How To Build A Climate-Friendly Skyscraper: Start Small. Petri-Dish Small.
Prometheus Materials has a solution for replacing one of the biggest contributors of greenhouse gasses, financial backing from Microsoft and an aggressive plan to scale up quickly.
Petri Dish Days
Four University of Colorado Boulder academics, Jeff Cameron, Sherri Cook, Mija Hubler and Wil Srubar — all Prometheus cofounders and advisors — stumbled onto the idea while searching for a solution to a different problem.
They’d received a $2.4 million grant from the Department of Defense’s research arm in 2017 to see if they could use biology to produce protective structures in deserts and other remote environments with difficult terrain. “They knew they couldn’t fly in concrete because it’s too heavy, and they knew they didn’t want to truck it in over large expanses of hostile territory,” Burnett says. “So if they could use local materials to produce hardened structures to protect troops and high-value military assets, that’s what they wanted to do.”
Jeffrey Cameron, one of the four cofounders and current advisors to Prometheus, had taken research for the start-up into his basement as his lab facilities could *not* be used for commercial activities and until venture funding started coming in to afford the start-up space needed to grow the company.