Cement startup Furno lands $20M grant to build low-carbon micro-kilns in Chicago

Cement startup Furno will receive a $20 million grant from the Department of Energy, funds that will help the company build up to eight micro-kilns at a concrete plant in Chicago. 

Chicago might not seem like the sort of place where cement is hard to come by. But with the nearest kiln 100 miles away, concrete companies have to pay handsomely for the stuff to keep up with demand. Furno’s micro-kilns promise to reduce pollution and eliminate transportation costs.

Furno’s partner in the project, Ozinga, currently buys 60,000 tons of cement annually from suppliers to use at its Chinatown Yard on Chicago’s south side. There, it blends the binder with aggregate to produce concrete that’s used in construction projects throughout the city.

Most cement plants are massive installations, requiring sprawling logistical networks to get the material to where it’s needed. But the new Furno project will be limited to the amount that Ozinga uses.

“We’ve sized our facility, the project, to that,” Furno founder and CEO Gurinder Nagra told TechCrunch. Nagra will be appearing onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Francisco on October 28. “They have access to the virgin limestone as well as the recycled material already.”

To power the eight kilns that Mountain View-based Furno will be installing, Ozinga might use biogas, a form of methane produced by decomposing organic matter. That, along with the use of recycled material, stands to significantly reduce the climate impact of cement made at the facility. 

Cement is one of the most polluting industries on the planet, generating 8% of all carbon pollution. It’s created when minerals that contain calcium, like limestone, are cooked under intense heat. This process, known as calcination, produces cement along with large amounts of carbon dioxide, over and above the pollution released by any fossil fuels that are used to generate the necessary heat. Every metric ton of cement produces 600 kilograms of carbon pollution.

Most cement today is produced in massive rotary kilns, which are essentially long, horizontal tubes through which heat and raw materials flow. They’re inefficient, with only about 30% of the heat being used for calcination; the rest is wasted. 

Furno shrinks the kiln and turns it upright, a twist that allows more of the heat to participate in the calcination reaction, reducing fossil fuel pollution by at least 70% and eliminating it entirely when it’s fired using hydrogen.

The startup raised a $6.5 million seed round in March, TechCrunch exclusively reported. The federal grant will pay for a significant portion of the project. For the remainder, and to cover other expenses, Furno will be raising a Series A round starting in early 2025, said Kiersten Jakobsen, Furno’s head of marketing.

The deal with Ozinga, which Furno is calling Project Oz — a nod to both the project partner and to Nagra’s home country — will create 50 construction jobs and 30 permanent jobs. The Department of Energy was particularly interested in that statistic, Jakobsen said. “There were some coal plant closures, and the DOE grant is to bring back jobs for those people who had been displaced,” she said.

Furno wasn’t the only cement startup to receive an award from the Department of Energy. Terra CO2, which is based in Golden, Colorado, received $52.6 million to build a new manufacturing facility outside of Salt Lake City. The plant will crank out a cement replacement that’s significantly less polluting than the existing Portland cement.