Cambridge is a startup hotbed. Technical talent, investors and industry contacts sit within a few miles of each other, which made it quick for us to assemble the right ecosystem. We could access specialists who understood our materials science, alongside the capital to back it, and build our production plant in central Cambridge, taking us from lab-stage technology to scaled manufacture.
Paul Radziwill
Commercial Director, Composite Designers Ltd
Composite Designers is decarbonising the built environment through its next-generation carbon-negative construction materials.
Conventional bricks and tiles emit around 213 kg CO2e per tonne, while the sustainability premium attached to greener alternatives has long kept low-carbon materials out of mainstream specification. Founded by Dr Frank Gommer, Composite Designers is tackling both challenges by creating carbon-storing construction products that match the price, performance, and practicality of the clay and cement materials already used across the industry.
Composite Designers has developed a fully circular, recyclable construction material that enables buildings to act as a carbon store. It’s proprietary composite, built around a high proportion of biochar with bio-based binders, sequesters 1.2 kg of CO2 per kg of material produced, with brick slips alone locking away 11.1 kg of CO2 per square metre. Tiles and brick slips serve as the company’s beachhead product, designed as a plug-and-play alternative that can be installed with existing construction tools and methods, removing barriers to adoption. At scale, 70,000 brick slips or tiles installed across a typical out-of-town supermarket could store around 13.6 tonnes of CO2 while avoiding the embodied carbon emissions associated with conventional clay cladding.
In 2023, Composite Designers secured funding from Innovate UK to advance the development of its carbon-negative construction materials. Carbon13’s pre-seed investment followed in 2025 supporting the launch of a pilot production line that has since expanded the company’s manufacturing capabilities. In 2026, Composite Designers was selected as an innovation partner for Exploit4InnoMat providing installation and monitoring support for pilot projects. Together, these milestones have helped advance the company’s brick slips to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6 while achieving price parity with existing market alternatives.
With its technology validated through pilot projects and production capabilities continuing to grow, Composite Designers is now focused on bringing its first tiles and brick slips to market. By scaling production and expanding real-world installations, the company aims to make carbon-storing construction materials a mainstream choice across the built environment.
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