Gigaton raises $26M to replace heavy industry control software

A cement kiln is one of the most unforgiving machines in heavy industry. It operates at fourteen hundred degrees, cannot be easily shut down, and the software governing its fuel mix and oxygen levels is often older than the engineers who tend it. Gigaton wants to rip out that legacy control system and let an AI run the kiln instead. On 3 June, the company secured $26 million in Series A funding to scale that vision.

The round was led by Plural, with participation from 2150, Semapa Next, and existing investors including Planet A Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, the UCL Technology Fund managed by AlbionVC, and the Clean Growth Fund. This brings Gigaton’s total funding past $35 million. The capital will fuel a fivefold increase in headcount and drive expansion beyond cement into steel, glass, and chemicals.

Originally known as Carbon Re, the company rebranded in late May. It spun out in 2020 as the first joint venture between University College London and the University of Cambridge, founded by Daniel Summerbell, Buffy Price, Sherif Elsayed-Ali, and Aidan O’Sullivan. Josh Vernon, who previously co-founded Australian fintech Earnd, joined as chief executive in early 2024. The name change signals a broader ambition: not just carbon reduction as an add-on, but full control of the plant itself.

That distinction is central to Gigaton’s pitch. Most AI solutions sold into heavy industry sit atop existing control stacks, offering recommendations that operators can accept or ignore. Gigaton says it spent five years inside control rooms learning why those systems fail, and built its technology to replace the control stack rather than advise it.

Its software simulates process behavior, forecasts the effect of each action before executing it, and then autonomously adjusts parameters like fuel mix, kiln speed, and oxygen. It retrains continuously on live plant data as conditions shift. The case for letting an AI take the controls rests on numbers the company supplies. Deployments with Mannok, Adani Cement, Heidelberg Materials, and Holcim deliver $1 million to $3 million in annual operational savings and roughly 30,000 tonnes of avoided CO2 per plant, Gigaton says, scaling toward $100 million or more across large multi-site customers.

These are company figures rather than independently audited results, and the comparison to 11,000 UK households’ emissions is a framing device. But the named customers are real and substantial, and a venture investor has put money behind the readings.

The competitive anxiety Gigaton is selling against is geographic. China is already building “dark factories” , plants that run without on-site operators , and Gigaton frames the rest of the world as falling behind. There is real pressure underneath the pitch. Energy costs have climbed, market volatility has grown, and the shift to alternative fuels has made plants harder to run, not easier.

Kevin Lunney, operations director at Mannok, put that last point concretely. Moving to solid recovered fuel instead of coal, he said, is “genuinely harder to operate with,” varying in calorific value and moisture in ways coal does not. The real challenge, he added, is making operators in the control room comfortable with being asked to do something so different.

That is the unglamorous reality of decarbonising heavy industry: the carbon and cost benefits are large, but the operational transition is where projects succeed or stall. The harder question is the one any autonomous-control pitch raises. Handing a fourteen-hundred-degree kiln to software that retrains itself on live data demands a level of operator trust that recommendation tools never required. The failure modes are physical, not just financial.

Gigaton’s answer is that operators see precisely why each action is taken. Whether that transparency is enough to make plant managers cede the controls is the thing the next phase , dozens of sites , will actually test.