A cement kiln is one of the least forgiving machines in industry. It runs at fourteen hundred degrees, it cannot easily be stopped, and the software deciding its fuel mix and oxygen levels is often older than the engineers tending it. Gigaton wants to throw that software out and let an AI run the kiln instead. On 3 June, it raised $26M to do it at scale.
The Series A is led by Plural, with 2150, Semapa Next and existing backers including Planet A Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, the UCL Technology Fund managed by AlbionVC, and the Clean Growth Fund.
It brings the company’s total funding past $35M and will fund a fivefold increase in headcount and expansion beyond cement into steel, glass and chemicals.
Gigaton was known as Carbon Re, but rebranded in late May. The original spun out in 2020 as the first joint venture from 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 the Australian fintech Earnd, joined as chief executive in early 2024. The renaming signals the wider ambition: not carbon reduction as a feature, but control of the plant itself.
That distinction is the company’s whole pitch. Most AI sold into heavy industry sits on top of the existing control stack, offering recommendations a human operator can take 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.
