Concrete is the second-most used material on Earth after water, accounting for 8% of global CO2e emissions. 90% of this impact arises through the production of the cement binder and Biozeroc’s cement-free concrete has the potential to be low-carbon, but also carbon negative through the incorporation of industrial waste and byproducts.
Their technology directly precipitates a CaCO3 (Limestone) binder into the sand and aggregate matrix using a naturally occurring soil bacterium. Given the right precursors and conditions, this robustly binds sand and aggregate together to mould a performant biomaterial.
CTO of Biozeroc, Dr Davor Ivankovic is responsible for leading their multidisciplinary research teams across biotechnology, materials science, and engineering domains. He acknowledges: “managing teams is new to me, and as a result I have plenty of room to grow into this role, particularly as the business continues to expand at pace.” He believes that the Shott Scale Up Accelerator will create the opportunity to learn from others and recognises how invaluable understanding the experience of others through the networking opportunities.
He recognises that the Shott Scale Up Accelerator’s coaching and mentoring will help him develop his ability to lead and manage the cross-domain teams and better grow the team in domains in which he is not a subject-matter expert. He acknowledges that hiring is a challenge, particularly when assessing candidates’ technical expertise where their subject-matter knowledge is vastly superior to his.
Biozeroc is in a rapid scale-up period and Davor strongly believes that ‘upskilling’ his management and leadership will be instrumental in ensuring the continued success and growth of this startup. He reflects that: “I have found it challenging to manage the team at the existing size and can only assume that this will not decrease as the team expands.”
The company is in a high growth phase, with some key milestones in the year ahead. Biozeroc are launching their first products and installing pilots across a range of customers in the UK. The success of these will be key to the future trajectory of the company and will define the impact that their technology will have into the future.
William Goldsmith is the Director of Strategy and Innovation at ev.energy, responsible for expanding their addressable market and collaborating with partners to build the world’s largest virtual power plant. Since securing $33 million in Series B funding last year, ev.energy is transforming from a startup to scale up. The Shott Scale Up Accelerator comes a perfect time to help him navigate this transition by gaining greater business acumen and leadership skills to build on his strong engineering background.
William recognises that the Shott Scale Up Accelerator will: “help to expand my peer network of other innovative tech leaders and support each other in scaling our companies.” He also plans to make use of the one-to-one coaching sessions and mentoring to support his changing role. He also notes that “Mentors would bring awareness to the risk and challenges I’m likely to face in my leadership role so I can mitigate risks or weaknesses and fully exploit opportunities or strengths.” He also plans to use the £10k grant towards leadership courses to enable him to receive targeted learning in the areas of leadership and finance.
In the next three years ev.energy’s goal is to scale from 160 thousand to 3 million EV drivers using their platform and expand their partnership with utilities, automakers, and charger manufactures across the UK, EU, and US. Key milestones include launching their ChargeWise program, which has been awarded $41m in funding by the California Energy Commission to deploy their software at scale in California.