On Monday, Fortera, a Silicon Valley-based maker of next-generation low-CO2 portland cement, announced that it has successfully closed a $30 million Series B venture capital round, co-led by Singapore’s $214 billion sovereign wealth fund Temasek and Khosla Ventures, the VC fund founded by Sun Microsystems founder, Indian-American businessman Vinod Khosla.
Founded in 2019, Fortera has developed a novel process based on carbon mineralization that converts CO2 to cement that can be used anywhere Ordinary Portland Cement is used. In a statement on the Series B round on Monday, Fortera CEO and Co-Founder, Dr. Ryan Gilliam, said the capital round would be used to accelerate the global rollout of the company’s technology and fund the early phases of product adoption.
“Our process is scalable, competitive economically with traditional cement, and offers a realistic pathway to zero CO2 emissions,” Gilliam said.
The company is in the process of building its first commercial plant in Redding, California, where it will manufacture its first-generation product, a low-CO2 supplementary cementitious material, available for sale in mid-2022.
“We have evaluated a wealth of technologies in this space. The majority offer incremental impact or are relevant in only niche markets such as precast concrete or are simply not economical.” Vinod Khosla said in announcing the round. “Fortera is able to make large reductions in carbon emissions while being competitive in cost and targeting the larger cement market. Almost none of the competitors we have seen in this space are able to achieve this trajectory.”
According to Fortera’s Gilliam, the current process for making construction materials requires the chemical release of CO2 as part of the production process. In nature, he says, it is just the opposite, calcium and CO2 are combined to make up the building blocks relied on by coral reefs and shells to make their hard materials. The result of the Fortera process is a 60 percent reduction in CO2 and a more efficient way to make cement. Including CO2 in the finished product allows for advantageous economics by minimizing the amount of raw materials processed. For every ton of material mined, ground, and heated, one ton of cement is produced. In ordinary cement production, 44 percent of the primary ingredient limestone is lost as CO2 emissions reducing the sellable product proportionally.
Lehigh Hanson
In March 2021, Fortera announced a partnership with Lehigh Hanson, a North American construction materials supplier and a subsidiary of HeidelbergCement Group, one of the world’s largest integrated producers of building materials, to construct and operate a small commercial plant at Lehigh’s Northern California cement facility. The plant will capture CO2 from the kiln exhaust–the first installation of its kind to do this–and convert it into a cementitious material used to produce high quality concrete. Speaking on the deal this spring, Fortera’s Ryan Gilliam said the partnership would prove the commercial scalability, finished produce quality and competitive economics of the Fortera process.
