Warren Ndlovu
Founder & CEO

Warren Ndlovu is the founder and CEO of Sotera Materials. He brings over 10 years of experience in go-to-market strategy, operations, and strategic finance, with time as an early-stage operator at a seed-stage clean energy startup and consulting work spanning renewable energy, EVs, and critical minerals. His background includes Wharton, McKinsey & Company, Barclays, and LabStart, the accelerator program that also connects him to Akhila and What If Design, who worked on LabStart's rebrand roughly two years ago and have since engaged more with its fellows.

He co-founded Sotera with Gabe Mickel, who leads material science and technical development as CTO. The idea for the company grew out of his focus on fire safety in buildings, specifically products that protect a building from external fires or stop fires from spreading within or beyond it. Working with Gabe, he landed on the concept of a novel concrete that hardens through carbonation instead of hydration, rather than typical Portland cement. As of the kick-off conversation, the exact product hadn't been finalized and the team was still running customer discovery to validate their theories.

He explains the choice of fire safety as an entry point deliberately: it's the one problem that applies to every building type, since even niche products like acoustic panels still need to be fire rated. As he put it, aiming for that gives Sotera a fire-rated material even if fire safety doesn't end up being the company's core value proposition long-term. His early market exploration leaned heavily toward data centers, though he's since found healthcare and residential, particularly wildfire-prone areas, to be promising as well. He's also said he wants to bring an aesthetic appeal dimension into the product line, beyond pure fire performance.

Gabe Mickel
Founder & CTO

Gabe Mickel is co-founder and CTO of Sotera Materials, leading material science and technical development. He describes himself as a scientist, operator, and connector, bringing together a background in materials science and nanotechnology with hands-on startup research experience and a wide network of founders, scientists, and industry experts. His background includes the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Master of Science in Nanotechnology and a Bachelor of Science in Materials Science and Engineering, plus time at VitroLabs, Plug and Play, and Sandia National Laboratories.

He co-founded Sotera with Warren Ndlovu, who leads go-to-market strategy and operations as CEO. Gabe's role has been to turn Warren's fire-safety framing into an actual material, a novel concrete that hardens through carbonation rather than the hydration process typical of Portland cement. His path there runs through deep technical R&D: over four years at VitroLabs, moving from research assistant to associate scientist, where he led assay development and a 1,000x volume scale-up that cut COGS by 70 percent and lifted strength and density metrics significantly. As of the kick-off conversation, validating that material science with real customers is still active work.

He's explicit about what shaped his approach: at VitroLabs, the most meaningful traction came through a deep development partnership with a global corporate, one that went beyond a standard customer relationship into real co-creation, and that experience shaped his conviction that startup-corporate partnerships reliably get new materials to market. He carried that belief into his next role leading the New Materials and Packaging vertical at Plug and Play's Sustainable Futures group, matching startups building transformative materials technology with corporates that had the scale and infrastructure to deploy them, before turning that same conviction toward building Sotera itself.

Problem
Solution
Technology
Team
Contact

Accelerating construction without compromising performance

A new class of concrete that cures faster, at higher strength and lower carbon.

See how it works
Connect with us

Broken materials procurement processes are a leading cause of construction delays

Ask any builder what wrecks a schedule, and materials top the list. Material delays stall everything behind it: crews wait, costs climb, delays compound down the critical path.

75% of construction projects finish behind schedule.
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Problem
Forecast inaccuracies lead to manufacturing delays.
Demand forecasting
Demand response
Problem
Lengthy holding times
(1-4 weeks) before panels are ready to ship.
<12 hr
Curing time
No Holding time
Forecast*
Manufacture
Hold*
Distribution
Installation
Problem: Weeks of planning with no guarantee of accuracy.
Demand forecasting
Demand response
Producers project demand and order months ahead.
Problem: Weeks of planning with no guarantee of accuracy.
Demand forecasting
Demand response
Batch and cast the mix.
Problem: Lengthy holding times (1-4 weeks)
<12 hr Curing time
=
No Holding time
Panels held in yard to cure to full strength.
Problem: Weeks of planning with no guarantee of accuracy.
Demand forecasting
Demand response
Trucked from plant to site.
Problem: Weeks of planning with no guarantee of accuracy.
Demand forecasting
Demand response
Materials reach the site.
Forecast*
Manufacture
Hold*
Distribution
Installation

Ready to ship in hours, not days

Portland cement-based products have a weeks-long production cycle. Our chemistry enables faster curing, so panels can ship in less than a day.

Ordinary Portland Cement

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This is some text inside of a div block.
Note: Visuals are AI-generated representations of the process, not actual product or site photography.

New chemistry, new possibilities

CO₂ flows through the pores of the material and interacts with reactive particles (orange) embedded in the mixture. A new mineral phase (blue) rapidly precipitates into the empty space, hardening the material faster and stronger than OPC.

Mixing & casting
Onset of curing
Full strength
Ordinary Portland Cement
Reacts with water
Reacts with CO₂
Reactive particles (Orange)
Note: Colors are representational. Orange indicates reactive particles and blue indicates new mineral phases, not actual material appearance.
Mixing & casting
Onset of curing
Full strength
Ordinary Portland Cement
Water
Heat + CO₂
Reactive particles
(Orange)
Note: Orange indicates reactive particles and blue indicates new mineral phases, not actual material appearance.
Ordinary Portland Cement
1 day
1 hour
New mineral
phase convention
(Blue)
Note: Orange indicates reactive particles and blue indicates new mineral phases, not actual material appearance.
Ordinary Portland Cement
7+ days
< 10 hours
Note: Orange indicates reactive particles and blue indicates new mineral phases, not actual material appearance.
"We were stacking five layers just to hit code on fire rating, and half of it got cut to waste on site. One panel that handles fire resistance, looks good on the exterior, and cuts down on labor? That's not a sustainability play. That's a scheduling play."
Isaac Chambers
Owner of Pixel Studio
"We were stacking five layers just to hit code on fire rating, and half of it got cut to waste on site. One panel that handles fire resistance, looks good on the exterior, and cuts down on labor? That's not a sustainability play. That's a scheduling play."
Isaac Chambers
Owner of Pixel Studio
"We were stacking five layers just to hit code on fire rating, and half of it got cut to waste on site. One panel that handles fire resistance, looks good on the exterior, and cuts down on labor? That's not a sustainability play. That's a scheduling play."
Isaac Chambers
Owner of Pixel Studio

On-time delivery, made the default.  

We're building the material that makes it possible and welcome partners who want to build it with us.

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