Orbital Industries, an industrial technology startup, has raised £37 million in Series B funding led by Plural, with participation from NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures. The funding will be used to scale Orbital Industries’ data centre products, grow its AI and engineering teams and accelerate development of its industrial AI platform.
Founded by Jonathan Godwin, James Gin-Pollock and Daniel Miodovnik, Orbital Industries designs and manufactures physical infrastructure using AI to speed up how industrial technologies are developed and brought to market. The business is positioning itself as an “AI industrial” company, combining materials discovery, engineering and manufacturing into a single system designed to reduce development timelines and allow smaller teams to commercialise industrial technologies more quickly.
The company is entering the market through Orbital IT, its commercial data centre infrastructure business. According to Orbital Industries, rising AI compute demand and increasing GPU density are creating major bottlenecks around power, cooling and deployment across data centres. The business has developed a dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system for next-generation GPUs, designed to manage higher heat loads in dense compute environments without using PFAS “forever chemicals”. Orbital Industries said the system is being developed with leading data centre operators, including through a multi-year partnership with AWS.
At the centre of the platform is Orb, Orbital Industries’ AI engine for simulating the quantum mechanical behaviour of atoms. The business said the model can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and runs ten times faster than competing systems from companies including Microsoft and Meta. Orbital Industries said the technology is designed to accelerate materials discovery and industrial engineering workflows that would traditionally take years to complete.
Alongside its cooling technology, Orbital Industries has also developed a modular data centre system designed to reduce infrastructure deployment timelines from up to three years to as little as six months. Manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units, the system is designed to help operators bring high-density compute online more quickly as AI infrastructure demand continues to rise. The company currently has a team of 50 across London and San Francisco and plans to apply its platform across sectors including semiconductors, aerospace, critical minerals and energy.
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.
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.
