ABOUT CORN NEXT
Why corn?
The question was never how to make a better plastic. It was why non-durable goods have to be plastic at all.
THE STORY
The ocean
Randy Zhang races sailboats. Offshore, far from the nearest coast, the water can appear empty.
It is not. On trip after trip he encounters plastic debris in open water and sees the impact of persistent waste in marine environments.
What stays with him is the mismatch between use and persistence: a product may be used briefly, but the material can remain in the environment far longer.
The wrong question
The obvious response is a better plastic. He asked something else: what if everyday things never had to be plastic in the first place?
He had no background in materials. He started with corn starch because it is natural, abundant and renewable. Several continents already grow it at industrial scale.
The hard part
Shaping starch into non-durable goods was never the problem. This was:
Can you change corn starch's natural structure enough to make it strong, stable and able to run at industrial scale, without turning it into a plastic and without blending it with one?
Every previous attempt had answered by making a bioplastic. That was the answer he refused.
The professor
Prof. Gang Chen had spent his career on enzymatic fermentation. He had found a way to make corn starch, water and natural enzymes hold together, without turning the starch into a plastic, which is where every previous attempt had ended.
He became Corn Next's co-founder and Chief Science & Technology Officer.
8
YEARS
Eight years of work turned that into CornNext-17.
The Founders
Randy Zhang
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
He built and scaled businesses before this one, none of them in materials. That is the reason he kept asking a question the field had stopped asking.
Prof. Gang Chen
Co-founder & Chief Science & Technology Officer
Doctorate in Food Science and Nutritional Engineering, China Agricultural University. Enzymatic fermentation and natural material engineering. CornNext-17's underlying chemistry is his.
Advisors
Cynthia Thyfault
ESG reporting, USDA feasibility studies and green financing. Decades in renewable energy and the bioeconomy.
Yang Zhong
Mechanical and electrical engineering, MIT. Ten-plus published papers in journals including Science Advances and Nature Communications. Advises on intellectual property and materials development.
Michael Bennett, CFO
Twenty-five years building the financial and governance structure that lets an emerging company raise institutional money, across North America, Europe, and Asia. He has been CFO and board member to companies making exactly that transition. He joined at the point where the question stops being whether the material works and starts being whether the company is built to be funded.