Making carbon a concrete number.

A twelve-month PDF, delivered in a couple of weeks

Here is a fact about the buildings around you that is both obvious and slightly maddening: roughly 40% of global CO2 emissions come from the built environment, and a large chunk of that is not the lights or the heating - it is the concrete, steel, and glass the thing is made of. Everyone in construction knows this. The problem is that until recently nobody could produce the number fast enough to do anything about it.

The number in question is called an Environmental Product Declaration, or EPD - a third-party-verified label that says how much carbon a specific product, like a batch of ready-mix concrete, is responsible for. Producing one traditionally meant hiring consultants, wrangling spreadsheets, and waiting six to twelve months. By the time the EPD arrived, the data was stale and the project you needed it for had probably moved on. It was, in the polite phrasing of the industry, a bottleneck. In the impolite phrasing of one Pathways customer, it was closer to a root canal that lasted a year.

Pathways, a New York startup founded in 2022, looked at this and made a bet that is almost suspiciously simple: the science of measuring embodied carbon is fine. The paperwork around it is the problem. So they built software that ingests the data a manufacturer already has - raw material inputs, transportation, plant processes, the invoices piling up in some accounting system - and turns it into a verified EPD in weeks. Same rigor. Same third-party verification. Minus most of the waiting.

Four things it puts in a producer's hands

$2.5M, oversubscribed, and a roster of concrete's biggest names

In February 2024 Pathways closed a $2.5M pre-seed round - reported oversubscribed by $1.5M - co-led by Zacua Ventures and Pi Labs, with Blue Lion Global, Positive Ventures, Jetstream, Refashiond, Great Wave Ventures, and Anglet joining. The interesting thing about the round is not the size. It is that a group of investors decided the data layer for green building was worth backing before it was fashionable to say so.

• Public client roster includes Heidelberg Materials, Stella-Jones, Master Builders Solutions, Dolese, Gerken Companies, and Knight's Companies - 19+ named producers in all.
• Customers reportedly reduce the global warming potential of their products by 20%+ within the first year - largely by seeing where the carbon actually is.
• Pathways treats carbon like a product spec, sitting right next to cost, weight, and PSI on a concrete data sheet.
• Works with state programs like Minnesota's EPD Funding Program that subsidize producers pursuing declarations.
• The company grew out of university research on embodied carbon in the built environment.