heavy-industry
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The 3-Week Fix for Mining's 10-Week Talent Problem
Peter Lucas built a 60-plus-person industrial project firm around an unglamorous promise: get the right specialist into the owner's team fast, then keep the knowledge from walking out the door.
The Startup That Turns Factory Exhaust Into a Power Plant - and Bills Nobody For It
Up to 58% of the energy fed into heavy industry escapes as waste heat. Kanin Energy built a business model that catches it, converts it to power, and hands the factory a check instead of an invoice.
ArcelorMittal
ArcelorMittal sells the material beneath modern life - then confronts the carbon bill attached to making it. Its next act is a high-stakes rebuild of steel, powered by scrap, electricity, research and a supply chain few rivals can match.
Mawaad Environmental Services
Mawaad Environmental Services (MES) is a Dubai-based materials processing and resource-recovery company founded in 2018 by Ismail Fahmy. It turns industrial by-products - chiefly the slag left over from steelmaking - into marketable construction materials such as steel slag aggregates and ladle furnace slag. Operating on a cradle-to-cradle circular-economy model across the GCC and Egypt, MES holds long-term processing agreements with steel producers including Emirates Steel and Ezz Steel, and reported processing and selling 300,000 tons of steel slag in the first half of 2021.
Vivity AI
Vivity AI is an industrial AI company building software that connects the physical factory floor to real-time machine intelligence. Its containerized Vivity Edge platform plugs into standard PLCs, IIoT sensors and CCTV systems to run computer-vision and anomaly-detection models on-site - powering Safety AI for accident prevention and Analytics for equipment failure detection. Founded in 2022 with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seoul, the company targets heavy industries like petrochemicals, energy, shipbuilding and heavy manufacturing, and is backed by South Korean strategic investor Hanwha Systems and Plug and Play.
Hgen
Hgen is a Los Angeles-area climate-tech company building higher-efficiency alkaline electrolyzers that convert water and renewable electricity into clean, low-cost hydrogen for heavy industry. Founded in 2021 by former Tesla and SpaceX engineers, Hgen redesigned the electrolyzer cell to shed hydrogen bubbles faster, claiming roughly 20x higher power density and a much smaller footprint than conventional alkaline systems. The company packages its technology into shipping-container-sized units that need only water and electricity, aiming to undercut the cost of trucked-in liquid hydrogen and help decarbonize chemicals, steel, and other industrial processes.
Leise Sandeman
Leise Sandeman is the CEO and co-founder of Pathways, a climate-tech startup building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Pathways uses AI to automate the creation of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material makers - concrete, steel, cement, glass - turning a months-long consultant slog into a process that takes weeks. A Copenhagen native and former McKinsey sustainability consultant who scaled a recycling venture before studying at Harvard and MIT, Leise co-founded Pathways in 2022 with Alex Cooper after meeting in an MIT entrepreneurship class. The company raised an oversubscribed $2.5M seed round in February 2024 and now serves manufacturers across hundreds of plants.
Molly Yang
Molly Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Hgen, a Los Angeles climate-tech company building modular, mass-manufacturable alkaline electrolyzers to make clean hydrogen cheap enough for heavy industry. A former energy product lead at Tesla, she teamed up with childhood friend and ex-SpaceX engineer Colin Ho to shrink the electrolyzer roughly twentyfold and package it into shipping containers that need only water and electricity. Hgen has raised $7M total from Founders Fund, Seven Seven Six, and Fontinalis Partners, and Yang was named a 2022 Breakthrough Energy Fellow.
ControlRooms.ai
ControlRooms.ai is an Austin-based industrial AI company that builds an AI-assisted troubleshooting platform for heavy industry - chemical, energy, and materials producers. Instead of relying on static, pre-programmed rules, its software learns a plant's normal behavior on its own and flags anomalies in real time across thousands of sensor parameters, helping operators catch small problems before they become unplanned trips, flaring events, or costly downtime. Founded in 2021 by serial AI entrepreneur Monte Zweben and Omar Talib, the company raised an oversubscribed $10M Series A in 2023 led by Origin Ventures and is live at industrial leaders including OCI Global and Ardagh Group.
Fourier
Fourier is a Palo Alto-based clean-energy company building modular, fully automated electrolyzers that produce green hydrogen on-site and on-demand. By borrowing architecture from the data center industry - racks of small, software-managed electrolyzer 'blades' running on reprogrammed mass-produced power supplies - Fourier aims to eliminate the costly, hazardous transportation and storage that inflate hydrogen prices, making clean hydrogen practical for heavy industry, transportation fuel, and distributed energy storage.
Cameron Halliday
Cameron Halliday is the co-founder and CEO of Mantel, a Cambridge, Massachusetts climate-tech company spun out of MIT's chemical engineering labs. Mantel uses molten borate salts to capture CO2 from heavy industry at high temperatures, recovering most of the energy as usable steam and slashing the cost and energy penalty of carbon capture. Halliday discovered the core material during his PhD at MIT, then co-founded the company in 2022 and raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Shell Ventures and Eni Next.
Doomberg
Doomberg is the pseudonymous green-chicken persona behind the most-read finance newsletter on Substack, with 373,000+ subscribers. Run by a tight-knit team of former heavy-industry executives and private-equity professionals, Doomberg delivers lateral-thinking analysis on energy, finance, and geopolitics - unapologetically pro-nuclear, data-driven, and fiercely independent. Launched in May 2021, the publication grew from zero to the #1 finance newsletter on Substack without spending a dollar on marketing, making it one of the most remarkable organic media success stories of the independent publishing era.