“We’re finally getting the lift from the market demand that we had hoped for some 20 years ago”
Ecocem, the green cement manufacturer founded by Donal O’Riain in 2000, has just raised €22.5 million from Bill Gates’s climate-focused fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures. From Paris where he has been working remotely since long before Covid-19, the Irish entrepreneur tells Thomas Hubert about his quest to decarbonise a heavily polluting industry, pouring concrete from the Aviva Stadium to European high-speed rail lines and dealing with impact investors.