Built environment: Growing focus to mitigate & adapt to a changing world
A sudden winter onset brings into focus our fast-changing world & criticality of climate-resilient buildings. We discuss built environment emissions & seed decarbonization opportunities + our updates.
Hi there,
We planned this to be our fall issue, but as we publish it, the Arctic Blast has brought freezing temperatures unexpectedly early in the Northern Hemisphere. Last week, the season’s first snowfall piled up a foot of snow around the Great Lakes. Toronto hasn’t seen this much snow this early for 50 years. This winter, decidedly, will be severe because of the ongoing La Niña, a global ocean current phenomenon. And sadly, the drab, less colourful & warmer fall we had this year might soon be the norm.
As we navigate further into our world that’s changed by climate, the extreme weather events are only expected to get worse — summers will be hotter, monsoons will have more rain, and winter will get more extreme. So, going forward, buildings & infra designed to mitigate and adapt to these changes will become increasingly critical.
At Momentum Capital, decarbonizing buildings has been a subject of high interest to us — we’ve already made a couple of investments in the space, published our thesis, and catalyzed events. In this issue, we share our work till date & our current opinions on decarbonizing the built environment.
Summary of this issue:
📃 Report: Early-stage Opportunities to Decarbonize Buildings
💡 Why we invested in CarbonStrong? 💪
⭐ Portfolio Highlight: Focal 🔦
📅 Events: SusCrunch 2025
📃 Report: 25 Entrepreneurship Opportunities for Climate & Sustainability
👩💻 Portfolio Careers
📃 Report: Early-stage Opportunities in Built Environment
Earlier this year, we began our series of reports on ‘India’s role in decarbonization and growing seed-stage opportunities’. In the last newsletter, we discussed our deep dive into Electricity Decarbonization. In this issue, we move to the ‘Built Environment’ - i.e. the places where we live, work & play - to identify seed opportunities to decarbonize them. Here’s a link to our latest report on the same, followed by a brief from it.
We spend nearly 90% of our lives indoors, i.e. in built environments. And for optimal productivity & health, we need to keep them within a narrow thermal comfort range. Hence, built environments account for over 33% of global energy consumption & contribute to 39% of global GHG emissions. Over 2/3rd of these emissions are driven by operational energy use (for space & water heating/cooling, cooking, lighting & other appliance use), and 1/3rd by embodied carbon (producing & transporting building materials; and constructing, maintaining & demolishing buildings).
With increasing variations in weather, energy demand for cooling inside buildings is growing rapidly. While 3.5 Bn people live in regions with rising temperatures, only 15% own ACs. But this ownership is growing fast, further accelerated by economic growth & urbanization in developing countries, and space cooling is one of the fastest-growing sources of global energy demand. At the same time, we are building more & more infra at an unprecedented scale; e.g. India is currently witnessing a construction wave. Incredibly, 50% of India’s infrastructure for 2047 is yet to be constructed! Overall, this means emissions from built environments are a huge future concern.
Now, there’s been growing alignment on policy, tech & economics to decarbonize buildings and make them more climate resilient. E.g. RMI and GMA recently formed the Sustainable Concrete Buyer Alliance (SCoBA), which includes Amazon, Prologis, Meta and other majors, to enable them to purchase environmental attributes from sustainable concrete. This activation & aggregation of demand can catalyze the green concrete industry. At the same time, policy initiatives in India like the Smart Cities Mission, Building Codes with efficiency standards, and Floor-Area-Ratio incentives for green buildings are creating strong tailwinds for sustainability solutions.
This points to a large and growing construction market, one ready to adopt green climate-resilient and cost-effective solutions.
However, despite the large market and disruption potential, built environments space has seen the least amount of VC dollars compared to its contribution to emissions. Despite sometimes capital-heavy nature of businesses, we believe this is a large under-invested sector and see two key areas for early-stage investment in India:
Riding the Construction Wave: Reducing emissions from materials & processes, as well as better design, can change embodied carbon for half of India’s buildings while saving material and energy. We think new building materials, such as engineered Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCMs), and digital tools that enable efficient building design, value engineering and integrating passive cooling, are interesting areas.
Enhancing Climate Resilience & Efficiency: India is expected to experience some of the worst impacts of climate change, and built environments will be a critical adaptation & resilience pillar. We see scale potential in sustainable cooling, e.g. next-gen energy-efficient ACs, refrigerant-free solutions, and passive design retrofits. There’s also growing need for solutions that improve flood resilience, such as porous construction materials, etc.
We are already witnessing a wave of startups in the built environment space, and they are demonstrating strong market traction. Here’s a market map of key global and Indian startups:
💡 Why we invested in CarbonStrong? 💪
India’s construction industry, growing rapidly with the infra boom highlighted above, faces significant environmental challenges due to the high carbon emissions from cement production. About 65% of embodied emissions in buildings are driven by cement & concrete. India use of cement is expected to grow 1.5x within 6 years, rising from 445 metric million tonnes (MMT) in FY24 to 670 MMT by FY30! This risks a proportionate increase in emissions. But what if there was a way to make buildings with less cement?
