Midwest Composites

Advanced composites and biocomposites — consulting, design, prototyping, and manufacturing for aerospace, automotive, mass transit, and defense.

The composite materials in the car you drive, the drone overhead, and the bus you take to work are almost certainly made from synthetic fibres — fibreglass or carbon fibre — that will spend the next century in a landfill. They cannot be meaningfully recycled. The same performance properties that make them useful make them essentially permanent waste. Midwest Composites is building the manufacturing infrastructure to change that, using agricultural fibres that are abundant, renewable, and largely overlooked by the Western manufacturers who dominate the field.

The composite materials problem no one talks about at scale

Advanced composite materials — fibreglass, carbon fibre, and their variants — have transformed the weight and performance profiles of vehicles, aircraft, and infrastructure over the past half-century. The global composites market was valued at USD 88 billion in 2021 and continues to grow at roughly 7.5% annually, driven by automotive electrification, aerospace expansion, and the construction sector's ongoing shift toward lighter, more durable materials. These are structural tailwinds that will not reverse.

The sustainability problem, however, is serious and underappreciated. Composite materials are notoriously difficult to recycle — the bonding between the fibre reinforcement and the resin matrix that gives composites their structural properties also makes them essentially impossible to separate and reprocess at end of life. The result is that composite components from scrapped aircraft, end-of-life vehicles, and decommissioned wind turbines are almost universally landfilled. European regulations are beginning to respond: the EU's end-of-life vehicle directive now requires 95% of vehicle materials to be reusable or recoverable by weight — a standard that conventional composites fail comprehensively. Biocomposites, made from natural fibres and ideally bio-based resins, offer a pathway to composite performance without that terminal waste problem.

The Asian fibre advantage: an overlooked feedstock opportunity

The global biocomposites industry has been developed primarily by European and North American researchers using locally available natural fibres — predominantly flax in Europe and hemp in North America. These materials have genuine performance credentials, but they come with supply chain constraints and, in the case of hemp, regulatory complexity that limits their global scalability. The broader biocomposites conversation has been largely conducted as if those materials were the only options.

Sethu Raaj's specific insight — developed through his postgraduate research in the US and then validated back in Malaysia — is that Asia's agricultural landscape offers an alternative feedstock base that is more abundant, more diverse, and largely untapped. Kenaf grows to 5.5 metres in three months, absorbs CO₂ at significantly higher rates than woody trees, requires minimal water and pesticides, and produces fibre with strong mechanical properties. Palm oil empty fruit bunches — agricultural waste generated in enormous quantities by Malaysia's existing palm oil industry — can be converted into composite reinforcement material, turning a disposal problem into a value-added feedstock. Pineapple leaves, banana fibre, bamboo, and jute round out a materials palette that is native to Southeast Asian agriculture.

This is the core strategic thesis: Malaysia is not just a market for biocomposites. With the right manufacturing infrastructure and R&D capability, it is a natural production hub for the APAC biocomposites supply chain — sitting on top of abundant, renewable feedstocks that Western manufacturers would have to import.

The product: from concept to manufactured component across multiple industries

Midwest Composites operates as a full-service composites partner — consulting on material selection and process design, developing tooling and prototypes, and manufacturing finished components. This end-to-end capability is strategically important in a market where customers are often making their first move into composites and need guidance across the full development cycle, not just a material supplier or just a manufacturer. The team has built competency in multiple fabrication processes: vacuum-assisted resin transfer moulding, light RTM, compression moulding, and open moulding — giving them the flexibility to match process to application rather than forcing clients into a single manufacturing approach.

The project portfolio demonstrates both the technical breadth and the commercial validation of the approach. A 2.4-metre UAV fuselage fabricated from kenaf and palm oil composites — claimed to be the first of its kind in Southeast Asia — demonstrated that natural fibre composites can meet aerospace-grade structural requirements. A Formula 4 racecar front spoiler in carbon fibre, bus bodywork in fibreglass, agricultural drone components in kenaf, and an AI-powered smart shopping cart basket made from kenaf composites illustrate the range of applications the team has successfully navigated. Most significantly, a collaboration with a local bus manufacturer on electric bus components — where composite bodywork can reduce vehicle weight by up to 40%, translating to a 28% fuel saving — points toward the highest-value near-term market.

