Orbital Industries secures $50M to scale data centre infrastructure systems

Orbital Industries, a London-based
company developing industrial hardware and infrastructure using AI-driven
engineering and materials discovery systems, has raised $50 million in a Series
B funding round led by Plural, with participation from existing investors
including NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures.

Founded by Jonathan Godwin, James Gin-Pollock, and Daniel Miodovnik, Orbital Industries is focused on applying AI
to accelerate how physical technologies are designed, tested, and brought to
market.

The company describes its approach as
an “AI industrial” model, integrating materials discovery, engineering, and
manufacturing into a single system aimed at reducing development timelines and
enabling smaller engineering teams to develop industrial technologies more
efficiently.

Orbital Industries is initially
targeting data centre infrastructure through Orbital IT, its commercial
division focused on cooling and deployment systems for high-density AI
computing environments. As AI workloads continue to increase, data centres face
growing pressure around power consumption, heat management, and deployment
speed, with existing cooling systems approaching technical limitations.

To address these challenges, the
company has developed a dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system
designed for next-generation GPUs and high-density compute environments.
According to Orbital Industries, the fluid is free from PFAS chemicals and was
developed using its materials discovery platform.

Underlying these products is Orb, the
company’s simulation engine designed to model the quantum mechanical behaviour
of atoms at scale. Orbital Industries says the system enables significantly
faster materials simulations compared to traditional approaches and is being
used to accelerate industrial product development.

The company is also developing modular
data centre infrastructure intended to reduce deployment timelines for new
compute capacity. Orbital Industries says the systems are manufactured off-site
and delivered as ready-to-deploy units designed to accelerate the rollout of AI
infrastructure.

According to Jonathan Godwin, co-founder
and CEO of Orbital Industries, advances in AI are allowing smaller teams to
move more quickly from scientific discovery to commercial hardware development.

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.

The funding will be used to scale
Orbital Industries’ data centre products, expand its AI and engineering teams,
and accelerate the development of industrial applications beyond data centre
infrastructure.