Gigaton raises $26M to build fully autonomous plants in energy-intensive industries

News, by AlbionVC

Climate Tech

Posted
June 3 2026

Gigaton, formerly Carbon Re, is the AI company replacing control software that runs energy-intensive industries

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 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, bringing Gigaton’s total funding to over $35M. This will fund a 5x increase in team, 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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

“We’ve backed Josh and the team since their early days as Carbon Re because we believed they had what it takes to solve one of the hardest problems in industrial decarbonisation. Yes, you need AI, but you also need a team that actually understands what happens inside these plants. Gigaton has both.

We’ve seen first-hand how Gigaton has moved far beyond an optimisation layer; it’s the new control stack for industries that produce the materials the world runs on. The results with customers like Adani, Heidelberg, and Holcim speak for themselves, and the scale of what comes next is extraordinary. We’re proud to continue supporting the team on that journey.”
DAVID GRIMM, PARTNER, ALBIONVC

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