The Story of EcoLocked: Turning Buildings Into Carbon Sinks

The Story of EcoLocked: Turning Buildings Into Carbon Sinks

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Steff Gerhart, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of EcoLocked, shared the origin story of a company that found its purpose at the intersection of two massive problems: the desperate need for scalable carbon removal and construction’s stubbornly high emissions footprint.

The Carbon Removal Bottleneck

The story begins with a realization that most people still haven’t internalized. “For a long time the focus was on emission reductions and at some point the IPCC said, well, emission reduction, we need to do all we can, but even in best case scenarios, we will not get close to our climate goals,” Steff explains. The solution? “We additionally need to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. So carbon removal.”

But there was a problem with carbon removal technologies. “Most of them are really early stage, not ready to scale and highly energy intense and super expensive,” Steff notes. One technology stood out: biochar carbon removal. In 2023, it accounted for over 90% of all carbon removal credits sold in the market.

Even dominance didn’t mean scale. Biochar carbon removal was the largest player in a tiny market. The technology worked, but it lacked something critical: “Scalable end application for the product that it’s producing, which is a kind of a material called biochar.”

An Engineer’s Curiosity

This is where Michael, EcoLocked’s CTO and Steff’s co-founder, enters the story. As an engineer and environmental scientist, he came across biochar and had a simple question: “Oh, that’s such a cool technology, why isn’t it applied further?”

He started investigating end markets systematically. Where could biochar actually be used at scale? The search led him to construction, and the numbers were staggering. “Just the building materials make 15% of the overall global emissions every year and cement alone is 8%,” Steff shares. To put that in perspective: “The aviation sector is 2 to 3%.”

Construction wasn’t just a massive emissions problem—it was a hard-to-solve emissions problem. “It’s really hard to abate and being able to find a solution for this market to compensate the emission and inset the emissions and this is really powerful solution,” Steff explains.

Michael had found something rare: a technology looking for a market and a market desperately needing a solution. Even better, solving one problem would unlock the other. “At the same time we help then scale up a very powerful CDR technology that we need.”

Validating the Opportunity

Michael didn’t jump straight into building. He did what every technical founder should do: he validated the technology and the market simultaneously. “He basically looked at, you know, is it scalable, is it promising? You know what it says it does, is the technology sound?” Steff recalls.

Then came the harder question: economics and customer pain. “Is it economically feasible? Are we actually solving a customer pain point? Right. Or are we just hoping to do something important but no one really cares about it?”

This dual validation—technical feasibility and economic viability—protected EcoLocked from a trap that kills many climate tech startups: building something important that nobody will buy.

Michael worked with Mario, Steff’s second co-founder, on the business case. They verified feedstock availability and mapped out the economics. Then Steff joined to add market validation, talking to stakeholders across the construction value chain to add detail and reality to the hypothesis.

The Evolution

What they planned initially isn’t what they’re building today. “Obviously as you know, direction is changing. So what we planned in the very beginning has evolved quite a bit to what we are doing now,” Steff notes. The driver? “This is like to a large part obviously driven by customer feedback.”

This willingness to evolve separates successful startups from failed ones. EcoLocked didn’t fall in love with their solution—they fell in love with the problem. When customers told them what they actually needed, the team listened and adapted.

Cracking the Concrete Code

Getting that first customer in the concrete industry required strategy, not luck. “Our direct customers are concrete producers. And obviously they are not known to be super innovative or always looking for new materials,” Steff explains. The industry demands materials that are “well known, that are proven, that are completely de risk.”

EcoLocked’s approach was surgical. They focused on concrete producers already marketing sustainability credentials and who had either partnered with startups or demonstrated internal innovation. These weren’t early adopters—they were the only possible adopters.

The first customer came from nearby, enabling the face-to-face interaction the industry demanded. EcoLocked went into their lab, tested with their materials, and worked directly with their head of laboratory. “Making sure they can build up that trust, they can get the security that there’s something legit was really important,” Steff recalls. “And all of that sprinkled with some excitement and enthusiasm to support a young startup and led to our first customer.”

Strategic Patience

While other startups rushed to launch, EcoLocked practiced strategic silence. They worked with a handful of customers for nearly two years, perfecting their product before ramping up marketing. “We actually really tried to work just with a handful of customers to make sure we are market ready and we are ramping up our marketing efforts, really just I would say in the last few months,” Steff shares.

This patience came from understanding their market’s memory. Going public too early meant burning their one chance at a first impression. Better to be unknown than to be yesterday’s news.

Building Trust in a Tight-Knit Industry

The concrete industry’s reputation—”everyone talks of the concrete mafia,” Steff says with a laugh—reflects its interconnected nature. “Everyone knows everyone and people talk a lot amongst each other. So really like the reputation that you have is important and you don’t want to like screw it up.”

This required balancing transparency with enthusiasm, especially when navigating the split between sustainability-focused executives and risk-focused technical leaders. EcoLocked invested heavily in education: infographics, explainer videos, thought leadership content, conference appearances. “A lot of people are not very knowledgeable about sustainability, about carbon removal,” Steff notes. Before they could sell, they had to teach.

The Future: Scale and Expansion

Looking three to five years ahead, Steff’s vision is clear and ambitious. “For us, we really need scale, right? Because in the end, we are in this for the climate. We want to unlock the built environment as a carbon sink for this biochar industry.”

The technical challenge is demonstrating they can handle biochar’s complexity consistently. “We need to demonstrate that we are able to handle the complexity that comes along with its material and able to kind of process it in a way that it can consistently be introduced into the construction value chain.”

On the go-to-market side, expansion happens in two dimensions. First, geographic: from Central Europe to “North America, Middle east.” Second, market segment: “It will be important to become more cost competitive to bring down the green premium and then move from the premium market into the mass market.”

This isn’t about capturing a niche—it’s about transforming an industry. Buildings account for 15% of global emissions. If EcoLocked succeeds, every building becomes part of the climate solution instead of the problem. Concrete, one of civilization’s oldest materials, becomes a tool for removing carbon from the atmosphere.

The company that started with an engineer’s curiosity about an underutilized technology has become a bridge between carbon removal and construction—two industries that desperately needed each other but never knew it. That’s the story of EcoLocked: finding the connection nobody else saw and building a company to make it real.