Somerville-based Cement Manufacturing Startup Issues Large-scale Layoffs

SOMERVILLE, MA — A cement manufacturing and climate-based technology company announced it has undergone large-scale layoffs.

Sublime Systems has reportedly moved on from two-thirds of its approximately 90 person workforce. The company cited the loss of an $87 million federal grant from the Department of Energy it was slated to receive this past December as a main reason why the cuts were made.

The company is headquartered out of Somerville’s Somernova Innovation Campus at 28 Park St., where it has 30,000 square feet of space made up of offices, research and development labs, and a manufacturing plant. The grant was going to be used to fund the construction and staffing of an additional manufacturing facility in the Central Massachusetts city of Holyoke. Construction on that facility that was estimated to cost $150 million has been paused since December as well.

“Donald Trump is continuing his crusade against American manufacturing, American workers, and American competitiveness on the world stage,” Senator Ed Markey said in a statement about the rescission of the grant. “When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, it was with hardworking American communities such as Holyoke and visionary U.S. businesses such as Sublime Systems in mind. Together, they planned a $150 million investment in American manufacturing that would have created hundreds of union construction jobs and more than 70 full-time jobs for families in Western Massachusetts, all while cornering the market on the next generation of clean cement technology.”

Sublime was founded in 2020 by MIT researcher Dr. Leah Ellis and Professor Yet-Ming Chiang that the same electrochemical principles used in batteries could be applied to cement production as opposed to fossil fuels. The business has a goal of decarbonizing the manufacturing of building materials overall.

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