Clean Growth Fund co-leads £10m Series A into cement recycler Reclinker

Clean Growth Fund and AP Ventures have co-led a £10 million ($13 million) Series A into Reclinker, the Cardiff company founded in 2022 that makes low-carbon cement out of construction and demolition waste, with the Development Bank of Wales and Kibo Invest joining the round alongside returning backers Zero Carbon Capital and Cambridge Enterprise.

Conventional cement averages 77% clinker, and making that clinker means heating limestone in a kiln—the step that releases much of the sector's carbon—which is why cement accounts for roughly 8% of global CO2 emissions, over 900 kg of it for every 1,000 kg of material produced. Reclinker instead recovers cement paste from demolished concrete and runs it through electric arc furnaces, the equipment steelmakers already operate, to rebuild clinker while dispensing with kilns, quarried limestone and fossil-fuel heat; the company says the resulting cementitious slag could cut emissions by 50% at the outset, improving as the process scales, at cost parity with conventional cement.

The money goes to scaling the team and production in Cardiff and to expanding across electric arc furnace sites in Europe and the US, and that expansion is where the underwriting question sits: if the process runs on EAFs, Reclinker's expansion map is the steel industry's electric-furnace map, and its abatement case inherits whatever power contract those furnaces run under. A furnace fed by a coal-heavy grid makes a weaker carbon story than the process chemistry alone would suggest.

AP Ventures managing partner Andrew Hinkly put the appeal in capital-equipment terms: a route that can be deployed using steel equipment that already exists and consumes one of the world's largest industrial waste streams, which he called a natural fit for his firm's cement-sector investing.

The co-lead lands weeks after Clean Growth Fund closed its second vehicle at £81.5 million, as this publication reported, with two LGPS pools, Border to Coast and Strathclyde, supplying roughly two-thirds of the capital against a $202 million target, leaving a vehicle with 21 investments left to prove the climate-tech returns story. A £10 million cheque for Welsh industrial recycling is a small draw against that ambition, and an early test of whether public pension capital carries UK Series A climate risk all the way from commitment to measured abatement.