How AI Helps Construction Suppliers Sell More with EPD Automation. Meet Pathways.

Ask a cement or concrete producer what it takes to win a major project today, and there's a good chance they'll start with paperwork.

That paperwork is the Environmental Product Declaration, or EPD. Think of it as a nutrition label for building materials: an independently verified record of the carbon footprint of one specific product, like a particular concrete mix from a specific concrete plant. A few years ago it was a nice-to-have. Today, many developers, contractors, and public agencies won't buy a material for their project unless it comes with an EPD.

Cement, the key ingredient in concrete, accounts for about 8% of global CO2 emissions. According to the UN Environment Program, roughly three-quarters of the urban infrastructure that will exist in 2050 has yet to be built. With that much construction ahead, choosing lower-carbon materials is one of the biggest ways to cut emissions, and it's quickly becoming mandatory. Governments are writing carbon limits into what they'll buy for public projects, and the companies building AI data centers have made public climate commitments they now have to show progress on. So before they commit to a material, buyers, regulators, and tech companies want proof of what it costs the planet.

The trouble is that EPDs are slow and expensive to produce. The data behind one is spread across a plant's quality control system, utility bills, supplier invoices, and spreadsheets. Most producers hire a consultant to pull it together by hand, which costs $15,000 - $75,000 per product and takes 6 to 12 months. For a producer selling dozens of concrete recipes across several plants, those costs add up fast, and a year-long wait can mean missing a bid entirely. AI changes that math. It can read and organize scattered factory data automatically, turning it into verified records in weeks instead of months.

That's why we're proud to announce that Sorenson Capital led Pathways' $6M seed round! Pi Labs, Zacua Ventures, Blue Lion, Positive Ventures, Remarkable Ventures, Great Wave joined us, alongside strategic investors Titan Ventures and Heidelberg Materials.

EPDs Have Gone From Optional to Required, Fast

Demand for EPDs didn't build gradually. Within roughly two years, public agencies, international and local regulations, and some of the largest private buyers in the world started requiring them.

Picture a ready-mix producer, a company that makes concrete and trucks it to job sites. It's bidding to supply a state highway project or a big tech company's new data center, its price is competitive, and its plant has room to take on the work. But the buyer now requires an EPD that the producer doesn't have, and getting one will take longer than the time it has to submit the bid.

That scenario is becoming common because the pressure is coming from three directions at once:

• US state governments. Since January 1, 2025, New York has required an EPD for every type of concrete used on state projects, and other states have passed Buy Clean laws of their own.
• European regulators. The EU's Construction Products Regulation is raising disclosure requirements, and CBAM, its carbon border tariff, entered its definitive phase on January 1, 2026, turning carbon reporting into a real cost. Exporters without verified carbon data are assigned default values instead, which typically means paying more.
• Big tech buyers. Microsoft, Meta, and AWS have all publicly committed to lower-carbon concrete and steel for the data centers they're building to run AI.

Demand changed fast, but the way EPDs are made didn't. One industry R&D director told us that they still take about 12 months, even with existing software. So a producer can have the right product, the right price, and plenty of capacity, and still lose a highway or data center bid because the EPD won't be ready in time. We heard versions of that story again and again during diligence.

You Run the Plant, Pathways Will Handle the Paperwork

Pathways doesn't ask manufacturers to adopt new software or clean up their data first. It plugs into the systems a plant already uses, like its quality control software, utility accounts and finance tools. Where there's no clean integration, Pathways' AI agents read the documents themselves, from PDF electricity bills to scanned supplier invoices and spreadsheets, and organize that information into the life cycle assessment an EPD is built on. Each EPD is designed to hold up under third-party verification, including NRMCA verification for concrete.

Here's what that changes for a producer:

There are three key areas that set Pathway's technology apart:

• AI mapping. An AI agent maps each customer's raw system data to Pathways' model, cutting integration time dramatically. One producer had five plants live in nine days.
• Auditability. Pathways brings an agentic approach to certification, so every EPD can stand up to third-party verification.
• Speed. Producers get verified EPDs in weeks instead of 6-12 months. Once a plant's model is built, new EPDs take seconds.

The sustainability impact follows naturally: you can't reduce what you can't measure. When EPDs become affordable, even small producers can get product-level carbon data.

The Industry Is Already Moving

Pathways is already making strides in the industry:

• Heidelberg Materials, one of the top three cement producers in the world, used Pathways to publish the first cement EPDs in North America under the industry's new product category rules, and is now expanding with Pathways across manufacturing sites in North America, Europe, and Australia.
• Titan is deploying Pathways across its North American operations, and its venture arm also invested in this round.
• Crete Solutions brought five plants and a new Stonemont integration live in nine days. As Crete's VP of Technology, David Draper, noted, his team assumed "doing all the EPD work ourselves was just the industry norm…until Pathways finished data modeling in days that had previously taken us weeks."

Why We Invested

At Sorenson Capital, one of our core theses is built-world automation. The physical economy runs on documentation produced by hand, and demand for that documentation keeps rising while skilled labor stays scarce. Pathways stood out because it treats EPDs as a data problem, not a document problem.

Three things led us to lead this round:

• A regulation-driven tailwind in a segment almost no one else is building for.
• Strong initial traction, with a top-three global cement producer choosing Pathways over its own tool.
• A leader who can sell and know how to focus. CEO Leise Sandeman brings industrial domain expertise and product instincts to turn messy, operations-heavy workflows into software.

We believe that Pathways creates value across the whole ecosystem: manufacturers win more bids at lower cost, specifiers and buyers get credible product data, and program operators get clean, verifiable inputs.

We're proud to partner with Leise and the Pathways team as they build the data layer for the materials that build our world.

This portfolio company update is provided for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation to invest in any security. This post was prepared by Sorenson Capital based on internal and third-party sources (including publicly-available sources) which it believes to be reliable. However, Sorenson Capital makes no representation as to the accuracy or completeness of such information. It should not be assumed that other portfolio investments will be profitable or equal to the success of the company profiled in this post. A complete list of Sorenson Capital investments is available upon request.