Orbital Industries Raises $50M to Reshape AI Data Center Hardware

Orbital Industries has closed a $50 million Series B funding round. The London-based company develops industrial hardware using AI — from material simulation to finished product. The round is led by Plural, with existing investors NVentures (Nvidia), Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures also participating. Orbital Industries will use the fresh capital to scale data center infrastructure, expand its team, and further develop its AI platform for industrial applications beyond data centers.

Orbital Industries was founded by CEO Jonathan Godwin, who spent nearly a decade in AI research — including five years at DeepMind focused on AI for science, engineering, and materials research. At his side is CTO James Gin-Pollock, a serial founder in the AI space. The team is rounded out by COO Daniel Miodovnik, who brings experience in finance, government AI, and consulting for the United Nations.

The founding team holds the thesis that advances in AI are fundamentally changing how industrial companies are developed and operated. Rather than treating materials development, engineering, and manufacturing as separate steps, Orbital integrates these processes into a unified AI-driven system. The goal is to enable smaller, highly specialized teams to bring industrial technologies to market faster.

Cooling as the Bottleneck of the AI Era

The company’s market entry is through Orbital IT, the commercial brand for data center infrastructure in an industry worth several hundred billion US dollars that is set for strong growth in the coming years. Rising AI compute demands and increasing GPU density are pushing existing infrastructure to its limits. Power supply, cooling, and deployment are emerging as central bottlenecks in scaling modern AI systems.

Orbital Industries has developed a dielectric cooling fluid as well as a cooling system for next-generation GPUs. The fluid is free of PFAS (forever chemicals), thereby meeting tightened regulatory requirements in the US and Europe.

Typically, developing new coolants takes several years to a decade. The company’s AI-driven approach is intended to significantly accelerate this process. According to the company, Orbital works with leading data center and cloud operators such as AWS to develop cooling and efficiency technologies for hyperscale data centers.

AI Engine Simulates 100,000 Atoms on a Single GPU

This is made possible by Orb, the company’s AI engine for simulating atomic and quantum mechanical systems. According to Orbital Industries, the model can simulate up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU — in a domain where other models reach their limits.

The system is said to be up to ten times faster than comparable approaches, outperforming models from major technology companies and research labs alike.

This allows complex simulations that traditionally take weeks to be completed significantly faster. Independent benchmarks are also said to demonstrate high stability and accuracy of results, making them usable for scientific applications.

Modular Data Centers in Six Months

In parallel, Orbital Industries has developed a modular data center system optimized using AI for the high-compute-density requirements of next-generation GPUs. According to the company, the system reduces the deployment of new AI infrastructure to around six months — compared to industry-standard timelines that frequently span several years.

Prefabricated off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units, the systems enable operators to bring compute capacity for high-density AI workloads online significantly faster — at a time when demand is outpacing existing infrastructure supply.

Expansion and Long-Term Industrial Ambitions

With a growing team of 50 employees, Orbital Industries is scaling its products for commercial use. The long-term ambition extends beyond data centers into sectors such as semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace, and energy.

CEO Jonathan Godwin explains: “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.”

Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, adds: “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.”