KLAW Industries – Developing Pantheon™, a Carbon-Negative Replacement for Cement

Introduction 

KLAW Industries, founded in 2019 by Jacob Kumpon and Jack Lamuraglia, has developed a raw material called Pantheon™, which is a carbon-negative replacement for cement in concrete made from waste glass diverted from landfills. They started the company as sophomores in college and have since graduated to work full-time on the business. They have raised $1.36 million in non-dilutive funding, including winning a $25,000 Technology Bonus Prize awarded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management as part of the Office of Technology Transition’s (OTT) EnergyTech University Prize 2022 competition and a $400K Phase II Small Business Innovation Research award from the Environmental Protection Agency.  In July 2023, KLAW Industries won first place at OTT’s Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Prize pitch competition, taking home $100,000 to help them purchase a new truck and trailer for operations. Today, they have completed over 60 pilot projects and sold close to 50 tons of their Pantheon™ material. 

We’re catching up with Jacob Kumpon, cofounder and Chief Operating Officer of KLAW Industries, to learn more about the milestones his team has achieved since participating in the EnergyTech UP and EPIC competitions. 

Q&A With Jacob Kumpon, KLAW Industries Co-Founder & COO  

OTT: How did your team meet and where did the original idea come from for KLAW Industries?  

We started KLAW when we were sophomores in college because we started looking into problems in the recycling industry. We toured recycling facilities, and we identified that glass was a big problem – a lot of glass that we think is recycled doesn’t actually get recycled because it’s mixed with a bunch of paper, plastics, and metals that make it unusable for new bottles. So, the only option for these mixed recycling facilities is to send this glass to the landfill. But glass is really heavy and it’s incredibly expensive for them to get rid of all this material. That led us down the path of taking some of this waste glass and trying to develop a process to clean it up and make it into something that could benefit another industry.   

OTT: Can you tell us more about the problem you’re trying to solve and how Pantheon™ solves it? 

Our business really tackles two problems – one in the carbon impact of concrete and another in diverting waste from the landfill. Our technology allows us to replace cement, which is the most carbon intensive part of concrete, with Pantheon™, a product that is very sustainable and low energy to make. And for every ton of our material that is utilized in concrete, that is another ton that’s not sent to the landfill. So, our pitch to the recyclers we work with is that we can help them find a solution that both keeps their materials out of the landfill and is less expensive than paying landfill tipping fees. For the concrete producers, we make sure that our product can drop into their existing mixes and be an easy replacement for them, allowing them to increase compressive strength while lowering their concrete's embodied carbon. 

OTT: How did you hear about EnergyTech UP? And how did participating in the EnergyTech UP competition impact the development of the business?  

We are part of the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator, which is an incubator closely tied to Binghamton University where we went to school. The incubator told us about EnergyTech UP and encouraged us to enter the competition.  

Participating in EnergyTech UP was very useful for us. When you have to sit down and put together a plan for where the business is today and where it’s going in the future, the process helps you think about a lot of problems that might not come up in the day-to-day operations of the business.  

All our funding to date has been non-dilutive funding, so we haven’t done many investor pitches, but the competition also helped us with our business pitch. We refined our story to be digestible and understandable in a relatively short time frame.  I remember one of our first video pitches for the competition had to be shorter than ten minutes, so it was a useful exercise to ask ourselves: what do we actually need to talk about here?

The biggest impact of doing EnergyTech UP was that it put us on the path of being able to do this full time when we got out of college, which was a goal for my team from the start. I don’t know if people in college know that these sorts of business competitions are a good thing to do, but we found that these events really do help you get off the ground. It helped us do it without needing to raise a seed round, so that was huge for us.  

OTT: What milestones have you achieved since participating in the ETU competition? How was participating in the EPIC pitch competition in July? 

At the time of the ETU competition in 2022, we were building out our MVP. The competition really pushed us to finish that.  We were also working on our fourth or fifth pilot, but we really progressed to a post-revenue stage after the competition.  We were able to start selling profitably with real paying pilots. To date, we’ve sold about 49 tons of our materials across 63 pilot projects. One of the other major milestones was that we won a Phase II SBIR award from the EPA that was $400K, which kickstarted some of our larger City of Binghamton projects around curb and sidewalk upgrades.   

A few weeks ago, we won first place at the DOE’s EPIC Pitch competition. The EPIC Prize Competition allowed every team to present to a room of potential funders, partners, and end customers, so even without the prize funding, it was an incredible opportunity that has already pushed our company further. Listening to the other team’s pitches, we gained valuable knowledge about the adversities they faced and their creative solutions to overcoming many of the challenges we face today. The prize money will allow us to purchase a truck and trailer to deliver our product to our customers, pushing our technology forward faster than ever before and making low-carbon concrete a reality for New York. 

OTT: What’s next for you and the team on this commercialization journey?  

Our next step is to build out our facility – we purchased a 6,000 square foot facility about a year and a half ago and it will become our large-scale pilot plant for Pantheon™.  Then, we’ll start to take high volumes of glass across our region and continue to service projects like the City of Binghamton projects and other municipal concrete contracts that we have. 

We’ve been able to work with some great partners such as the Barney & Dickenson, our local concrete plant and the Taylor Garbage recycling facility – they have been a huge help in getting us going and it’s been great to see that there are real people in the industry who want to make better concrete that is both more sustainable and less expensive. This is how we can make a difference and we are excited to keep working with companies in the concrete industry to do that. 

EnergyTech University Prize is a competition sponsored by U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) aiming to cultivate the next generation of innovators while accelerating the transfer of energy technologies to market.  Student teams compete for cash prizes by successfully identifying energy technologies, assessing their market potential, and creating a business plan for commercialization. To learn more, visit EnergyTech University Prize | Department of Energy. 

The Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Prize recognizes the nation's most innovative incubators. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Technology Transitions (OTT), the EPIC Prize awards cash prizes to regional incubator teams that submit the most creative and impactful plans, then implement those plans to develop strong clusters, connections, and support for energy startups and entrepreneurs. To learn more, visit Energy Program for Innovation Clusters | Department of Energy. 

To learn more about KLAW Industries, please visit KLAW Industries.