Age: 34
Occupation: Co-founder and CEO, Carbon Upcycling Technologies
Almost every human activity has a carbon impact, according to Apoorv Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Upcycling Technologies. These CO2 emissions add to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which contributes significantly to global warming. Sinha, an engineer and self-described “perseverant and curious entrepreneur,” was inspired to find a solution to climate change when, in 2013, he entered the Alberta government’s Grand Challenge: Innovative Carbon Uses, a competition to reduce industrial carbon emissions. Sinha was named a first-round winner and awarded $500,000 in seed grants.
Riding that momentum, he founded Carbon Upcycling Technologies in September 2014. The company converts CO2 emissions into carbon-to-value products, namely cement replacements — these materials can capture and lock away CO2 into buildings and sidewalks for hundreds of years, effectively removing those emissions from the atmosphere.
Sinha’s carbon capture and utilization technology has grown from a reactor the size of a cookie jar with two kilograms of capacity to a planned 30,000-tonnes-a-year unit in 2025. The company now has four offices (in Canada, U.S., U.K. and Germany), and is recognized as a top Global Cleantech 100 and a leading Canadian carbon-management solution on the Government of Canada’s Carbon Management Strategy. “We’ve been lucky to win awards, but seeing that people on the ground are changing their behaviours based on our technology — that gives me a lot of gratification that we’re actually driving the change that we want to see,” Sinha says.
In 2022, the company raised US$6.5 million from investors, and, in 2023, a whopping US$26 million through Series A funding, which included investments from three of the world’s largest cement companies.
“We’re on a mission to be the most impactful carbon tech company, and we’ve laid the foundation to be able to do that,” Sinha says. “But there’s a lot more left to do to realize the impact we can drive.”
Thank yous
“My team at Carbon Upcycling for believing in our vision and working every day to move us closer towards becoming the most impactful carbontech company of this decade.”
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