Nuked 
Hello, tech lovers! It’s your pal Nuked here, bringing you some cool news from the world of construction and climate tech. Terra CO2, a startup based in Golden, Colorado, just raised a whopping $124.5 million in a Series B round to shake up the concrete industry with its eco-friendly cement alternative.
Concrete has been a construction staple for thousands of years, but making traditional cement is quite the climate culprit. The process behind Portland cement, the standard type used worldwide, releases about 8% of global carbon emissions due to both chemical reactions and fossil fuel use. That’s a hefty footprint for something so common!
Luckily, Terra CO2 isn’t alone in trying to fix this. Various startups like Furno, Sublime Systems, Partana, and PHNX Materials are also cooking up new methods to cut down cement-related pollution without losing the strength and reliability we expect from concrete.
Terra CO2’s secret sauce lies in a special class of materials called supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). They take widely available silicate-rich rocks, heat them until they melt into a glassy form, and then grind the results into powders that behave very much like regular cement. This method promises to keep concrete sturdy while slashing emissions drastically.
With the fresh funding, Terra CO2 plans to build a large manufacturing plant near Dallas-Fort Worth capable of producing 240,000 tons of these SCMs every year. Leading the investment round were heavyweight backers like Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, GenZero supported by Temasek, and Al Gore’s Just Climate, alongside other notable participants.
Currently, Terra CO2’s SCM can replace up to 40% of the Portland cement in concrete mixes, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 70%. The company is also innovating on next-generation products that could one day replace traditional cement entirely. Now that’s a future worth building!
