Orbital Industries raises USD $50 million in Series B

Orbital Industries has raised USD $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Plural. Existing investors NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures also participated.

The London-based company will use the funding to expand its data centre products, grow its AI and engineering teams, and develop its industrial platform for applications beyond data centres.

Orbital Industries uses AI to design and manufacture physical infrastructure, starting with equipment aimed at easing constraints in AI data centres. Its first products include a dielectric cooling fluid for next-generation graphics processors and a modular data centre system designed for faster deployment.

The cooling fluid is non-toxic and free from PFAS chemicals, which face growing regulatory scrutiny in the US and Europe. The product was designed for chips that generate more heat as AI computing systems become denser.

Alongside the cooling system, Orbital Industries has built modular data centre units that can be deployed in as little as six months, compared with traditional build times of up to three years. The units are manufactured off-site and delivered ready to install.

AI model

At the centre of the business is Orb, the company's AI model for simulating the quantum mechanical behaviour of atoms. Orbital Industries said Orb can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single graphics processor and runs ten times faster than the nearest alternative.

Those performance gains helped cut the time needed to develop a new cooling fluid from roughly a decade to a matter of months. The company is also using the same approach to design industrial systems for data centre infrastructure.

Orbital Industries has a multi-year partnership with AWS and is working with other data centre operators on cooling and efficiency technologies. It is operating in a market shaped by growing demand for AI computing and mounting pressure on power, heat management and deployment speed.

The business was founded by Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Godwin, Chief Technology Officer James Gin-Pollock and Chief Operating Officer Daniel Miodovnik. Godwin previously worked at DeepMind on AI for science, engineering and materials design, while Gin-Pollock previously sold a company to Shutterstock.

Orbital Industries has a team of 50 across London and San Francisco. It plans to apply the same model to sectors including semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace and energy.

Plural's backing adds to a group of investors focused on AI infrastructure and industrial technology. NVentures, the venture arm of NVIDIA, was among the existing backers in the round.

The company is entering the market through Orbital IT, its commercial brand for data centre infrastructure. It cited rising graphics processor density and increased demand for AI computing as drivers of the need for new cooling methods and faster construction of physical sites.

Demand for data centre capacity has risen sharply as companies build and train larger AI models. That has created opportunities for businesses addressing physical bottlenecks such as cooling systems, power supply and construction timelines, which have become more important as operators try to bring new capacity online more quickly.

Godwin said Orbital Industries was built on the view that AI can change how industrial products are developed and brought to market.

"When people imagine a better future, they think about physical things: technologies that give them more freedom, more time, more life. AI will get us there faster. That's what we set out to do at Orbital Industries. Frontier AI gives us PhD-level expertise across every discipline, meaning small, agile teams can move from materials discovery to commercial hardware in a way that simply wasn't possible before, so what used to take a decade, we can now do in months. We're starting with some of the most pressing challenges in data centres, but the scope of what this approach can unlock is much, much bigger," said Godwin.

Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, linked the investment to the physical constraints facing AI deployment.

"AI progress is now constrained by the physical world: by energy, heat and infrastructure. Orbital Industries is tackling those constraints directly, from breakthroughs like its AI-designed cooling fluid, which enables the next generation of GPUs. The ability to discover and deploy these technologies faster than traditional industry will define the next phase of AI and it's clear there is already strong demand for what the team is building," said Hogarth.