” says Donna Marshall, professor of supply chain management at University of College Dublin’s College of Business.
“But unlike post-consumer waste, these materials are ‘clean’ and easier to reuse,” she adds.
The US-based startup is initially targeting mostly European mills, who are incentivised to give Everbloom their pre-consumer protein waste as they’re subject to a European law that prevents them from burning and disposing of it.
Everbloom then purifies these proteins to get them into the right form by “adding various cross-links”, Gulati says, before marrying the proteins with a new method of industrial fibre manufacturing, which mirrors that of synthetic fibre production.
“We’ve figured out a way to process organic proteins through melt extrusion and melt spinning, which were previously only possible in polyester or nylon production,” Gulati explains.
It’s taken Everbloom’s team of 11 scientists seven years to develop the process, which yields the patented material that the startup is yet to name.
“We’ve developed something that’s not a protein fibre, nor a biomaterial — it’s a unique compound like something that’s never existed, so will fall under a different umbrella,” Gulati says.
Consumers are willing to pay more for noble fibres like cashmere and wool because of their luxurious feel and natural composition, so proposing a partly manufactured alternative to brands will be a hard sell. Existing startups selling cashmere and wool alternatives have so far focused on material recycling (post-consumer), and have struggled to meet the luxury market’s standards, owing to the often inferior quality of the recycled fabric. Gaining the world-renowned Italian cashmere industry’s trust is no easy feat, but Gulati is confident that they’ll be won over by the quality of Everbloom’s material, which he says rivals that of virgin Mongolian cashmere.
“I’d say the proof is in the pudding. We knew it has to feel really good,” he says. “Humans are visceral, emotional creatures. When we feel a fibre, it doesn’t matter what it’s made of, it’s like, how does it feel? How does it make me feel?
“When it comes to material innovation, oftentimes innovators have been forgetting this visceral component of fabrics,” he adds.
Lower prices and no new machines
Everbloom is entering the market at a time when the next-generation materials industry is at something of an impasse. A slew of startups such as Evrnu, Infinited Fibre Company, Ecovative and Renewcell have created promising alternatives for conventional materials, from cotton to viscose to leather, but have faced challenges when trying to scale. Often, these startups struggle to scale beyond pilots with mills and factories, or early sample drops that are then abandoned.
This is largely down to a mismatch between the pace of adoption that startups require to scale their business with the industry’s reluctance or inability to act fast on its adoption of their materials. Brands’ manufacturers require high volumes of materials and operate on razor-thin margins, which leaves factories with little incentive to spend time and money retooling machines, retraining staff and accepting yield losses. But Gulati says Everbloom’s material requires zero machinery changes (and thus no extra worker training) — they can use it exactly as they would wool or cashmere, and can skip their normal cleaning step as Everbloom purifies the fibres as part of its own process. He’s also bullish that Everbloom can meet the order demand required by these mills.
“I come from the textile industry — my family had factories in India — so I understood when developing the material that the most important thing is scalability and implementation,” Gulati says. “Capsule collections aren’t enough — they’re not going to make an impact. We have to be in the core collections for brands, so that requires huge scale and the ability to supply that.”
Also, on a macro level, the luxury brands that Everbloom is selling to are facing tariff threats and waning consumer sentiment on the one hand, and the risks of reduction in supply on the other. The goats and sheep that the cashmere and wool industry relies on are producing less material, which is constricting the industry at a time it’s looking to expand. Put simply, brands have no incentive to pay more for next-gen materials right now, but Gulati says Everbloom is offering mills a more attractive price point.
“Our goal is to be more competitive from a price perspective than merino wool and cashmere — I’m a realist and know that people just aren’t going to pay for sustainability,” Gulati says. “That’s part of why it’s taken so long for us to develop the fibre. We have to be cost competitive and cheaper than incumbent suppliers. I think that’s what it requires for sustainability to be adopted at scale.”
Launching commercially
Next-gen materials startups are capital-intensive investments, thanks to the machinery they require to manufacture the material they’re selling. This, coupled with the challenge of gaining enough manufacturing customers, often makes venture investors nervous to back startups in the sector — instead, they prefer to back less resource-intensive sustainability software plays.
Gulati says Everbloom will use its fresh $10 million round to make some “strategic senior hires”, and launch its material commercially with brands, following on from its pilot process with Filati Biagioli Modesto, alongside five other heritage Italian mills. Its goal is to work with a dozen mills in Italy and across “strategic parts of Europe” by the end of 2026, Gulati adds.
Retaining the business of these brands and mills will be the core challenge for Everbloom — high-profile failures like Renewcell’s bankruptcy last year have shone a light on just how precarious such business models are when reliant on a risk-averse industry. Fellow materials startup Evrnu even decided to bypass brands and launch a direct-to-consumer recycled textiles clothing brand last year.
Heritage brands may also fear that using Everbloom’s alternative material could risk downgrading how their cashmere is perceived by consumers. But this could also present a brand narrative opportunity, says Marshall.
“The real challenge is balancing material performance with sustainability and communicating that story to customers in a really positive way,” she says. “As the luxury industry is built on storytelling, it has a unique opportunity to champion methods and materials that genuinely do good and to lead the way for others.”
Everbloom is targeting one of the most traditional industries possible; Italy’s heritage cashmere mills have been in business for around 150 years. Gulati acknowledges that some mills have been “slower to change than others”, but says the company has factored that in.
“It’s what comes with working in the heritage industry,” he says. “But our USP is that we’re not asking them to change how they’ve been doing things for 150 years, we are simply optimising it a little bit for them.”
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