CarbonStrong’s co-founders, Harsh and Vikramaditya, who had been long-time work colleagues in India’s energy and mobility space, have found a way to decarbonize building construction while reducing costs.
CarbonStrong’s core offering, engineered SCMs is an elegant & powerful technology solution that works as a drop-in for concrete makers. Born out of deep & methodical R&D with a team of engineers and PhDs, their solution reduces 30-40% of cement requirements for concrete production, thus reducing both cost and emissions. Unlike other cement/ concrete decarbonization products available in India today, their innovation is suitable for load-bearing structures. This allows them to cater to a large market, and creates a value for the high-quality engineering innovation that has gone into their product. In the last 18 months since our investment, CarbonStrong has evolved their technology, completed numerous field trials and onboarded many more customers for pilots.
CarbonStrong has a significant first-mover advantage in India, as there are currently no other players offering this technology in the region. With patents for their unique technology pending, they are well-positioned to build a strong defensible moat. They are also taking a “bite-sized” approach to reducing emissions from the behemoth of the construction industry by going after the concrete market. Read our full blogpost.
🔈 Portfolio Spotlight: Focal 🔦
In contrast to India, the US and Europe’s building energy consumption is driven by heating. This heating mostly directly burns fossil fuels, causing local pollution and fire risks. Also, heating solutions today heat spaces around people & are not personalized. Focal’s smart, high-efficiency, electric, spot heating system provides personalized warmth to people in all environments. Think spotlight, for heat.
Raj & Rohan, long-time childhood friends, built Focal with a vision to heat people, not spaces. Raj holds a dual master’s from Harvard Kennedy and Stanford GSB, and has worked with Deloitte earlier. Rohan holds a master’s in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon and a bachelor’s from Georgia Tech, and has previously worked at Tesla. They started working on the idea in 2021, and after years of research, testing and field pilots, Focal’s Robotic Heating System is now UL 2021 certified, rated for both outdoor and indoor use applications. They’ve also gained traction with huge inbound interest for commercial & residential uses. The company is now scaling their production line to cater to this demand.
If you are in the Bay Area, check out their product in action at Pacific Catch and Anchovy Bar, amongst other top restaurants! Also read our detailed blog post on ‘Why we invested in Focal’.
🗓️ Event: SusCrunch 2025!
Last quarter, Momentum Capital sponsored SusCrunch 2025, the annual climate tech conference of note in India, organized by the SusMafia. The event brought together over 400 founders, investors, corporates & academia representatives.
The summit was designed as a high-energy working space, with impact-led problem-solving sessions. At the Builder Room, 24 handpicked founders got direct inputs from corporate leaders & investors. The Big Pi Grant enabled five early-stage startups to pitch novel innovations to an expert panel, including Momentum’s Ankur Shrivastava, for a ₹31.4 lakh grant. It also featured CarbonStrong’s wall made of green concrete!
📃 Opportunity Map for Climate & Sustainability in India
Momentum’s Bharti Singhla recently teamed up with Paridhi Mishra (Program Head at Climate Corps) to co-author a detailed ‘Climate Tech Opportunity Map’, as an initiative by SusMafia and SusVentures, with advice from several experts in India climate tech.
It presents a curated map of 25 high-potential climate tech opportunities across four critical sectors for India — energy, industry, food & agriculture, and water. These ideas could collectively reduce up to 72% of the carbon emissions in India! The team has worked hard to surface urgent, unsolved challenges and provide a toolkit to give a jumpstart to smart founders. If you’re keen on any of these ideas, reach out to us.
👩💻 Portfolio Careers
1. New Product Development Engineer, Dharaksha EcoSolutions (Faridabad • Full time • In-Person)
Dharaksha EcoSolutions is hiring a New Product Development Engineer to drive sustainable innovation with a team of brilliant engineers and innovators. If you are someone who loves designing mechanical systems, solving challenges, and turning ideas into real products, this is the team for you.
2. Polymer Scientist, Vimano Inc. (Bangalore • Full time • In-Person)
Vimano Inc., a deep-tech startup building next-gen components for energy storage & conversion, is hiring a Polymer Scientist. Ideal candidate to have strong background in polymer science (synthesis, formulation & characterization of polymeric materials) with 7+ years experience. Role involves innovative projects to develop new materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion. Drop an email to info@vimano.biz.
Momentum Capital is a pre-seed/seed investor in climate tech, health and cross-border models. We champion Indian-origin founders and our team is spread across the US, Canada & India. More: Portfolio | Insights.
That’s it for this issue. We’re always looking for innovative startups working on ways to make our buildings greener and climate resilient. If you are working on innovations in building materials, innovative cooling methods and resilient infrastructure, do reach out!
— Momentum Team
 | A guest post by
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Built environment in India is responsible for >17% of India’s emissions, but has received <1% of climate equity funding, despite being a large and growing market. Looks like a massive overlooked opportunity!