Matium's story starts in 2018, with Bailey Robin, co-founder and CEO, graduating from University of Michigan Engineering and leaving his home state of Michigan to take a job selling recycled plastics for Bach Polymers, a plastics brokerage in Annapolis, MD. Armed with a Plastics News magazine, a laptop, a phone, and some good advice, he got to work. The job was fairly simple: call people and ask them what plastics they have and what plastics they need. After 2 years on the job, Bailey built a 10 MMLBS/month book of plastics trading. Trading plastics progressed from a job, to a career, to a life. At this point, Bailey would decide to either work the rest of his life capturing value for himself, or dedicate the rest of his life to creating value for others. For an engineer, the choice was simple.

In late 2020, Bailey approached his first cousin and co-founder Alex Lambrides, who was building content management systems for Fortune 500 companies at the time. Bailey shared his vision of revolutionizing the way materials move, and how digitizing process was the necessary first step in defining and accomplishing sustainability goals. Bailey believed that plastics was, and is, a black box problem. He had processed thousands of transactions by this point and knew from the lack of data had the industry and its regulators operating blind. The cofounders process mapped the entire industry on the floor of Alex's Arlington, VA apartment. At one end, there was an initial concept of material supply which had specifications. On the other end was a final concept of demand which had parameters. The space between was their problem to solve. It was this moment on the floor with pencils and white paper from CVS that Alex and Bailey would found Matium, the material medium.

On April 21, 2021, Matium was incorporated and Alex left his engineering job to take the full time risk on his cousin’s crazy idea. The company was bootstrapped by the founders to prove concept. Matium initially set out to build a simple matchmaking system, “Tinder for materials” was the tagline. After building the matchmaker and testing it with a couple early supporters of Matium, the cofounders believed that the product would need to encompass the entire process of buying and selling materials in order to achieve their mission of digitizing and optimizing the material supply chains. Matium raised its first outside funding round on a convertible note as 2023 began to build this MVP. This product launched to a pilot group of customers in summer of 2023. After a successful restricted launch, the company raised a $1.8M Pre-Seed Round in late October 2023. In November of 2023, Bailey transitioned his $50M/YR book of plastics trading back to Bach Polymers to commit all of his time and efforts to solving sustainability as Matium’s CEO.

Matium launched its first version of the Network in late January. The company has a tiered release cycle that will run throughout 2024 to add further network functionality for its users. In the first 50 days of the Network release, over 170 customers created their profiles on the industrial internet of the future. We welcome all, and are grateful for the opportunity to build products for an industry that delivers so much to all of us.