Gigaton, an AI startup replacing control software that runs energy-intensive industries, has raised £19 million in a Series A led by Plural, with participation from 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. Total funding now exceeds £26 million. The new capital will fund a 5x increase in team size and expansion into steel, glass, and chemicals.
Energy-intensive industries are facing mounting pressure from soaring energy costs, new fuel types, and market volatility, while most plants still run on decades-old control systems that depend on manual intervention. The result is rising costs, excess carbon, and process instability. Gigaton spent five years inside control rooms understanding why existing systems fail before building its platform. Rather than sitting on top of existing infrastructure like a conventional solution, the AI platform is designed to replace the existing control stack entirely. It simulates process behaviour and forecasts the impact of each action before it is taken, allowing it to autonomously adjust key parameters including fuel mix, kiln speed, and oxygen levels. Operators can 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 Mannok Holdings DAC, Adani Cement, Heidelberg Materials, and Holcim deliver up to $1-3 million in annual operational savings and 30,000 tonnes of CO₂ reduction per plant, equivalent to the yearly emissions of 11,000 UK households. Savings scale to $100 million 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.
Founded in 2020 as Carbon Re and spun out of UCL and the University of Cambridge, Gigaton is now deployed by several of the world's largest cement producers. The funding round reflects growing urgency across the sector: China is already building fully autonomous facilities that run without on-site operators, and the gap between what plants need and what legacy systems provide is widening.
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.
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.
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.
