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

      The London-and-San-Francisco startup, now called Orbital Industries and formerly known as Orbital Materials, has secured $50M in funding led by Plural for its PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular high-density computing infrastructure.

      Orbital Industries, an AI-materials startup, raised $50 million in a Series B round with participation from Nvidia's NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures. The funding will help expand commercial deployment of the company's data center cooling fluid and modular computing infrastructure products and grow its team in London and San Francisco.

      The company has rebranded as it moves forward with this funding round. Founded in 2022 by Jonathan Godwin (previously of DeepMind), James Gin-Pollock, and Daniel Miodovnik, Orbital Materials initially focused on AI-discovered carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuel chemistry. However, it has since shifted, or rather broadened, its focus to data center infrastructure, where there has been a stronger immediate commercial interest.

      The new name, Orbital Industries, reflects this wider focus; the company's long-term goal is to adapt the same model for semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace, and energy.

      Two key products are noteworthy. The first is a PFAS-free dielectric cooling fluid designed for next-generation high-density GPUs. PFAS, known as "forever chemicals," have been used in two-phase immersion-cooling systems in data centers for years but are now facing stricter regulatory bans from the EPA and EU. 3M completely stopped producing its PFAS-based Novec coolants in 2024, leaving data center operators searching for alternatives as Nvidia's new generations push power densities beyond the capacity of water cooling alone. Orbital's fluid, developed using its AI materials platform, aims to fill that gap.

      The second product is a modular, off-site manufactured data center system delivered as ready-to-launch units. Orbital claims this method reduces deployment times to as little as six months compared to the traditional three years for custom-built high-density facilities. The current capacity bottleneck is significant, as companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta have visibly struggled to secure sufficient power and cooling capacity to meet their planned computational expansions, prompting the industry to respond with modular prefabrication as a standard practice.

      Orbital distinguishes itself by utilizing an AI-led engineering loop to design the modules instead of just assembling them off-site. The foundational technical asset is Orb, the company's open-source AI model for simulating the quantum-mechanical behavior of atoms.

      Available on GitHub under Apache 2.0, Orb's latest v3 release can handle fully solvated enzyme simulations of 20,000 atoms at scale while claiming stable simulations of up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU. Benchmarks indicate that Orb operates three to six times faster than existing universal interatomic potentials, reducing error by 31% compared to the Matbench Discovery benchmark.

      The AWS partnership, which the company has been highlighting since December 2024, was established under its former name, Orbital Materials. This strategic agreement encompasses data center decarbonization, cooling, and water-utilization technologies, with the Orb model available to AWS customers through SageMaker JumpStart and the AWS Marketplace. This commercial partnership serves as the primary near-term revenue source for the cooling fluid product line.

      The Plural-led round signifies a significant endorsement within the European deep tech sector. Plural partner Ian Hogarth, who led the investment, is prominent in UK AI policy and previously chaired the UK AI Safety Institute's predecessor organization. Nvidia's NVentures participation is notable as well, considering the chip manufacturer's investment arm rarely supports hardware-infrastructure startups directly; its involvement suggests that Orbital's cooling fluid could be relevant for deploying Blackwell GPUs and beyond.

      Godwin, in framing the company, joined DeepMind around the time of AlphaFold and worked on AI for science and materials before founding Orbital. The company has not disclosed revenue figures, customer counts, or the post-money valuation implied by its Series B funding.