Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

The plastic in your coffee lid, the fiber in your sweater, the blue gloves in the doctor’s office — there’s a good chance they all share one raw material: acrylonitrile.

For 75 years, every drop of it has been made from oil barrels. But Knoxville-based Trillium Chemicals found a new way to produce it.

Instead of depending on oil barrels, Trillium makes acrylonitrile from plants and is now the worldwide leader in doing so. In January, the company shipped a four-story, 60-foot-tall demonstration plant to Texas on 15 trucks, bringing its proven technology to industrial scale.

“The thing that stands out about Trillium is we actually did do this,” said Corey Tyree, founder and CEO. “We built a real plant that’s four stories tall. It’s in an industrial environment right now. So we’re not just a lab company or a research company. We have serious engineers who are making the product. We’re providing it to customers in 2026.”

Prioritizing people as the key to success

The company was founded in 2021, though Tyree has been working on the underlying technology for a decade.

“We got started in 2021, and the idea was we had a technology that we wanted to scale up and make chemicals out of it,” Tyree said.

Scaling deep-tech chemistry takes years, and Tyree is deliberate about how Trillium grows. He pushes back on the notion that bigger teams mean faster progress.

“A lot of people think about growth as hiring more people. Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s about staying focused and hiring exactly the people that you need to do the job,” he said. “This kind of technology, it takes years to scale up. You don’t need 1,000 people. You don’t need 100 people. You need the right people to do the job at hand.”

That long-game mindset extends to the people Trillium recruits.

“You need to have the people who are going to see it through year after year after year. We’ve been at this for 10 years now,” Tyree said. “It takes a special kind of person to do that.”

Globally financed, Knoxville-led

Trillium’s capital has come from investors across the globe, including Belgium and Germany to South Korea. Tyree said every dollar was raised from a Knoxville-based.

“Being in Tennessee has allowed me to attract the right people, right money, and create the right technology,” Tyree said.

The company’s progress may be worth keeping an eye on, not just for Tennessee’s innovation ecosystem, but for the global industries that quietly depend on what Trillium is making.