AI Co‑Pilot Decarbonising the World’s Most Energy‑Intensive Industries
From BE100 semi-finalist to raising £1m through Blue Earth Ventures
Kondor has already secured early backing from US investors, including angels and a corporate VC, followed by an advanced subscription agreement in early 2025. The company is now raising £1 million through Blue Earth Ventures to expand its team, strengthen its enterprise capabilities, support new pilots and convert existing projects into commercial contracts.
When Tim Highfield (MIChemE, FCMI) left behind a 25-year career in global energy engineering to build a startup, he wasn’t searching for a headline or a pivot. He was following a signal, one he’d seen repeatedly across his consulting career: industry is wasting enormous amounts of energy and emitting vast amounts of avoidable carbon, simply because no one has the tools to see and fix the inefficiencies hiding in their data.
That signal became Kondor , an AI-native co-pilot for energy efficiency and decarbonisation. And today, the company is raising £1m through Blue Earth Ventures to scale its technology, convert existing pilot customers, and tackle a market measured in the billions.
In 2025, Kondor reached the semi-finals of the BE100 Grow Category at Blue Earth Summit and their momentum since has only accelerated.
This is their story.
Want to invest? Explore their round 👉 https://app.raaise.co/share/kondor
From oil & gas engineering to AI decarbonisation: Tim's founder journey
Before Kondor, Tim spent more than two decades designing and optimising some of the world’s most complex industrial assets:
- Offshore platforms in Norway
- LNG facilities across the US, India and China
- Compression stations
- Hydrogen and carbon capture systems.
As a director in engineering consultancy, he watched the same pattern repeat across clients:
“Consultants were spending weeks, sometimes months, analysing data manually. Yet 25–30% efficiency gains were sitting there, hidden in plain sight.”
When he collaborated with a software team on an internal energy-efficiency module, the numbers were undeniable:
- 25% energy reduction
- 26% emissions reduction
- $3m additional revenue per year
But the company shelved the project. Tim didn’t. He saw a market failure too big to ignore, and the early blueprint for Kondor.
Enter Peter: a co-founder with deep AI and fintech scale experience
The second half of Kondor came via Deep Science Ventures.
Tim partnered with Peter Kasprowicz (PhD in theoretical physics), whose eclectic journey included trading exotic derivatives, “escaping to Guatemala” to build a solar-as-a-service startup to Series C, and CTO roles at multiple fintechs.
Tim brought industrial and commercial depth and Peter brought advanced software and agentic AI expertise. Together, they saw a way to build something that didn’t yet exist: a platform capable of analysing industrial equipment continuously, learning how it behaves, and providing operators with clear recommendations for how to reduce emissions and save money, instantly.
“It’s a unique partnership: industry meets advanced AI.” — Tim
What Kondor actually does
Kondor positions itself as an AI co-pilot for energy efficiency and decarbonisation.
It continuously monitors industrial equipment, evaluates performance and identifies optimisation opportunities that would normally require deep engineering study. The platform blends thermodynamic models, empirical models, machine learning and agentic AI to create insights that go far beyond the capabilities of spreadsheets or even traditional digital twins.
The result is a system that can tell operators exactly what is working, what isn’t and what they should adjust, in real time, 24 hours a day.
Early customers and commercial traction
Kondor is focused on energy-intensive industries, from chemicals and food production to petrochemicals, refining, oil and gas and the fast-growing world of industrial data centres. The company operates a SaaS subscription model, with additional project-based licensing for consultants who want to use the platform with their own clients.
The early customer results have been striking. A pilot project in the Permian Basin in the United States has demonstrated a 15 percent reduction in energy use, equating to $4.4 million saved annually and 69,000 tonnes of CO₂ avoided. Kondor’s own revenue share would represent 10–20 percent of those savings, depending on compute and deployment scope.
A second pilot, underway at a European compression station, has shown a 13 percent reduction in fuel gas, delivering €1 million in savings and more than 6,000 tonnes of annual CO₂ reduction. Once the site falls under the EU Emissions Trading System, the financial benefits will grow further.
Both projects are expected to progress into commercial contracts in Q1 2026, and eight additional customers under NDA are awaiting pilot availability, far more than Kondor can currently serve. The need to scale is now urgent.
A market hiding in plain sight
The scale of the industrial inefficiency problem is vast. Global industry wastes between $187 billion and $375 billion every year in avoidable energy costs, a figure that represents 2 to 4 percent of global emissions. Kondor estimates that more than 300,000 facilities could benefit from their technology. Even capturing a modest slice of that market, in the region of two percent, would translate to roughly 4,000 sites.
Many of the organisations they are speaking with operate dozens of facilities globally. A single pilot conversion could become a fleet-wide rollout. For a platform positioned at the intersection of AI, decarbonisation and industrial performance, the opportunity is enormous.
Competitive edge: AI-native, not Excel-dependent
While legacy players rely on slow, rigid digital twins, and newer startups rely on large language models trained directly on customer data, Kondor has made two key choices:
- AI-native technical architecture They flex between thermodynamic, empirical and ML models precisely where each is strongest.
- No training on customer data This protects IP and solves a major blocker for enterprise adoption.
The result: a fast, defensible platform with a clear moat in model design and agent orchestration.
A £1m raise to unlock the next phase
Kondor has already secured early backing from US investors, including angels and a corporate VC, followed by an advanced subscription agreement in early 2025. The company is now raising £1 million through Blue Earth Ventures to expand its team, strengthen its enterprise capabilities, support new pilots and convert existing projects into commercial contracts.
Tim is clear about where this raise sits in the company’s trajectory: the opportunity is immediate, and execution speed matters. While investor interest is strong, Kondor is still seeking a lead investor, who will also help set the valuation for this round.
Industrial energy waste is not a niche problem. It is one of the world’s most economically and environmentally significant challenges, and one that can be addressed without waiting for new hardware, retrofit cycles or policy changes. The technology to fix it already exists. Kondor is building the system that can scale it.
For investors, operators and climate leaders, Kondor presents a rare combination: defensible technology, proven savings, measurable emissions reduction and a market of extraordinary size.
The next chapter begins with the raise now underway.
Join Kondor’s £1m Raise Through Blue Earth Ventures 👇
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