The Primo Climate fund invests in DMAT, the Italian-American deep tech company that makes concrete more durable and slashes its CO2 emissions.
We are surrounded by concrete. The load-bearing structures of buildings are made of concrete, as are pavements and cycle paths, motorway barriers, and bridges — a list that could go on for a long time. "From a distance, concrete all looks the same; up close, there is a great deal of technology involved": so says Paolo Sabatini, CEO and co-founder of DMAT, a deep tech company that aims to double the service life of this material and reduce its carbon footprint by up to 60 per cent. DMAT is writing its next chapters thanks in part to a capital raise completed recently: the first round of 4.5 million dollars closed in October 2025 with demand exceeding the available shares. It was led as lead investor by Primo Capital Sgr through the Primo Climate fund, dedicated specifically to climate tech.
More than 4.3 million buildings are constructed worldwide every year, corresponding to 33 billion tonnes of concrete — figures that, according to estimates, will increase by a further 30 per cent by 2050. It is therefore no surprise that today the concrete market exceeds one trillion euros per year, roughly 1 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP).
All of this comes at a cost to the environment. Of the four basic ingredients of concrete (cement, sand, gravel and water), the most problematic is cement, because its production requires extremely high temperatures — up to 1,450 degrees — and involves a chemical reaction known as calcination, which releases large quantities of CO2. It is primarily because of cement that the concrete sector alone accounts for 8 per cent of global CO2 emissions.
If cement production is so impactful, extending its lifespan can truly make a difference. It was this intuition that, in 2020, led Paolo Sabatini and Professor Admir Masic of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to begin their collaboration. "We worked in parallel on both the scientific research — with a publication in Science Advances in 2023 — and on technological validation, together with industrial laboratories," Paolo Sabatini tells LifeGate.
The result is an innovative technology, based on proprietary fillers and blends, that allows concrete to "heal" itself when cracks open due to material shrinkage during drying, thermal fluctuations, overloading or structural settlement, corrosion of internal iron reinforcements, or laying errors. This system doubles the useful life of structures and reduces the proportion of cement required over the lifecycle of concrete and mortars — thereby drastically cutting their CO2 footprint.
"Admir Masic and I founded a company in Italy in 2021 and one in the United States in 2023, going on to commercialise our solution last year," Sabatini continues. "We now have a certified, CE-marked process in Italy, we are active in the Italian and Swiss markets, and we want to bring production to the United States and the Gulf countries as well, where there is strong interest in the durability of constructions."
Within the European Union, further support comes from the revision of standard EN 206 (drawn up by CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, and adopted in Italy by UNI), which sets out a uniform methodology for classifying concrete according to its CO2 emissions per cubic metre. "This metric allows public administrations to include, in tender specifications, a scoring advantage for suppliers of concrete with a carbon footprint below the national average," Sabatini suggests.
Among DMAT's first applications is the repair of a retaining wall on a motorway in Switzerland, a project that avoided the demolition of the structure. "We started with infrastructure — which is more complex — to demonstrate that our technology works even for simpler uses such as civil construction," explains Paolo Sabatini. "It is not a niche solution: we developed it in dialogue with the entire supply chain, from architects through to engineers and contractors."
DMAT, in short, has demonstrated all the characteristics that Primo Climate looks for in the companies it invests in: "It reduces CO2 emissions, has validated technology, and delivers concrete economic and industrial benefits — all without modifying production processes: concrete is produced, transported and worked in exactly the same way, with the same processes and the same machinery," summarises Simone Molteni, scientific director of LifeGate and partner of the fund alongside Giusy Cannone and Ezio Ravaccia.
This is precisely the fund's mission: to grow high-technology companies, founded or based in Italy, that deliver benefits both in climate and in industrial terms. "Inaugurating a project generates political consensus. Inspecting and maintaining it much less so, because it means incurring further costs and causing disruption for the public," Molteni points out. "For any administration, regardless of its sensitivity to climate issues, it is advantageous to be able to keep a motorway safe by intervening every forty years rather than every twenty."
And it is not a given that all of this happens in Italy. "This round is an important signal for the Italian innovation ecosystem: the invention took its first steps in Cambridge but then found in Europe all the ingredients it needed to grow, be developed and be improved," Molteni concludes. "Today the heart of operations and research and development resides in Italy and, even with investors of international standing involved, the lead investor is Italian (Primo Climate). These seem to me to be excellent news for the country as a system."