Gurinder
Nagra

The Work

Reinventing the most boring material on Earth

Cement is everywhere and almost nobody thinks about it. It holds up your apartment, your bridge, the runway your flight lands on. It is the second-most-used substance on the planet after water. It is also, by Nagra's own framing, "this overlooked, dirty industry" responsible for roughly 8% of the world's carbon dioxide - more than aviation and shipping combined.

His company, Furno Materials, is rebuilding the cement plant from scratch in South San Francisco. The traditional version is a kilometer-long, coal-fired beast that costs about a billion dollars to build. Nagra's pitch turns that on its head: make the kiln small, modular, and efficient enough that you can drop a compact plant near demand and fire it with natural gas, biogas, or hydrogen instead of coal.

The trick at the center of it is oxyfuel combustion - burning fuel in nearly pure oxygen rather than ordinary air. Strip out the nitrogen that makes up most of the air and you get a hotter, cleaner flame and an exhaust stream that is almost pure CO2. That matters because the hardest part of capturing carbon is usually separating it from everything else. Furno's process hands you the CO2 already concentrated, ready to sell, use, or store, "without expensive purification."

Furno folds the four classic stages of cement-making - preheating, calcining, sintering, cooling - into a single vertical reactor running at over 80% thermal efficiency. Machine learning and X-ray fluorescence watch the chemistry in real time and tune the process on the fly. The company likes to call the result the "Furno Brick": an end-to-end cement factory compressed into one box.

And the cement actually works. In October 2024 Furno announced its product had earned ASTM C150 certification for Ordinary Portland Cement - the industry's pass/fail line - and then tested at twice the standard's required strength. Clean and stronger is a combination the incumbents rarely manage at once.

The Arc

A long way from Griffith

Nagra was born in India and moved to Australia at the age of seven, with his parents and sister, chasing a better life. They landed in Griffith, a farming town in rural New South Wales. The boy who arrived speaking a different language grew up dreaming of one thing that travels everywhere in Australia: professional cricket. He played for his college and, by his own telling, fully intended to chase the sport.

Science got there first. At UNSW Sydney he took a Bachelor of Advanced Science with an Earth Science major, lived his first year at Warrane College, and fell under the wing of Professor Andy Baker, who, as Nagra tells it, taught him "how to think scientifically" and gave him the nerve to consider a PhD. A summer at Oxford and volunteer work in Zimbabwe widened the lens. His own line on what a science degree is for has the ring of a manifesto: "Your degree is a passport, not a prescription."

The passport took him to Stanford, where he won a funded place to study Earth Systems Science and dug into carbon capture and storage - specifically, how to take CO2 and turn it into something with a market, like limestone. Stanford's climate-venture ecosystem did the rest. Classmates noticed that whatever the assignment, "every time was focused on cement." In 2020 he stopped studying the problem and started a company to fix it.

He had a choice, and he named it plainly years before Furno existed: "I could earn a lot more money by taking a safe option, or I can have a larger impact." He took the impact. The cricket dream became a founder's grind - long enough hours that he keeps "intense physical training" as ballast and reads roughly a book a week to stay sharp.