Orbital Industries has raised $50 million (£37m) in Series B funding, led by Plural.
The company is building industrial hardware from the atoms up to address the physical constraints of AI infrastructure.
Orbital Industries designs, engineers and manufactures physical infrastructure, using AI to accelerate how new technologies are discovered and brought to market.
It was co-founded by CEO Jonathan Godwin, who has been in AI research for nearly a decade, including five years at DeepMind working on AI for science, engineering and advanced materials design; CTO James Gin-Pollock, a repeat AI founder who previously sold a company to Shutterstock; and COO Daniel Miodovnik, whose background spans finance, government AI and advisory work to the UN.
They are united by the belief that advances in AI fundamentally change how industrial companies can be built and run.
Instead of treating materials discovery, engineering and manufacturing as separate processes, Orbital integrates them into a single AI-driven system, enabling smaller, highly interdisciplinary teams to move faster and bring new industrial technologies to market more efficiently.
Existing investors NVentures (NVIDIA), Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures also participated. The funding will be used to scale Orbital Industries’ data centre products, grow its AI and engineering teams and accelerate the development of its platform for industrial applications beyond data centres.
The company is entering the market through Orbital IT, its commercial brand for data centre infrastructure – a $344bn industry set to be worth more than $2 trillion by 2032. Rising AI compute demand and increasing GPU density are pushing infrastructure to its limits, with power, cooling and deployment emerging as the primary bottlenecks to scaling AI. These constraints will determine how quickly new systems can be built and deployed.
As AI models grow more powerful, the chips that run them generate increasing levels of heat in ever more dense environments, pushing conventional water-based cooling to its limits. Within the next few years, new approaches will be required to prevent next-generation GPUs from overheating.
Orbital Industries has developed a dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system designed specifically for these chips; a critical breakthrough that enables future high-density compute. Unlike existing alternatives, the fluid is free from PFAS ‘forever chemicals’, allowing it to meet tightening regulatory standards across the US and Europe.
Traditionally, developing a new cooling fluid would take around a decade, but Orbital Industries’ AI-led approach has dramatically accelerated this process. The company is working with leading data centre operators, including through a multi-year partnership with AWS, to develop cooling and efficiency technologies, bringing these systems closer to deployment at hyperscale data centres.
This is possible because of Orb, the company’s AI engine for simulating the quantum mechanical behaviour of atoms. Just as large language models have scaled to handle longer and longer documents, Orb has scaled to simulate larger and larger physical systems: it is the only model that can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU, where every competitor crashes.
It runs ten times faster than the nearest alternative — outperforming models from Microsoft, Meta and leading academic labs — turning week-long quantum simulations into coffee-break computations, and independent benchmarks show its predictions don’t drift or hallucinate over time, meaning scientists can trust the results without babysitting the model.
This positions the company at the centre of one of the most critical bottlenecks in scaling modern AI systems.
In parallel, Orbital Industries has developed a modular data centre system designed using AI to solve the engineering challenges of extreme compute density required for next-generation GPUs. The system enables new AI infrastructure to be deployed in as little as six months, compared to traditional timelines of up to three years. Manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units, it allows data centre operators to bring high-density compute capacity online far faster at a time when demand is outpacing infrastructure supply.
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With a growing team of 50 across London and San Francisco, Orbital Industries is scaling its products for commercial deployment. Its long-term ambition is to apply the same model across sectors, including semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace and energy, using AI to redesign how critical physical infrastructure is developed, manufactured and deployed.
“When people imagine a better future, they think about physical things: technologies that give them more freedom, more time, more life,” said Godwin.
“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.”
Ian Hogarth, partner at Plural, said: “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.”
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