Atmospheric AI, a company that builds computational models of industrial raw-material production for manufacturer sourcing teams, has raised £7 million in seed funding. The round was led by DBL Partners, with participation from RAISE, Broadscale, Norrsken Evolve, Working Capital Fund, Flex Capital, tiny.vc and Anamcara. Vinnie Caruso of DBL Partners is joining Atmospheric AI's board.
Atmospheric AI models how materials are made, connecting chemical engineering, plant economics and industrial processes into a picture of the global industrial system, from oil fields and pipelines to refineries, chemical plants, terminals and shipping routes. Atmospheric runs around 50,000 facility models and uses them to help sourcing teams judge what a material should cost, whether a supplier's price increase is justified, which other plants could make it, what happens if a route is disrupted, and whether a different sourcing decision is better on cost, carbon or resilience, without relying on suppliers sharing their internal operating data.
In one test, Atmospheric reproduced a producer's published carbon footprint to within 4.4%, without using its own data. Manufacturers including Haleon work with Atmospheric. During the Hormuz disruption, one manufacturer was presented with a proposed price increase; working through the underlying production economics, Atmospheric's team calculated the actual increase in manufacturing costs and gave the customer's sourcing team a different starting point for the conversation with their supplier. In September, Atmospheric received the Early Stage award at the DPW Awards 2026 in Amsterdam. Torsten Lichtenau is joining as Founding Chief Commercial Officer after 22 years at Bain & Company, where he was a Senior Partner and Global Head of Carbon Transition.
So far, much of Atmospheric's work has focused on plastics. With this funding, Atmospheric will expand into more of the materials that underpin manufacturing, including chemicals, paper and metals, and deepen collaboration with an initial group of around 100 leading manufacturers.
For almost two years, Haleon has worked closely with Atmospheric AI to change how we source resins. We now start from what a material should cost, its carbon footprint and the risks in its supply chain, rather than from what a supplier quotes us.
Manufacturers deeply understand their operations, but the industrial supply chains they depend on remain a black box. Atmospheric AI combines engineering expertise with AI to give manufacturers unprecedented visibility to make faster, smarter, and more sustainable sourcing decisions. That's exactly the kind of industry-changing innovation DBL Partners seeks to back.
Our ambition is to build a computational model of the raw material economy. We want manufacturers to be able to understand the plants and supply networks behind everything they buy, and use that understanding to make better decisions. Chemical engineering gives us the foundation to do that. AI allows us to tackle it at a much larger scale.
