By Riley Kaminer
Might Carbon Limit be one of South Florida’s most successful ClimateTech startups?
The company is quite literally paving the way to a carbon neutral future with its concrete additive that transforms concrete into a carbon capture and storage solution. Carbon Limit, which calls its product CaptureCrete, has the ability to capture CO2 pollution directly from the atmosphere and store it permanently via carbonization. CaptureCrete also generates carbon credits.
The Boca Raton-based startup has won a litany of awards recently. It won the Smart Building/ Smart Construction Innovation World Cup at BIM World Munich, the world’s leading congress for the latest innovative technologies in construction, real estate, and urban planning. It was a winner and gold medalist at one of last year’s biggest challenges in the construction sector: CEMEX Ventures Construction Startup Competition. The U.S Department of Defense awarded Carbon Limit as a winner of the Army’s XtechSBIR Clean Tech competition. And list goes on.
But the Carbon Limit team is perhaps most proud of its first major deployment. In August 2022, the Minnesota Department of Transportation laid 35 new pavement mixes on a quarter-mile of a major US interstate. This pilot will include a 3-year case study of testing and lab work to measure performance and carbonization. Data sensors as well as other testing equipment were set up prior to the pouring and paving of the concrete cells to ensure real time data generation.
Also last summer, the startup was selected to join Google for Startups Climate Change Cohort 2022 as one of 11 startups. Upon the completion of the accelerator, Google recently used CaptureCrete for a restoration project in their new R&D facility.
“We’ve been working on getting a lot of additional R&D, optimization, and testing done – as well as bringing on a new lead scientist,” founder and CEO Tim Sperry told Refresh Miami. The startup now has 8 full-time employees, all but three of which are based in South Florida.
“This space is moving very fast right now,” said COO Christina Stavridi. “When we started, nobody was doing this. Now there is a huge shift. I think we’re very proud to have led this shift to greener solutions and carbon capture being integrated in innovative and creative ways.”
Still, Stavridi underscored the novelty of Carbon Limit’s product. “No one is doing what we’re doing, which is developing a building material that can actually remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere around it, lock it away permanently, and then generate carbon credits.”
The startup is in the process of raising capital.
So what has been the key to Carbon Limit’s success thus far? For Sperry, it was being laser-focused on a very ambitious goal.
“My advice for other startups would be to come up with one of the biggest goals that you can come up with – a really crazy mission like us to remove a billion tons of co2 from the environment, and something that’s never been done. Because when you do something that’s so big, so audacious, you attract all of the best people in the world, since everyone wants to be a part of something that’s bigger than themselves and bigger than making money.”
READ MORE ON REFRESH MIAMI:
- Blue Frontier is on a mission to keep us cool, while being kind to the climate
- South Florida is a hotbed for climate tech innovation. Here are 5 reasons why
- Are smart cities the key to sustainability? At local conference, global leaders weigh in
- Catching up with environmental reporting startup SustainaBase: ‘Companies of all sizes are starting to really care about this issue’
- AI, climatetech and healthtech reign supreme on Day 1 of eMerge Americas’ 10th anniversary - April 18, 2024
- Brought together by tech, kept together by culture: Miami’s protagonistic role in LatAm’s startup story - April 15, 2024
- New World Angels launches Innovation Fund to write pre-seed checks - April 12, 2024