Clean Growth Fund and AP Ventures back £10m Series A for Reclinker

Clean Growth Fund and AP Ventures, two transition-focused venture investors, said this week they had backed a £10 million Series A for Reclinker, a Welsh company that recovers cement paste from demolition waste and turns it back into new clinker. The round, reported by Net Zero Investor, also drew the Development Bank of Wales, Carbon Zero Capital, Kibo Invest and Cambridge Enterprise, and the capital is earmarked for expanding Reclinker's Cardiff production facilities and hiring additional workers.

Cement has been one of the harder problems in transition finance to put money against, because the conventional process heats limestone in a kiln until it decomposes into lime and releases the carbon locked in the rock, leaving a material that accounts for somewhere between 6% and 8% of global carbon emissions, a larger share than global aviation, according to Net Zero Investor. It is also the binding agent in housing and infrastructure, which is why the sector has stayed on the hard-to-abate list while cleaner substitutes were found for other industrial inputs.

Reclinker's answer, which comes out of Cambridge University, recovers cement paste from demolition waste and returns it to clinker inside the electric arc furnaces already used to recycle steel, so a single furnace pass yields recycled steel and new cement together. The company says the process needs no kiln, no quarried limestone and no fossil-fuel-driven heat, reduces emissions by 50%, and has passed multiple trials at 7 Steel UK's Cardiff plant, with first commercial sales already secured, according to Net Zero Investor.

The furnace choice is the part of the design worth watching, because steel recyclers already have electric arc furnaces installed and running, and a cement process that uses them likely spares Reclinker much of the capital and siting work a new kiln would demand. The trade is dependency: output moves with a steel plant's schedule rather than its own, so trials at one site establish the chemistry while throughput remains a separate question.

The coverage is quiet on the details that would let an allocator underwrite the claim: no baseline is given for the 50% reduction, so it is unclear whether the comparison runs against conventional cement production, against the plant the process would displace, or against something narrower, and an abatement figure without a baseline is difficult to underwrite. Nor does the coverage name the buyers behind those first commercial sales or say whether they are paying a premium to conventional product; for an allocator treating this as a template for hard-to-abate deals, those details separate a demonstration from a business.

The company's cheque sits on a fund with public pension money inside it: Clean Growth Fund closed the second tranche of its second vehicle at £81.5 million in September, with £22.5 million from Border to Coast and £30 million from Strathclyde supplying roughly two-thirds of the pot, and the vehicle passed the midpoint of a $202 million target. Two LGPS pools are therefore two layers behind Reclinker's Cardiff build-out, and the returns question lands at the company rather than at the fund's close.

Five backers besides the two venture leads is a crowded register for a £10 million cheque, and the mix is the point: Clean Growth Fund brings the climate-tech mandate, AP Ventures the co-investor role, Cambridge Enterprise the lineage of the science, and the Development Bank of Wales a Welsh institutional presence alongside a Cardiff build-out. Kibo Invest and Carbon Zero Capital complete a syndicate that has spread the risk of an industrial process needing plant across several balance sheets rather than asking one to carry it.

That shape is becoming familiar in UK climate Series A, and it follows the direction public balance sheets are travelling: closer to the meter, absorbing risk that private capital has stepped around. What matters is where in the stack that appetite appears: a £10 million early-stage cheque is equity rather than project debt, and the pool money reaches the cement process through a venture vehicle that has to pick winners among hardware companies facing long paths to revenue, so the wager is being made at the riskiest point on the curve.

Clean Growth Fund's own accountability sits underneath the deal: it raised the second tranche on the argument that UK climate hardware can produce returns, and the funds that supplied most of that capital are pension schemes that will measure it in realised abatement and realised exits, not in commitments. Whether the first cohort of these companies reports numbers that hold up will likely determine how easily the vehicle's remaining capital, and any successor, gets raised.

Reclinker was founded in 2022 and claims cost parity with conventional product, and a £10 million cheque of this kind buys Cardiff capacity and headcount before it buys an answer on the emissions figure. How much product moves out of that plant, and whether the abatement holds once the furnaces run to a steel recycler's timetable rather than a trial schedule, will determine whether the claim holds up.