Summary
Trip Allen is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Terranova, the Berkeley, California-based startup building autonomous robots that lift flood-prone land by injecting wood-waste slurry underground. A materials engineer with more than three decades of experience spanning NASA, Dow Chemical, and his own plastics-recycling company, he co-founded Terranova with his son, CEO Laurence Allen, after watching their shared hometown of San Rafael, California, flood repeatedly, and served as the company’s first CEO before moving into the chairman role in 2025.
Career
Allen holds a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering from Clemson University. He began his career as a research engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia in the late 1980s, then moved to Dow Chemical as a senior research engineer, where he built and operated a pilot plant for recovering post-consumer plastics and invented an injection-moldable wood/polyolefin composite material — early exposure to combining wood-based materials with industrial processes that would later inform Terranova’s core technology (LinkedIn).
He went on to found MBA Polymers, Inc., serving as its Chief Technical Officer and helping build the company into a world leader in recovering plastics from end-of-life appliances, automobiles, and electronics. He subsequently worked as a consulting engineer on material-recovery system design, leading a team of automakers and national laboratories to develop technology for recovering plastics from scrapped vehicles, and later spent nearly a decade as a consultant and angel investor, including work developing and selling biochar, a charcoal-like soil amendment made from organic waste (LinkedIn).
Allen has lived in San Rafael, California, for more than two decades, in a neighborhood near San Francisco Bay that floods through roughly 18 inches of standing water during heavy rains. After researching historical precedents for lifting land — including 1970s mud-injection projects in Venice, Italy — he identified waste wood, abundant from California wildfire-clearing efforts and far more volume-efficient to transport than dirt, as a more scalable injection material, reasoning that wood packed underground in wet, low-oxygen conditions would not decay (Substack — Jason Carman). Working with his son Laurence, who turned the concept into a company, Allen co-founded Terranova (originally Levitree) around 2021-2022, and served as its CEO from 2021 until moving into the Executive Chairman role in July 2025, as Laurence Allen took over day-to-day leadership (LinkedIn).
As Executive Chairman, Allen has represented Terranova publicly, including hosting California State Treasurer Fiona Ma on a tour of the company’s Berkeley facility, and has been outspoken about the institutional resistance the company has encountered from cities weighing its land-lifting technology against conventional, more expensive flood infrastructure like seawalls and levees (Inside Climate News).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Trip Allen’s LinkedIn profile, an Inside Climate News feature on Terranova’s San Rafael flood-mitigation proposal, a Substack interview with Terranova’s team describing the company’s origin and technology, and The Robot Report’s coverage of Terranova’s 2025 seed round. Some sources spell his first name “Tripp”; this profile follows the “Trip” spelling used on his LinkedIn profile and in most press coverage. His exact birth year is not confirmed in available sources and has been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.