ÂÌñÏ×ÆÞ

Yannick Willemin, founder of Catalysium. Source | CW

In this latest installment of CW Talks, we discuss the business of composites with Yannick Willemin, founder of Catalysium. The new consultancy specializes in investment trends within composites and advanced material manufacturing. 

As part of its mission, Catalysium has worked with JEC Group (Paris, France) to coordinate an Investor Day event at JEC World 2025 in Paris. The event offers an opportunity for investors to explore new innovations and network with the composites and advanced materials industry. (Learn more and register for Investor Day .)

Featured Content

Biomaterials make strides toward composites sustainability READ MORE

Composites end markets: Sports and recreation (2025) READ MORE

Development of a composite liquid hydrogen tank for commercial aircraft READ MORE

Willemin discusses the upcoming event, trends in the industry and more in the latest episode of our CW Talks podcast — stream here or read an excerpt from the interview below.

ÂÌñÏ×ÆÞ (CW): Talk a bit about Catalysium’s mission.

Yannick Willemin (YW): Sure. It [Catalysium] is the result of 20 years in the field. I have developed a lot of networks, especially in the last 6 years, doing a lot of business development topics at the association level. I also have done a lot to just promote startups and composites in general, because I think composites is still a niche market.

Even after 20 years, you might feel like, “Oh, it’s [the composites industry] is an entire world,” but it’s still a very tiny piece of the materials we use and still holds many challenges. The space between startups and investors is also quite challenging. I would consider a startup an innovation vehicle, one of many. And before a startup can really be used and considered at scale and at a corporate level, it needs a bridge — which is obviously a knowledge bridge, but also a financial bridge.

Investors have their role to play here. However, there are many different investors, and I think there is a lack of knowledge sometimes on both sides — on the investor side because of the technical nature of composites and the very niche market, and on the startup side in determining who is really the right partner (or partners) to spend some time over the course of the company’s beginning years to scale the company. It’s really exciting to be at that intersection.

CW: Can you talk a bit about some of what you’re doing to connect startups and investors?

YW: It’s about doing pre- and post-acquisition support. It starts with scouting and being aware of some trends. [It also starts with] educating a few very technical investors to bring them into the composites space, better understanding their thesis, their missions and how composites — or some cluster in composites — would fit into their investment portfolio.

CW: You mentioned watching the trends in the composites industry — what sorts of challenges and opportunities do you feel like the industry is facing right now?

YW: Right now, if you look on a macro level, of course you have a big challenge on global versus regional topics. I mean, we are always speaking about tariffs these days, so that has a massive implication. If you take strategic topics, it’s also about [determining] how much control you really have over the entire supply chain. And that comes back to high-performance materials. So it has also an impact, obviously, on this regional versus global, I would say, for production of some materials or some parts.

Then there’s the energy topic, which is certainly key in composites, because we know energy is super relevant. This is most obvious at the production phase of the material, but we can also gain a lot of understanding of energy in terms of lightweighting mobility applications.

There’s also the total life cycle assessment. And I think now, coming back to the recycling topic, we are asking ourselves how we build a secondary material stream. For now, the primary material stream is established and is certainly going to move a bit because of these regional topics. But then we must address how we can achieve these secondary material streams. They exist for other materials, but composites have been somewhat of an exception being very, very special, especially if we speak about continuous fiber composites, because then it’s kind of counter intuitive. If you have waste, you cannot remake the fibers continuous again.

There may be physical limits to the game of primary versus secondary, but there are certainly a lot of resources going into this topic, and I think, in such a young industry — because the material remains a young material compared to others around it — it is super interesting.

Composites in general is certainly an innovative field. So maybe even putting responsibility on the investors is necessary — to make it not just a financial game, but to really consider other KPIs and make it a game where the ecosystem is winning.