![]() Then, a few years ago, Prairie, which has 25 plants in the midwest, connected with Concrete.ai and started testing the tool. “As they are becoming more aware of their carbon footprint, they are putting more pressure on us to solve that.”Īt first, Rapp said, the company was doing its own R&D and looking for alternative products. “Over the past four or five years, we’ve seen the market become more aware of the carbon footprint of these buildings,” he said. Hall said that he was “100% shocked” by those results.Ĭhris Rapp, vice president and general manager at VCNA Prairie Materials, a subsidiary of Brazilian cement giant Votorantim Cimentos with operations in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, started working with Concrete.ai for its early field tests. The company said that it had saved an average of $5.04 per cubic yard, while achieving an average carbon reduction of 30%, by optimizing mixes to decrease the amount of cement needed. It has optimized the mixes used in more than 2 million cubic yards of concrete-enough to fill 681 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The company has raised a total of $3 million, and is looking to raise an additional $2 million to expand its research and development.įor the past three years, Concrete.ai has been testing its models in conjunction with concrete producers across the United States. In 2021, Bauchy (who also serves as the company’s chief technology officer) and Sant spun out that research into Concrete.ai. “We have been working for more than 10 years on trying to understand how to use AI and machine learning to reinvent old traditional materials like concrete,” he said. Meanwhile, Mathieu Bauchy, a 38-year-old computational materials scientist who is an associate professor at UCLA, was working on the model that underpins Concrete.ai. In 2017, while working at Suffolk Construction, Hall, 52, became an advisory board member to CarbonBuilt, a separate UCLA spinout that embeds CO2 emissions into ultra-low carbon concrete. “I thought, ‘This is the future, I’ve got to get involved with these guys,’” he said. In 2016, Hall, a longtime executive at Holcim, the Swiss building materials giant, saw an article with a photo of UCLA’s Pritzker Professor of Sustainability Gaurav Sant holding up a vial of concrete and talking about how to turn CO2 into sustainable concrete. Hall said that the company’s technology could also be used to help validate so-called “green cement” (a term for low-carbon alternatives, such as those being created by Prometheus and Brimstone) and other new materials. New regulations at both the federal and state level, including rules on government buying in the Inflation Reduction Act and a recently enacted “Buy Clean Concrete” program in New York state, are also nudging developers to look at lowering their carbon footprints.Ĭoncrete.ai’s researchers are also looking at other complex materials that could benefit from its AI-driven formulations to lower cost and reduce environmental harm. Terra LUNA CO2, backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has a different low-carbon alternative to cement, while Brimstone Energy, with funding from venture firm DCVC, is working to commercialize carbon-negative cement. University of Colorado spinout Prometheus Materials developed a process to turn algae into cement using a process that’s similar to how coral and seashells naturally form. Mathieu Bauchy, UCLA associate professor and Concrete.ai cofounderįixing the problem of cement and concrete has attracted increasing attention from entrepreneurs and investors. ![]() “We have been working for more than 10 years on trying to understand how to use AI and machine learning to reinvent old traditional materials like concrete.” ![]() Hall said that Concrete.ai’s ultimate hope is to reduce the annual global carbon footprint by some 500 million tons by optimizing concrete mixes. He expects revenue to reach $1.5 million in 2024, up from just $250,000 last year. Each customer represents multiple concrete plants, and Hall said he expected to be in 80 plants by year-end. To date, the early-stage startup has lined up three commercial customers, and expects to sign on a fourth soon. The startup plans to announce today at the World of Concrete event in Las Vegas that its technology, which it calls Concrete Copilot, is now available for commercial use.
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