London-based Orbital Industries has raised $50M in a Series B led by Plural to commercialise an AI-designed, PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular data centre systems for next-generation GPUs — addressing the physical infrastructure bottleneck that compute density growth is creating.
The company’s AI engine Orb is the only model capable of simulating 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and runs 10x faster than its nearest alternative, outperforming models from Microsoft, Meta and leading academic labs, according to independent benchmarks.
The data centre infrastructure market stands at $344B today and is projected to surpass $2 trillion by 2032.
The GPUs powering the current generation of AI models run so hot that the cooling systems built to manage them are themselves becoming a bottleneck. Water-based cooling is approaching its physical limits. The chemicals historically used in dielectric cooling fluids are now subject to tightening environmental regulation across Europe and the US. And the time it takes to design a new cooling material – typically close to a decade –- is incompatible with the speed at which GPU density is increasing.
Orbital Industries, the London-headquartered industrial technology company founded in 2022 by Jonathan Godwin, James Gin-Pollock, and Daniel Miodovnik, has raised $50M in a Series B led by Plural, with participation from NVentures – NVIDIA’s venture arm and returning investors Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures. The company employs 50 people across London and San Francisco. Godwin spent nearly a decade at DeepMind, five of those years on AI for science, engineering, and advanced materials design. Gin-Pollock previously sold a company to Shutterstock. Miodovnik’s background spans finance, government AI, and advisory work for the UN.
