Orbital Industries, a UK-based AI industrial company developing physical infrastructure and advanced materials using artificial intelligence, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Plural, with participation from NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures. The funding will support expansion of the company’s data centre products, AI capabilities and industrial technology platform.
Scaling AI-Powered Industrial Infrastructure
Founded by former DeepMind researcher Jonathan Godwin alongside James Gin-Pollock and Daniel Miodovnik, Orbital Industries combines materials discovery, engineering and manufacturing within a single AI-driven system. The company aims to accelerate the development of critical technologies across industries including energy, computing and advanced manufacturing.
Solving Data Centre Bottlenecks
Orbital Industries is entering the market through Orbital IT, a data centre infrastructure business focused on addressing growing challenges around power, cooling and deployment driven by AI workloads.
The company has developed a PFAS-free dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system designed for next-generation GPUs. Through an AI-led development process, Orbital significantly reduced the time required to create new cooling technologies and is already working with major data centre operators, including AWS.
Orb AI Engine and Future Expansion
At the core of the platform is Orb, an AI engine capable of simulating the quantum behaviour of up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU. The technology helps accelerate materials discovery and engineering processes that traditionally take years.
With a team of 50 across London and San Francisco, Orbital plans to expand beyond data centres into sectors including semiconductors, aerospace, critical minerals and energy infrastructure.
"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 Jonathan Godwin, co-founder and CEO of Orbital Industries.