Atmospheric AI announced on November 5, 2026, that it had raised $10 million in seed funding led by DBL Partners to expand its computational models of raw-material supply chains. DBL Partners published its portfolio page on November 4, 2026. The startup plans to move beyond plastics into chemicals, paper and metals, while DBL’s Vinnie Caruso joins its board.
The funding will also deepen collaboration with an initial group of around 100 manufacturers. That expansion connects the technical work to a commercial push: Dr Torsten Lichtenau is joining as founding chief commercial officer after 22 years at Bain & Company, where he was a senior partner and global head of carbon transition.
Modeling Industrial Supply Chains
Atmospheric AI’s approach begins with the physical processes used to make materials, rather than depending on suppliers to disclose internal operating data. Its models incorporate chemical engineering, plant economics and industrial processes, including relationships among feedstocks, energy, production costs and emissions. The connected system covers oil fields and pipelines, refineries, chemical plants, terminals and shipping routes.
Atmospheric AI says it runs around 50,000 facility models and, in one test, reproduced a producer’s published carbon footprint to within 4.4% without using that producer’s own data. The models are intended to estimate what a material should cost, assess whether a supplier’s price increase is justified, identify other plants that could supply it and examine how a disrupted route could affect cost, carbon or resilience.
The company’s product description presents the platform as a dynamic digital twin of a raw-material value chain, from its origin to the factory gate. Facility-specific cost, carbon and risk information supports should-cost analysis for individual suppliers, supplier-specific Scope 3 emissions metrics and lifecycle-assessment integration. Multi-tier mapping, proactive alerts and sourcing recommendations are intended to bring disruption and negotiation decisions into the same workflow.
Applying Models to Procurement Decisions
Haleon is one manufacturer already working with Atmospheric AI. Chris Low, Haleon’s head of sustainability procurement, said the companies have collaborated for almost two years on resin sourcing. His team now begins with a material’s should-cost, carbon footprint and supply-chain risks rather than relying only on the supplier’s quote, connecting the modeling work directly to a buying decision.
In a customer example described by Atmospheric AI, a manufacturer faced a proposed price increase of $730 per tonne during the Hormuz disruption. The startup’s team calculated that the underlying increase in manufacturing costs was approximately $120 per tonne. That analysis gave the sourcing team a basis for discussing what had changed in production economics instead of simply accepting the proposal or disputing it without evidence.
Co-founder and CEO Roee Goldberg described the long-term goal as a computational model of the raw-material economy: manufacturers would understand the plants and supply networks behind what they buy, with chemical engineering providing the foundation and AI enabling the work at a much larger scale.
The immediate test set by the round is breadth: whether a facility-based approach already applied to resin sourcing can support procurement decisions across additional material categories. Atmospheric AI is pairing that expansion with new commercial leadership and deeper manufacturer collaboration, making the move beyond plastics central to what the seed funding is meant to enable.
