London startup raises $20m to push AI into Europe's oil sector
London-based Applied Computing has secured $20 million to deploy its industrial AI software across European energy infrastructure, threatening legacy software suppliers with promises of drastic efficiency gains for oil majors.
Applied Computing, a London startup founded in 2023, has raised a $20 million Series A round led by the engineering firm KBR, with participation from Databricks Ventures. The company has built an AI model, Orbital, designed to process the massive streams of data generated by oil refineries and petrochemical plants.
Industrial facilities typically deploy thousands of sensors tracking metrics like temperature and pressure, but operators currently use less than 8% of this data to make decisions. “It’s getting those three data sources to talk to each other in real time. That’s the real key,” said Callum Adamson, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, referring to the combination of sensor readings, engineering documents, and physics data.
Rather than predicting text like standard large language models, Orbital blends time series, physics-based, and language models to simulate and predict the physical state of a facility. The company claims this can compress plant investigations that once took weeks into seconds, allowing operators to model how a change in one area might disrupt the rest of the plant and ultimately reduce energy consumption.
The funding arrives as the startup scales rapidly, having reached double-digit millions in annual recurring revenue within 18 months of emerging from stealth. While Adamson declined to specify customer numbers, he confirmed Orbital is used by large, publicly listed energy companies and will announce a partnership with a European oil major in the coming weeks.
Entering a market dominated by established industrial software firms like AspenTech and AVEVA, Applied Computing is betting that attracting top AI talent is a stronger competitive advantage than holding industry data. “It’s an AI problem. It’s not a data problem, and it’s not an energy problem,” Adamson said. “If you’re a tier-one AI researcher, where are you going to work? … I don’t think Shell’s on that list.”
KBR has already integrated Orbital into its INSITE 3.0 platform for ammonia production, providing Applied Computing with valuable operational data and client introductions. The startup, which operates hubs in London and Bengaluru, will use the new capital to open a Houston office and expand further into North America and the Middle East.