The founder: a composites engineer who came home to build the infrastructure Asia is missing

Sethu Raaj Munusamy's path to Midwest Composites is deliberate and specific. His interest in composites began in high school; he pursued it through undergraduate and master's degrees in the United States, with a focus that explicitly included bio-based composites. After gaining industry experience at Wausaukee Composites — a significant US composites manufacturer — and working with other mobility sector players in North America, he returned to Malaysia with a clear mission: to build the composites manufacturing capability that Southeast Asia's automotive, aerospace, and mass transit industries would need, and to position natural fibre biocomposites as the sustainable materials of choice for the region.

That combination of academic depth, US industry experience, and deliberate return to Malaysia is exactly the founder profile this kind of venture requires. Building a biocomposites manufacturing business requires materials science expertise that takes years to accumulate, relationships with the customer industries that take equal time to build, and a geographic conviction about why Malaysia specifically is the right place to locate the venture. Sethu has all three.

The external validation has been consistent and impressive. The Startup World Cup 2024 Regional Winner title — representing Malaysia in the global finals in San Francisco — was won competing against technology companies, reflecting the quality of the commercial and impact narrative Sethu has built. Participation in Petronas FutureTech 3.0, Hyundai Cradle, the Selangor Accelerator Programme, and the ERIA OneAsean Startup Award reflect a company that has been evaluated and endorsed across commercial, governmental, and international dimensions simultaneously.

Why now, and why Malaysia

The timing for biocomposites is defined by two converging forces. The first is regulatory: European end-of-life vehicle requirements, ESG reporting obligations for multinationals, and the emerging regulatory discourse around single-use synthetic materials are all creating pull demand for alternatives to conventional composites. This is not yet a Southeast Asian regulatory story, but the multinational automotive and aerospace manufacturers operating in Malaysia are subject to their home-market regulations and will increasingly need their supply chains to reflect those requirements.

The second is the electric vehicle transition. The single most important lever for extending EV range is reducing vehicle weight — and composites are the most efficient weight reduction technology available for structural and body components. As Malaysia's EV ambitions develop and regional automotive manufacturers face pressure to improve efficiency, the demand for lightweight composite components will accelerate. Midwest Composites is already ahead of this curve, having delivered components for electric bus development and Formula racing applications where weight performance is a primary specification requirement.

Malaysia's position in this market is structural, not incidental. It is the world's second-largest palm oil producer, a major kenaf-growing nation, and has the agricultural infrastructure to scale pineapple and banana fibre production. The feedstocks for a world-class biocomposites industry already exist in the country; what has been missing is the technical capability and manufacturing infrastructure to convert them into performance-grade composite materials. That is precisely what Midwest Composites is building.

What would have to be true for this not to work

The honest challenges are real and specific to this category. Biocomposite adoption faces an education barrier: the industries that would benefit most — automotive OEMs, mass transit manufacturers, aerospace tier-2 suppliers — have qualified their existing material supply chains through lengthy certification processes and are conservative about substituting materials, even for technically equivalent alternatives. As Sethu has noted directly, the work of convincing customers to switch from familiar synthetic composites to natural fibre alternatives is slow and financially intensive. The company's strategy of leading with demonstrable projects — physically proving performance credentials through real applications — is the right response, but it requires patience and capital to execute.

The cost structure of biocomposites also remains challenging at current volumes. Natural fibre materials and bio-based resins are currently more expensive per unit than conventional fibreglass at commercial scale, which means the value proposition must be argued on total lifecycle cost (including end-of-life disposal) and regulatory compliance rather than just raw material cost. As volumes increase and the supply chain matures, that cost differential will narrow — but the early commercial phase requires customers willing to pay a sustainability premium, which limits the initial addressable market.

We invested because the long-term direction of the composites market is unambiguous — toward sustainability, toward recyclability, toward bio-based materials — and because Sethu has the specific credentials and geographic positioning to build a meaningful business in the window before that transition becomes mainstream. Early-stage investment in deep tech requires accepting longer development cycles in exchange for the potential to establish a durable position in a market that will be large. Midwest Composites represents exactly that kind of bet.