Orbital Industries secures $50 million in Series B funding for AI-created data center equipment.

      The startup based in London and San Francisco, previously known as Orbital Materials, has secured $50 million in funding led by Plural for its PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular high-density computing infrastructure. Now named Orbital Industries, the AI-materials firm has raised this amount in a Series B round with additional contributions from Nvidia's NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures.

      This funding will enhance the commercial rollout of the company's cooling fluid for data centers and modular computing infrastructure, while also expanding its workforce in London and San Francisco. Along with the funding round, the company has undergone rebranding. Orbital Industries was established in 2022 by CEO Jonathan Godwin (formerly of DeepMind), CTO James Gin-Pollock, and COO Daniel Miodovnik. Initially focused on AI-driven carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuel chemistry, the company has since shifted its focus toward data center infrastructure due to strong commercial interest.

      The new name, Orbital Industries, reflects this broader focus, with aspirations to apply its model to semiconductors, essential minerals, aerospace, and energy in the long term. The two primary products currently under development merit detailed attention. The first is a PFAS-free dielectric cooling fluid designed for the advanced high-density GPUs. PFAS, known as "forever chemicals," have been a staple in two-phase immersion cooling systems in data centers for years but are facing increasing regulatory restrictions from the EPA and EU. 3M completely exited the production of its Novec PFAS-based coolants in 2024, prompting data center operators to seek alternatives as Nvidia’s new GPU generations push power densities beyond the limits of traditional water cooling. The fluid from Orbital, developed using its AI materials platform, addresses this need.

      The second product is a modular data center system, manufactured off-site and delivered as pre-assembled units ready for deployment. Orbital claims that this approach can reduce deployment times to as short as six months, compared to the typical three-year timeline for constructing custom high-density facilities. There is a significant capacity constraint in the industry, as companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta have struggled to secure sufficient cooling and power resources for their ambitious computing plans, leading to a rise in modular prefabrication as an industry standard.

      Orbital distinguishes itself with its AI-driven engineering process that designs the modules rather than simply assembling them off-site. The core technological asset behind Orbital is Orb, the company's open-source AI model for simulating quantum-mechanical behaviors of atoms. This model is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, with its latest v3 release capable of handling large-scale simulations of fully solvated 20,000-atom enzymes, and the company boasts stable simulations of up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU.

      Published benchmarks indicate that Orb performs three to six times faster than current universal interatomic potentials and achieves a 31% reduction in error compared to the Matbench Discovery benchmark. The partnership with AWS, which the company has been highlighting since December 2024, was established under the previous Orbital Materials name. This strategic agreement encompasses data center decarbonization, cooling, and water-utilization technologies, with Orb being available to AWS clients via SageMaker JumpStart and the AWS Marketplace. This commercial relationship serves as the main near-term revenue source for the cooling fluid product line.

      The funding round led by Plural represents a significant validation within the European deeptech sector. Plural partner Ian Hogarth, who spearheaded the investment, is a prominent figure in UK AI policy and previously chaired the predecessor organization to the UK AI Safety Institute. Notably, Nvidia NVentures' involvement is also significant, as the chip maker's strategic investment arm seldom supports hardware infrastructure startups directly, indicating that Orbital’s cooling fluid may have relevant applications for GPU deployments beyond the Blackwell generation.

      Godwin, reflecting on his background, joined DeepMind during the development of AlphaFold and worked in AI for science and materials prior to founding Orbital. The company has not yet revealed any figures regarding revenue, customer counts, or the valuation following the Series B round.