Holcim is trying to turn the oldest ingredients in construction into a newer kind of business - one that sells lower-carbon materials, recycles yesterday’s buildings and captures the emissions its kilns cannot yet avoid.
Gurinder Nagra is the founder and CEO of Furno Materials, a South San Francisco climate-tech company building the world's first modular, energy-efficient cement plant. Born in India, raised in rural Griffith, Australia, and trained as a geoscientist at UNSW and Stanford, he traded a boyhood cricket dream for a fight against cement's outsized carbon footprint. Furno's compact kilns use oxyfuel combustion to make ASTM-certified cement at lower cost and far lower emissions; in 2024 the company's cement tested at twice the ASTM strength standard, closed an oversubscribed $6.5M seed round, and Nagra landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.