Gigaton raises $26M to build fully autonomous plants in energy-intensive industries
- Gigaton, formerly Carbon Re, is the AI company replacing control software that runs energy-intensive industries
- Clean Growth Fund has backed Gigaton since their first round in 2021
- Deployed by several of the world’s largest cement producers, including Adani Cement, Heidelberg Materials, and Holcim, who are saving $1 million+ per year in energy costs and emissions
- New funding will enable a 5x scale-up in team size and expansion into steel, glass, and chemicals
Gigaton, the AI company replacing control software that runs energy-intensive industries, has raised $26 million in Series A funding. Led by Plural, this included participation from Clean Growth Fund, 2150, Semapa Next, Planet A Ventures, AlbionVC, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and the UCL Technology Fund, bringing Gigaton’s total funding to over $35M. This will fund a 5x increase in team members, and expansion into steel, glass, and chemicals, enabling its mission to strengthen industrial control and reduce emissions on a gigaton scale.
Energy-intensive industries are facing a crisis. Soaring energy costs, increased complexity from new fuel types and market volatility are squeezing margins across cement, steel, glass, and chemicals. Yet most plants still run on decades-old control systems that depend on manual intervention. The result is rising costs, excess carbon, and process instability. While China is already building fully autonomous “dark plants,” facilities that run without on-site operators, the rest of the world risks falling behind. The gap between what plants need and what they have is widening every year, and it is costing them today.
Josh Vernon, CEO 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.”
Stephen Price, Investment Partner at Clean Growth Fund said:
“Huge congratulations to Gigaton (formerly known as Carbon Re) on raising a $26m Series A! We’ve backed them since their very first round back in 2021 and we’re delighted to support them once again in this round. Their physical AI technology is built to decarbonise the most hard-to-abate industries at scale by leveraging their AI expertise and hard-earned industry experience to re-define what is possible with industrial process control. Gigaton delivers fully autonomous, real time process control that continuously learns and gets smarter every day. No more reliance on legacy systems and out-dated technology, Gigaton is truly delivering the AI-powered future of process control.”
Solving heavy industry’s operational challenges
Gigaton spent five years inside control rooms, understanding exactly why existing systems fail. Its self-learning technology operates deep within plant infrastructure, simulating process behaviour and forecasting the impact of each action before it is taken, allowing it to autonomously adjust key parameters, including fuel mix, kiln speed, and oxygen levels with confidence. The AI platform is designed to replace the existing control stack instead of sitting on top like a conventional solution. This results in lower energy and fuel costs, reduced emissions, and greater stability for operators. Crucially, the operators see precisely why each action is taken, and the system adapts to changing plant conditions by continuously retraining from live plant data.
Current deployments with customers such as Mannok Holdings DAC, Adani Cement, Heidelberg Materials, and Holcim deliver up to $1-3M in annual operational savings and 30,000 tonnes of CO₂ per plant, equivalent to the yearly emissions of 11,000 UK households. Savings scale to $100M or more across large multi-site customers. Gigaton is further developing its next-generation control platform with a small group of partners, with plans to scale deployment across dozens of sites in the next growth phase.
The post CGF portfolio company, Gigaton, raises $26m appeared first on Clean Growth Fund.
