London-based Carbon Re, an Artificial Intelligence and climate tech company that is working to decarbonise energy-intensive manufacturing, announced on Monday that it has raised £4.2M (approximately €4.78M) in a Seed round of funding.
The round was led by Berlin-based green tech venture capital firm Planet A Ventures, with follow-on participation from Clean Growth Fund, UCL Technology Fund and Cambridge Enterprise.
Jan Christoph Gras, General Partner at Planet A, says, “Energy-intensive materials, such as cement and steel, are the backbone of modern economies but they account for more than 20 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Carbon Re’s AI solution has the potential to tackle some of the toughest challenges on the road to a carbon-neutral future. Starting with fuel efficiency in cement, Carbon Re has the ambition and capability to develop a large portfolio of advanced solutions across multiple industries – and substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Capital utilisation
Carbon Re says it will use the funds to scale up the development and deployment of its technology. The company will enable product roll-out into the global cement market and expand into other energy-intensive industries such as steel and glass.
Carbon Re’s Delta Zero AI technology claims to enable the highly pollutive cement industry to reduce over 50 kilo tons of annual CO2 emissions per plant. The software installations each save as much CO2 as removing 11,000 automobiles from the road.
Sherif Elsayed-Ali, CEO of Carbon Re, says, “At a time of escalating fuel prices and increasing emphasis on CO2 reduction targets, there is an urgent need for action. Carbon Re is connecting the biggest challenge of our time – climate change – with the biggest opportunity – advances in AI. Our cement plant trials have demonstrated that Delta Zero can deliver dramatic CO2 savings on a near-live basis.”
“Our platform provides a unique solution for energy-intensive industries that delivers £2M in fuel cost savings and 50,000 tonnes of CO2 savings per plant. This latest funding round will enable us to accelerate our mission to reduce carbon emissions by gigatonnes every year,” adds Elsayed-Ali.
“Decarbonisation that saves you money”
Cement, steel, and glass are three energy-intensive industries that contribute over 20 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and are among the most difficult economic sectors to decarbonise. The present strategy for these sectors mainly relies on carbon capture and storage, a technology that will take decades to scale and currently drives up the price of these essential resources by as much as 60 per cent. This is where Carbon Re looks to make a difference.
Founded in 2020 by Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Carbon Re is on a mission to reduce carbon emissions by gigatonnes every year through the use of AI technology. Carbon Re’s Delta Zero platform uses deep learning for industrial decarbonisation to speed up the creation and application of novel low-carbon industrial designs, processes, and materials. Delta Zero analyses manufacturing data continuously to give plant managers the ability to near-live production process optimisation.
In just two years, Carbon Re’s software has been utilised in pilot projects to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions at cement plants in Europe, Asia, and the Americas by up to 10 per cent.
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