Applied Computing raises $20m with engineering group KBR in the lead

On 16 July, Applied Computing announced a $20m (£14.8m) funding round led by KBR, the Houston-based engineering and technology group, with Databricks Ventures joining as a new investor. The London company made the announcement a day after its annual demo day at the Energy Institute in London, where it says it showed its Orbital model working live.

The company was founded by chief executive Callum Adamson and Dr Samyakh Tukra, its chief AI officer. Companies House records it as incorporated on 14 December 2023 as Kashmir Intelligence Ltd; it took the name Applied Computing Technologies in April 2025, and the two founders are its only persons with significant control. The founders met through Imperial College London. Tukra finished a PhD in AI and 3D computer vision there in 2022, and Adamson, an expert in residence, mentored him while he went through Imperial Enterprise Lab programs. After Tukra’s earlier startup, Third Eye Intelligence, ran its course, the pair planned Applied Computing in 2023, according to Imperial’s account. Stride.VC led a £9m seed round with Repeat.vc in May 2025, and the company later hired Dan Jeavons, who led Shell’s global AI program, as president.

Orbital is what Applied Computing calls the first foundation model built specifically for energy operations. The company says it combines three models: one trained on time-series data from a plant’s control systems and historians, a physics-based model that keeps predictions consistent with mass and energy balances, and a language model that reads engineering documents such as piping diagrams and operating procedures. Its targets are refineries, petrochemical sites and oil and gas operations. Adamson told TechCrunch that facilities make operating decisions using less than 8% of the data available to them, because sensor readings, engineering documents and the underlying physics and chemistry are hard to combine quickly. “It’s getting those three data sources to talk to each other in real time,” he said.

KBR is not a venture fund. It licenses process technology to the kind of plants Applied Computing wants to sell to, it says it secured a board position in March and it has put Orbital inside a product of its own. The round is a distribution arrangement with capital attached, and it shows AI for energy operations reaching plants through the engineering firms that design and license them.

A contractor in the lead

KBR first invested on 23 March, when it announced a strategic stake, a board position and a multi-year joint development agreement to co-create exclusive AI products for the energy sector. KBR said it was its first strategic investment in an AI company. Greg Conlon, its chief digital and development officer, said the investment “enables us to scale innovations across our full range of licensed technologies”.

The product came before the stake. On 29 January, at India Energy Week in Goa, the two companies launched INSITE 3.0, a version of KBR’s remote technical and advisory platform for operating plants that runs on Orbital and is aimed at ammonia production. Jeavons said at the launch that KBR’s ammonia licensing relationships “represent 50% of the world’s capacity”. Adamson told TechCrunch that KBR brings plant operating data, process know-how and introductions to prospective customers.

A data platform on the cap table

Databricks Ventures arrives as an investor 10 months after Applied Computing announced a partnership with Databricks that made Orbital available inside the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, starting with operators in India. Julien Debard, Databricks’ global energy leader, said then that energy customers wanted to “transition from the potential of data and AI to real-world impact”.

Between them, the two investors cover two ways into a plant: the contractor that designs and licenses the process, and the data platform where an operator may already keep its records. Applied Computing opened an office in Bengaluru in December 2025 and, with this round, an office in Houston, Texas. The company says the money will also accelerate commercial deployment with energy operators and deepen investment in its AI research organization. Two of its existing customers are in North America, Adamson told TechCrunch, and Houston puts the company near them.

The unnamed operators

What the round doesn’t show is a named operator paying for Orbital. According to TechCrunch, the company says it went from stealth to annual recurring revenue in the double-digit millions in less than 18 months. Adamson said Orbital is in use at large listed upstream, refining and petrochemical companies, and that the company works with a major US upstream operator, but he declined to say how many customers it has. On its own account, Applied Computing will announce its first partnership with a European oil major in the coming weeks.

It is also selling into a field with established suppliers. AspenTech and AVEVA sell process simulation and optimization software to refineries and chemical plants, while Cognite and Seeq work on the industrial data layer, as TechCrunch noted. Adamson told the same outlet that the barrier to entry is research talent rather than access to data or process knowledge.

KBR’s lead puts a contractor with an Orbital-powered product of its own, and a board position it announced in March, at the center of Applied Computing’s next stage. The partnership with a European oil major that it has promised would give Orbital its first named operator, and a public test of how far the model sells without KBR in the room.