Mosaic Materials: Novel Materials for Carbon Capture
Company founded: 2015
Founders: Tom McDonald (UC Berkeley, Ph.D. 2015, Chemistry), Steven Kaye (UC Berkeley, Ph.D. 2007, Chemistry), UC Berkeley Professor Jeffrey Long
While completing his PhD at UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, Tom McDonald had planned to become a professor.1 He even had a postdoc position lined up at Imperial College London and had told his landlord that he was moving to the UK. But then, McDonald’s PhD advisor, Professor Jeffrey Long, and another student in Long’s lab, Steven Kaye, convinced him to join them as the cofounding CEO in a startup to commercialize the technology that they had been developing. That’s how the UC Berkeley spinout Mosaic Materials was born in 2015. In a 2022 interview with the research fellowship program Activate, McDonald stated, “I considered it long and hard—it was a really close decision between Mosaic and academia. I ended up saying, ‘Well if I don't do this, the technology is gonna die. So yes, I'll do it.”
When he started his graduate work at UC Berkeley, McDonald joined a research group that was part of the Center for Gas Separations—one of the US Department of Energy’s Frontier Research Centers. The research group was exploring how metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) could be used to make gas separations more energy efficient and affordable. “I had wanted to work on climate technology ever since reading Al Gore’s book when I was in eighth grade,” McDonald said. “So I said ‘sign me up.’ It was only my third day at Berkeley and I already knew I’d be working on carbon capture using MOFs and I basically did that for the next thirteen years.”
While experimenting with unusual and controversial approaches to functionalizing MOFs, the UC Berkeley researchers invented a MOF material that exhibited exceptional carbon dioxide absorption properties, including the ability to pull carbon directly out of the air. That technology was licensed by Mosaic and became the startup’s core focus. One of Mosaic’s first wins was when McDonald and Kaye were accepted into the Activate program (then called Cyclotron Road) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The paid two-year fellowship enabled McDonald and Kaye to focus full-time on R&D and building the company.
Mosaic’s carbon capture material was promising, but back around 2015 few investors were interested in funding the startup. So initially the cofounders looked to government grants for funding to derisk the technology and lower its costs. “So much of the story of Mosaic has been about help along the way by a lot of amazing government sponsors,” McDonald said. The first of those sponsors was the California Energy Commission, which funded Mosaic to investigate using its MOFs to drive down the cost of biogas production. “That funding was a critical lifeline—along with the Activate fellowship,” McDonald recalled.
The US Navy and NASA were other important government sponsors. Each took an interest in how Mosaic’s technology could improve carbon dioxide removal for life support within submarines and spacecraft, respectively. The Department of Energy (DOE) had also been a key supporter, going back to the early research at UC Berkeley and then through grants that Mosaic was awarded through the DOE’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, ARPA-E, and Advanced Manufacturing Office (which also funds Activate fellowships).
At that time, Mosaic connected with the energy technology corporation Baker Hughes. That interaction culminated in 2022, with Baker Hughes’s acquisition of Mosaic to advance next-generation carbon dioxide capture technology to overcome climate change. Baker Hughes was drawn to Mosaic because the UC Berkeley spinout’s technology requires less energy to operate, provides a low total cost of ownership, and it can be used across energy and industrial sectors, including refining, aviation, shipping, municipalities, steel, and cement manufacturing.
In 2022, Activate’s CEO Ilan Gur stated: “It’s been such a pleasure and an honor to support Mosaic over the past six years. The team’s personal focus on driving climate impact is inspiring. The cofounders were intent on proving that MOFs were more than fanciful academic chemistry but could be powerful tools for carbon capture. The Baker Hughes acquisition is a great step forward for the company and for meeting the urgent need for effective carbon removal technology.”
In 2024, Baker Hughes launched a collaborative research initiative with UC Berkeley to further develop carbon capture technologies.2 This exemplifies the virtuous cycle of how UC Berkeley’s I&E ecosystem and government-sponsored research lead to innovative technologies, startup companies, and solutions to societal problems such as climate change.
1 The source for much of this content is from “Startup to Sale: How Cohort 2015 Fellow Tom McDonald Built and Sustained Mosaic Materials,” Activate, May 10, 2022, www.activate.org/news/mosaic-materials-sold-baker-hughes-tom-mcdonald.
2 “Baker Hughes and the University of California, Berkeley, Establish Global Decarbonization Research Institute,” press release, December 12, 2024, www.bakerhughes.com/company/news/baker-hughes-and-university-california-berkeley-establish-global-decarbonization.
Published in Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups, August 2025
