I-Corps alumni startup Carbon To Stone is an emerging leader in the carbon capture and utilization industry. A recent influx of funding will help the company advance its mission to transform CO2 and residual materials into valuable resources.
Carbon To Stone won a $347,000 grant from the Carbontech Development Initiative (CDI) administered by Columbia University and supported by NYSERDA, as well as a $256.5K STTR Phase I award from the Department of Energy.
Co-founded by Greeshma Gadikota, scientific advisor; Hassnain Asgar, director of engineering; and CEO Sravanth Gadikota, Carbon To Stone spun out of Cornell University research. The startup is a member of the university’s Praxis Center for Venture Development, and Greeshma Gadikota is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell.
The startup’s innovative approach aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with steel and metals manufacturing by 8 to 10%. Their process can simultaneously yield metals that are essential for the advancement of clean energy technologies.
“We came up with a technology that harnesses the way nature deals with CO2,” Greeshma Gadikota said. “Nature has its own carbon cycle: it takes CO2 and traps it into a carbonate form. We were inspired by that.”
The new CDI grant will help Carbon To Stone develop its resource recovery technology, which can process up to 10kg of solid industrial waste per day and is integrated with innovations in CO2 capture and mineralization. The team will explore the technology’s scale-up potential through a pilot with an iron and steel making industry partner in New York State.
The company secured the STTR award with support from the SBIR/STTR Assistance Program, a program that helps startups hire a qualified consultant to develop a proposal for SBIR/STTR funding. Carbon To Stone will use the new funding to conduct further research in preparation for commercial launch and scale-up.
“These grants significantly enhance our ability to scale up our technology,” Sravanth Gadikota said. “Support from the Cornell community played a crucial role in getting us off the ground and transitioning us from working in an academic lab to deploying industry pilots.”
With the help of these new initiatives, Carbon To Stone’s environmentally friendly technology is on track to meet the need to treat multiple industrial waste streams and produce value-added products.