Gigaton has announced a $26 million funding round led by Plural, with participation from 2150, Semapa Next, Planet A Ventures, AlbionVC, Cambridge Enterprise, and Clean Growth Fund. The London-based company builds machine learning systems that autonomously control large-scale industrial manufacturing processes, with a mission to reduce industrial carbon emissions by gigatons. Financial terms beyond the round size were not disclosed.
Gigaton’s approach sets it apart from most industrial AI companies. Rather than building chat interfaces, analytics tools, or recommendation agents, the company sits deep in the control stack of industrial facilities, operating plants autonomously through machine learning systems built by a team of machine learning scientists and chemical engineers. The company began by helping plants analyze and understand their processes but determined through years in control rooms that controlling the underlying hardware directly was the only path to achieving its emissions reduction mission. The result is AI that physically operates industrial facilities — including cement plants running at 1,500 degrees Celsius in structures sixty metres long and fifteen storeys high — in real time, autonomously, from London.
Cement production alone represents approximately 8% of global CO2 emissions, with roughly 5,000 cement plants worldwide generating terabytes of operational data and spending billions annually on energy. Gigaton said that figure represents only a fraction of the tens of thousands of industrial assets that share similar characteristics and remain unaddressed by autonomous software. The company’s thesis is that the physical world is already run by machines — they simply have not been retrofitted with the software required to control them autonomously. The fresh capital will support continued deployment of Gigaton’s industrial AI control systems across the world’s most emissions-intensive manufacturing processes.
KEY QUOTE:
“We aren’t building chat interfaces or agents that analyse and recommend. We sit deep in the control stack and build machine learning systems that actually operate industrial plants. The world is already run by machines. These machines just haven’t been retrofitted with the software required to control them autonomously. We’re building that for the most consequential industries on earth.”
Josh Vernon, Chief Executive Officer, Gigaton
