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  • CAREER FEATURE

Scooped by a cupcake business: why we called our green-cement company Sublime Systems

Chief executive and co-founder Leah Ellis browsed a rhyming dictionary before adapting a word that leapt out after discovering her first choice was already taken.
By
  1. Jacqui Thornton

    1. Jacqui Thornton is a freelance writer based in Winchester, UK.

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For about 18 months, I was doing my postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, working on what was to become Sublime Systems. At that point, my co-founder, Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials scientist at MIT, engineer and serial entrepreneur, recognized it was the right time to spin it off from the university as a start-up company. At that stage, it needed a name.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02670-z

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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