Orbital Industries, an AI-powered industrial technology company focused on building physical infrastructure for the AI era, announced it has raised $50 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Plural, with participation from existing and previous investors NVentures (NVIDIA), Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures.
The company said the funding will be used to scale deployment of its data centre infrastructure products, expand its AI and engineering teams across London and San Francisco, and accelerate development of its broader industrial AI platform.
Founded by CEO Jonathan Godwin, CTO James Gin-Pollock, and COO Daniel Miodovnik, Orbital Industries is developing what it describes as an “AI industrial” model that integrates materials discovery, engineering, and manufacturing into a single AI-driven system. The company believes this approach enables smaller interdisciplinary teams to develop and commercialize industrial technologies more rapidly than traditional methods.
Orbital Industries is initially targeting the data centre infrastructure market through its commercial brand, Orbital IT. The company notes that growing AI compute demand and increasing GPU density are creating major challenges related to power, cooling, and deployment, which have become key constraints on AI infrastructure expansion.
One of the company’s flagship technologies is a dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system designed for next-generation GPUs. Unlike many existing alternatives, the fluid does not contain PFAS chemicals and is intended to comply with evolving environmental regulations in the United States and Europe. Orbital Industries said its AI-driven development process significantly reduced the time required to create the technology compared to traditional approaches.
The company is also working with major data centre operators and has established a multi-year partnership with AWS focused on cooling and efficiency technologies for hyperscale data centres.
At the center of the company’s platform is Orb, its AI engine for simulating the quantum mechanical behavior of atoms. According to Orbital Industries, the system can simulate up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU while delivering substantially faster performance than competing models. The company believes these capabilities can accelerate the discovery and development of new industrial materials and technologies.
In addition to cooling solutions, Orbital Industries has developed a modular data centre platform designed to support extreme compute density requirements for future AI hardware. The system is manufactured off-site and delivered as deployable units, allowing operators to bring new AI infrastructure online in as little as six months compared to traditional development timelines that can extend to three years.
The company currently employs approximately 50 people across London and San Francisco and plans to expand further as it scales commercial deployments. Looking ahead, Orbital Industries intends to apply its AI-powered industrial development model across additional sectors, including semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace, and energy.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Jonathan Godwin, Co-Founder and CEO, Orbital Industries
“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.”
Ian Hogarth, Partner, Plural
