Gigaton raises USD $26 million in Series A funding

Gigaton has raised USD $26 million in a Series A funding round led by Plural, taking total funding for the London AI company to more than USD $35 million.

The round also included 2150, Semapa Next, and existing investors Planet A Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, UCL Technology Fund managed by AlbionVC with UCL Business, and Clean Growth Fund.

Previously known as Carbon Re, Gigaton develops control software for energy-intensive industrial plants. It is focused on sectors including cement and plans to expand into steel, glass, and chemicals.

The new capital will support a fivefold increase in headcount and help broaden the use of its software across more industrial sites and sectors.

Heavy industry is under pressure from higher energy costs, changing fuel inputs, and volatile markets. Many plants still rely on older control systems that need regular manual intervention, which operators and technology suppliers say can add cost and instability.

Gigaton argues these constraints are becoming more serious as manufacturers try to cut emissions while keeping output stable. Its software is designed to replace existing plant control systems rather than sit alongside them.

Industrial focus

The business has concentrated on cement plants, where fuel use, combustion conditions, and equipment settings can shift quickly during production. Its system makes autonomous adjustments to variables such as fuel mix, kiln speed, and oxygen levels.

According to Gigaton, current deployments with Mannok Holdings, Adani Cement, Heidelberg Materials, and Holcim are delivering annual operational savings of USD $1 million to USD $3 million per plant. Each plant can also cut about 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

For customers with multiple sites, the financial impact could be much larger, with savings rising to USD $100 million or more across large industrial networks, according to the company.

That proposition comes as producers in Europe and elsewhere face pressure to remain competitive against lower-cost manufacturing bases. Gigaton pointed to the emergence in China of more highly automated plants with fewer on-site operators.

Josh Vernon, Chief Executive Officer of Gigaton, said: "Every cement executive I speak to is facing the same challenges: costs they struggle to control, carbon they struggle to reduce, and plants that weren't built for the world they're operating in today. The underlying software infrastructure most plants run on today was never built to manage the complexity plants are forced to deal with today. We have built Gigaton to deliver real cost and carbon savings now while building the AI infrastructure these industries need in a fully autonomous future."

Gigaton was founded in 2020 and emerged from work linked to UCL and the University of Cambridge. Its pitch to industrial groups centres on changing how plants are run at the control level, in an industry where many software environments have been in place for decades.

The company spent five years studying plant control rooms and operator workflows before bringing its system into live industrial settings. The software uses live plant data to model likely process outcomes before changing operating parameters.

Investor view

Plural's backing gives Gigaton support from a venture investor active in European deep technology and industrial software. The deal points to continuing investor interest in AI businesses targeting sectors where energy use and emissions remain difficult to reduce.

Carina Namih, Partner at Plural, said: "Cement, glass, and steel are the materials civilisation runs on, but producing them consumes about a quarter of global energy. The Gigaton team combines deep AI expertise with years spent inside these plants understanding how they actually operate. By running a single facility using Gigaton's AI, Adani, Heidelberg, and Holcim are already saving millions a year. The scale from here is enormous."

Customers have also highlighted the operational challenge of moving away from traditional fossil fuel inputs. Alternative fuels can lower emissions and costs, but they can also make plants harder to manage because fuel quality varies more widely.

Kevin Lunney, Operations Director at Mannok Holdings DAC, said: "We've had to look at all levels of innovation to improve our carbon footprint. Moving to alternative fuels like solid recovered fuel is genuinely harder to operate with - it's not the clean, consistent product that coal is, and varies in calorific value and moisture content. But the CO2 and cost benefit is enormous. The real challenge is making that transition with your operators in the control room, so they feel comfortable and understand why they're being asked to do something so different. That's where we've needed real support - and Gigaton provides it."