Oct 6, 2021 · 3 min read
CarbonBuilt Closes $10 Million Series A Financing
CZI Participates in Series A Funding with a Strategic Program Investment to Accelerate Commercialization of CarbonBuilt’s Low-carbon Concrete Technology
CarbonBuilt has raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by Grantham Environmental Trust’s Neglected Climate Opportunities, with participation from Tony Pritzker, Lime Street Ventures, Climate Capital, YouWeb IV: Impact, Foundamental and others. This injection of capital will be used to expand the CarbonBuilt team, further enhance its ReversaTM technology, and develop its first commercial projects.
“We are honored to have such stellar investors standing behind the company,” said Rahul Shendure, CEO of CarbonBuilt. “They share our conviction that carbon dioxide utilization has a critical near-term role to play in humanity’s path towards a zero carbon future. Enabled by CarbonBuilt’s technology, the concrete products industry is uniquely positioned to deliver on this promise.”
Based on a capital-light technology that recently won the prestigious NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, CarbonBuilt’s Reversa platform offers a practical pathway to large-scale impact. Reversa uses dilute carbon dioxide streams from hard-to-decarbonize industrial sources or direct air capture systems to efficiently and cost-effectively cure precast concrete. CarbonBuilt’s initial focus is the concrete masonry market, with product development to support its application to a wide array of precast concrete products well underway.
“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing carbon dioxide are the two greatest challenges we face. We see CarbonBuilt taking on both challenges, simultaneously, by helping to move a concrete industry that currently contributes about 8 percent of global emissions to become an industry that can pay for carbon dioxide utilization, while saving producers money,” said Kevin Tidwell at Grantham Environmental Trust.
CarbonBuilt’s Reversa platform includes innovations to concrete’s mixture design and its curing process. Reversa formulations significantly reduce consumption of Portland cement while enabling the increased use of widely-available low-cost and low-carbon materials, all without compromise to product performance. During the curing process, carbon dioxide is permanently sequestered via its transformation into calcium carbonate. Together, these changes result in a 10 to 30 percent reduction in raw material costs and a 60 to 90 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
A single concrete block produced using the Reversa platform is able to permanently store about 3/4 pound of carbon dioxide. Combined with CarbonBuilt’s best-in-class economics and scalability, Reversa accelerates humanity’s path towards gigatonne-scale carbon removal and even larger emissions reductions.
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About the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of our local communities. Our mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone. For more information, please visit chanzuckerberg.com.
About CarbonBuilt
CarbonBuilt’s ReversaTM process, winner of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, directly embeds CO2 from industrial and direct air capture sources into proprietary low-cost and low-carbon concrete formulations. This reduces overall CO2 emissions by more than 60 percent while delivering products that meet existing industry specifications and yield significantly greater margins for concrete producers. More information is available at www.carbonbuilt.com.
