Californian startup Concrete-AI has raised $2m (c.£1.46m) in a seed funding round led by the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and other marquee investors.
This financing will accelerate the rollout of Concrete-AI’s pioneering data science platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimise the design, proportioning, and production of concrete mixtures.
In addition, the company announced that industry veteran Ryan Henkensiefken has joined the company as Vice President of Business Development.
Henkensiefken has spent more than a decade in the concrete and chemicals industries, most recently serving as Market Development Manager for Master Builders Solutions.
Prior to this, he held business development, and engineering roles for Central Concrete Supply, a unit of U.S. Concrete.
Concrete-AI say that their AI/ML approach for concrete proportioning helps solve some of the biggest challenges facing the industry: concrete over-design, the embodied carbon footprint from cement, increasing material cost, and reducing margins.
The startup claims that if their technology was adopted globally, carbon emissions from cement and concrete production could be reduced by 500 million tonnes per year.
Alex Hall, CEO of Concrete-AI, commented: “To reduce the embodied carbon footprint of concrete construction projects, we must use materials effectively and efficiently.
“Concrete-AI enables this while ensuring safety, peak engineering performance and sustainability by optimising the use of cement, aggregates, and diverse SCMs in concrete, in an unparalleled manner by a data-driven approach.
“At a time when states and the federal government are increasingly requiring and incentivising the reduction of embodied carbon in the built environment, Concrete-AI offers the industry the leading data-driven solution for ensuring cost-effective and sustainable construction.”
The core Concrete-AI technology was developed at UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (ICM) by Gaurav N. Sant and Mathieu Bauchy.
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