Can Neocrete Solve One of the World’s Biggest Climate Problems?
Based in Parnell’s Outset Ventures in Auckland, deep-tech startup Neocrete has created a breakthrough concrete additive inspired by ancient Roman chemistry. With their low-carbon innovation now gaining traction offshore, one small New Zealand team could hold the key to reducing up to eight percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
Concrete isn’t something most people think about unless they’re pouring a driveway or staring at a half-finished building. But behind the scenes, concrete quietly props up almost everything about modern life. It’s the world’s most-used building material and making it generates a staggering 7–8 percent of global carbon emissions, more than the entire country of India produces.
For decades, scientists and policymakers have warned that without a breakthrough, the concrete industry’s carbon footprint will continue to rise alongside global infrastructure demand. And for just as long, innovators have been searching for a credible alternative. Neocrete believes it has found the key, not by reinventing concrete from scratch, but by re-engineering the way it’s made.
Neocrete is the venture founded by Zarina Alexander and Matt Kennedy-Goode, who began working together in 2018 with a simple but ambitious question: Could concrete be made not only greener, but also stronger, more durable, and more affordable?
Their answer came in the form of a breakthrough additive that, when blended with abundant low-carbon materials such as volcanic ash, produces a cement-like binder without the carbon-intensive processing that defines today’s cement industry. As Alexander succinctly puts it, Neocrete “develops an additive that turns low-carbon, low-cost materials into cement without the need for further processing.”
While clean tech stories often start with someone spotting a gap in the market, this one starts in a concrete lab in Moscow, where a young Zarina Alexander grew up watching her father — a classic “mad scientist” type, she jokes — experimenting with ancient and modern concretes. He taught her something that stuck: concrete is amazing, but we’ve been making it wrong for centuries.
Modern cement, the stuff that gives concrete its strength, only dates back about 200 years. It’s highly processed, energy-hungry, and releases massive amounts of CO₂ during production. It also doesn’t age particularly gracefully. Weather, seawater, and even the air all slowly eat away at it. Meanwhile, 2,000-year-old Roman structures made using volcanic ash are still standing. The difference? Their concrete wasn’t cooked at extreme temperatures. It formed naturally, using chemistry that was far more in harmony with the environment.
Fast-forward a few decades and Alexander, now living in New Zealand after a stint at KPMG, still couldn’t shake what she’d learned as a kid: concrete could be so much better. A chance conversation with business advisor Matt Kennedy-Goode lit the spark. They started talking about New Zealand’s infrastructure challenges post-Christchurch earthquakes and the lack of innovation in a sector responsible for nearly a tenth of global emissions. One conversation turned into another, and in 2018 the pair officially formed Neocrete.
Their solution is deceptively elegant. Instead of burning limestone at extreme temperatures, a process that releases vast amounts of CO₂, the Neocrete process leverages the natural chemistry of volcanic materials and activates them using the company’s proprietary additive. The result behaves like cement, fits into familiar construction methods, and produces concrete that is stronger, more durable, and significantly lower in carbon.
Insightfully, Alexander and Kennedy-Goode are not attempting to disrupt the industry with a completely foreign material that requires new equipment, new training, or new plants. The founders realised early on that the global construction sector is one of the most conservative, risk-averse industries in the world. So instead of asking the construction industry to adopt an entirely new material (something it’s famously hesitant to do), Neocrete designed its solution to behave almost exactly like the cement concrete makers already know. As Alexander says, the industry is “trained on cement-based concrete,” and nobody wants to retrain millions of people or rebuild an entire global supply chain. So Neocrete doesn’t fight the system but slides neatly into it.
Neocrete has spent years doing R&D, including more than a thousand trials in the past year alone. Behind the scenes, they also built a robust IP strategy: patents where appropriate, trade secrets where needed, and relentless ongoing research to stay ahead.
This pragmatic approach is paying off. The company is now exporting product to Southeast Asia, supplying container loads to a customer in Brunei under a long-term agreement. Their activator is already reducing that customer’s concrete emissions by around 40 percent.
And in markets such as Europe where cement prices are high, Neocrete’s solution can reduce material costs by up to 30 percent, giving it an economic advantage that accelerates adoption even further.
The region is under intense pressure to decarbonise heavy industries, and demand for low-carbon building materials is booming. Neocrete already has promising results with several prospective customers there, setting the stage for rapid expansion over the next few years.
Investors have taken notice too. Neocrete closed a US$4 million seed round at the end of 2023, led by Singapore’s Wavemaker Partners, and the company’s current raise is oversubscribed as well. The team has grown to 15, including chemists, engineers, and IP specialists.
Ironically, New Zealand itself isn’t where the company expects much of its future revenue to come from. Our domestic market is small, cautious, and currently under-resourced. But Neocrete still wants Aotearoa to benefit. Much of the early support (from Callaghan Innovation to NZTE and other grants) came from here, and the technology was born here too. Alexander says it feels right that some of the first places to build with lower-carbon concrete should be in the country where the idea took shape.
What’s striking about Neocrete’s story is how grounded it is. There’s no bravado about “disrupting” one of the world’s oldest industries. Instead, the founders talk about evolving the industry, reducing its carbon footprint using the tools, infrastructure, and knowledge it already has. They want to make it easy for concrete producers to change, because easy is what scales.
Interview and story by Richard Liew.
Innovation Nation is a series celebrating stories of innovation and diversity in entrepreneurship from around New Zealand.
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