Minus Materials

Minus Materials was founded to support sustainability and innovation in cement and concrete manufacturing. They are a pre-seed startup that recently spun out of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Living Materials Laboratory. Specifically, Minus Materials is industrializing a process to form limestone that replicates the natural process by which limestone deposits are naturally formed. They use microalgae, sunlight, and seawater to capture and store carbon dioxide as biogenic limestone. As a result, they shorten the formation of limestone quarries from millennia to minutes while sequestering and storing carbon dioxide in the process. The result is carbon-negative biogenic limestone that can help the cement industry achieve significant emissions reductions and, in combination with other cutting-edge technologies such as electric clinkering and carbon capture, enable the production of the world’s first carbon-negative portland cement.