Heavy industry produces the materials that the modern world runs on. It also produces around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cement alone accounts for roughly 8% of global CO2 output, a share that has barely shifted in decades despite the proliferation of net zero pledges.
Most of the plants responsible are old, complex, and still controlled by systems designed for a different era. The question facing the sector is whether artificial intelligence can do what regulation and voluntary commitments have so far failed to achieve: cut real emissions from the plants already in operation.
Gigaton, a London-based AI company spun out of the University of Cambridge and UCL, believes it can. The company has just announced a $26 million Series A led by Plural, with participation from 2150, Semapa Next, and existing investors Planet A Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, the UCL Technology Fund managed by AlbionVC with UCL Business, and Clean Growth Fund. Total funding now exceeds $35 million.
The raise comes shortly after the announcement of a rebrand. The company, founded in 2020 as Carbon Re, is now Gigaton, a name chosen deliberately to signal the scale of ambition. “The name Gigaton is the through line from where we began to achieve our mission, which is to reduce carbon emissions from energy-intensive industries on a gigaton scale,” says Buffy Price, co-founder of Gigaton.
From Advisory Tool to Autonomous Control
Gigaton’s platform does not sit on top of a plant’s existing infrastructure and issue recommendations. It replaces the control stack. The system simulates process behaviour and forecasts the impact of each adjustment before executing it, then autonomously modifies parameters including fuel mix, kiln speed, and oxygen levels. It retrains continuously from live plant data, adapting to changing conditions without manual recalibration.
The direction of travel is already visible in China, where a new generation of fully autonomous “dark factories” is emerging. The term refers to facilities that run without on-site operators and, by extension, without the need for lighting. With no workers on the floor, the lights stay off. China is building these at scale, and the rest of the world’s industrial base risks falling behind as the gap between automated and manually operated plants widens. Gigaton’s trajectory points in the same direction: towards plants that run themselves.
The company spent the better part of a decade developing this approach, and the path to full autonomy was not a straight line. Early deployments used a recommendation dashboard that presented operators with suggested set-point changes. Feedback from the plants was clear. “We don’t want to do that,” Price recalls. “Our jobs are busy enough as it is, particularly with the introduction of alternative fuels.” Operators dealing with variable feedstocks, different moisture contents, and fluctuating calorific values need headspace for higher-order decisions, not a screen prompting 15-minute manual adjustments. Gigaton responded by moving from advisory layer to autonomous controller.
“The plant operators now always have the opportunity to switch that off and take manual control,” Price says. “They’ve always got overall oversight. But they are very, very keen to take a step back from the old way of working and give us greater control of the plant.”
That cultural shift has been smoother than the company expected. Price describes an initial assumption that AI taking control of industrial kilns operating at over 1,400 degrees would face significant resistance. Instead, the engineers and operators Gigaton works with have largely welcomed it. “The rise of LLMs has just transformed people’s understanding of what AI can do for you in everyday life,” she says. The company hosted what it called a Process Intelligence Summit in London in early 2026, bringing together operators from plants across Portugal, Brazil, and beyond for a day of collaborative working on modelling and data approaches. The enthusiasm, Price says, surprised even them.
Financial Case First, Carbon Savings Second
Current deployments span ten plants across Europe, Turkey, India, Southeast Asia, and South America. Customers include Adani Cement, Heidelberg Materials, and Holcim, as well as Mannok Holdings DAC. The platform delivers between $1.5 million and $3 million in annual operational savings per average-size plant, primarily through reduced fuel costs. Carbon savings currently run at between 10,000 and 15,000 tonnes per plant per year, with Gigaton targeting an increase to between 30,000 and 50,000 tonnes as its models expand to cover grinding processes and additional plant systems.
The financial return, Price argues, is what makes Gigaton fundable in a difficult market for climate-related investment. “The advantage we have is that we can sit outside of the climate umbrella,” she says. “We can enable our producers to reduce their running costs by up to $3 million a year just in reducing their fuel costs.” Buyers need not be motivated by decarbonisation ambitions to procure the product. Fewer shutdowns, better quality clinker, and lower operating costs make the business case stand alone.
That positioning proves persuasive to investors. “By running a single facility using Gigaton’s AI, Adani, Heidelberg, and Holcim are already saving millions a year,” says Carina Namih, Partner at Plural. “The scale from here is enormous.”
Kevin Lunney, Operations Director at Mannok Holdings DAC, illustrates the practical challenge the technology addresses. “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,” he says. “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.”
Steel, Glass, and the Road to 100 Plants
The Series A proceeds will fund a team expansion from 33 people today to around 100 by the end of 2026, alongside a target of 70 to 75 active plant deployments by the same date. The company will also extend its platform into steel, glass, mining, and petrochemicals. An Innovate UK grant awarded approximately three years ago funded an 18-month feasibility study into steel and glass; Price says the company is now confident that its core approach can transfer to those sectors.
“Our USP in the cement industry is that we build teams with cement knowledge internally,” Price says. “We’re not just some trainer wearing AI company that just goes into a cement company and tells them how to do things better.” Replicating that depth in adjacent sectors will take time and targeted hiring. The company’s existing customer relationships offer one route in, since some of the large producers it works with also operate steel and glass facilities.
What Gigaton does not claim is that operational efficiency alone is sufficient for net zero. Roughly 40% of cement’s emissions come from burning fossil fuels and alternative fuels, the area where the platform can intervene directly. The remaining 60% comes from calcination, a chemical reaction inherent to the production process that releases CO2 regardless of how the plant is run. Addressing that requires carbon capture and storage. Price is direct about this: “The government in the UK has invested £22 billion in carbon capture, and that is the only way these industries are going to get to net zero entirely.”
She does, however, see Gigaton’s platform as an enabler of CCS rather than a substitute for it. Consistent flue gas composition and stable uptime are prerequisites for viable carbon capture, and both are outcomes the platform is designed to deliver. Heidelberg Materials’ Padeswood plant in Wales, one of Gigaton’s existing customer sites, is among the furthest advanced in the UK on CCS deployment. The two technologies are, in Price’s framing, part of the same journey.
Regulatory Tailwinds and the China Gap
The policy backdrop is shifting in Gigaton’s favour, though unevenly. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) began phasing in reporting requirements from January 2025, creating compliance pressure for cement producers exporting into the single market. The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) applies further cost. Turkey, where the company has seen strong interest, faces exposure to both mechanisms. The UK is still working out how to align its own carbon pricing with the EU framework.
“The UK is still dragging its heels a little bit on trying to work out how they’ll match the EU incentives,” Price says, adding that UK alignment is expected later in 2026. Green procurement policies, which could in principle create a market premium for lower-carbon clinker, remain more distant. Price acknowledges that procurement incentives acting further down the construction supply chain have yet to translate meaningfully to cement producers.
China presents a different challenge. Around 1,800 of the world’s estimated 3,600 cement plants are located there. Gigaton is not active in the Chinese market and does not plan to enter it in the near term, citing concerns about IP protection and the prevalence of large, already highly efficient mega-plants that leave less room for optimisation. The company’s growth strategy is focused on the markets where the regulatory and commercial conditions are already moving.
Josh Vernon, CEO of Gigaton, sums up the company’s position: “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. 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.”
That combination, immediate financial returns for producers and a credible path toward material emissions reductions, is what Gigaton is betting the next phase of its growth on. Whether the company can reach the gigaton target that now defines its name will depend on how quickly it can move from cement into the adjacent industries that account for the rest of heavy industry’s enormous carbon footprint. The funding gives it the platform to try.
