Creating the next era of machine perception
From sight and sound to chemical awareness. Altered Carbon adds a new sensory layer to the digital world — a scalable perception platform for AI, robotics, and intelligent environments.
WHAT WE DO
Digital Chemical Perception
Altered Carbon has developed a scalable platform for digital chemical perception: the ability for machines to detect, interpret, and act on invisible chemical signals in the air.
Our technology is built on proprietary graphene nanomaterials engineered for mass manufacture and seamless integration with standard silicon electronics. The sensors operate at the intersection of nanotechnology, electronics, and software, converting complex air chemistry into reliable, machine-readable data at ultra-low power and at cost points suitable for global deployment.
Rather than a single sensor for a single problem, we have created a core sensing architecture that can be configured for many applications. The same underlying platform can be applied wherever technology needs a deeper, continuous understanding of its environment, from buildings and infrastructure to healthcare, industry, and beyond. In effect, we are giving machines a new sense, one designed from the outset to scale, integrate, and underpin entirely new classes of data-driven products and services.
OUR EDGE
Why Our Technology Is Different
Most gas-sensing technologies in use today are based on metal-oxide sensors. They work, but they come with structural limitations that make them expensive to run and hard to scale: high power consumption, drift over time, slow response, and ongoing calibration overhead.
Altered Carbon’s graphene-based sensing platform takes a different approach. Built on proprietary graphene nanomaterials and designed for integration with standard semiconductor electronics, it delivers chemical sensing at ultra-low power with stable, repeatable performance. Just as importantly, it has been engineered for manufacture at scale, not as a bespoke lab device but as a platform that fits into existing supply chains.
Ultra-Low Power
Runs on microwatts, enabling deployment in battery-powered and energy-harvesting devices.
Highly Stable
Graphene’s inherent stability ensures reliable readings over extended periods without recalibration.
Scalable Economics
Compatible with existing semiconductor fabrication for cost-effective mass production.
Continuous Operation
Always-on sensing delivers real-time continuous monitoring rather than periodic sampling.
The result is a sensing technology that is not only more capable, but economically viable to deploy widely. It opens the door to continuous chemical awareness in places where traditional sensors are simply too costly, too power-hungry, or too complex to maintain.
PLATFORM APPLICATIONS
One Technology. Multiple Industries.
Built Environment
Making buildings aware of what cannot be seen — from air quality threats to invisible pollutants.
Healthcare
Detecting invisible threats in clinical environments through breath analysis and pathogen monitoring.
Food & Agriculture
Reducing spoilage by sensing what others miss — from freshness detection to soil emissions.
Security & Defence
Chemical awareness for high-risk environments — from threat detection to perimeter monitoring.
Industrial & Infrastructure
Leak detection, emissions monitoring, and predictive maintenance across energy and utility networks.
Robotics & Autonomous Systems
A new layer of sensing in autonomous environments — beyond vision and sound.
Founded
2018
Patents Filed
10+
Partners
15+
OUR MISSION
To give machines a new sense — enabling safer, healthier, and more intelligent environments.
Founded in 2018 at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Altered Carbon was created to tackle a problem that sits at the edge of materials science, electronics, and computation: how to capture complex chemical information from the real world and translate it into data that machines can trust and act upon.
The company is built around deep technical capability. Our team brings together expertise spanning graphene nanomaterials, electrochemical sensing, semiconductor integration, signal processing, and applied artificial intelligence. Over several years of sustained research and engineering, we have addressed challenges that extend well beyond detection itself, including selectivity, stability, manufacturability, and system-level integration.
What we have built is not a single product or demonstration, but a robust sensing platform that can be embedded into real-world environments and existing digital infrastructure. The outcome is foundational rather than experimental: a new layer of machine perception that allows technology to understand the chemical dimension of the physical world, supporting safer buildings, healthier environments, and more intelligent, data-driven systems.
LEADERSHIP
Leadership Team
George Hawkins
CEO
Sam Onwugbenu
CPO & Founder
Frazer Barnes
CTO & Founder
Suresh Pushpananthan
Chairman