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

      The London-and-San-Francisco startup previously known as Orbital Materials has secured $50 million led by Plural for its PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular high-density computing infrastructure. Now called Orbital Industries, the AI-materials startup has completed a Series B funding round with participation from Nvidia’s NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures.

      This funding will facilitate the commercial rollout of the company’s data center cooling fluid and modular computing infrastructure products, as well as enhance its team in London and San Francisco. Along with the funding round, the company has undergone a rebranding. Orbital Industries was established in 2022 by CEO Jonathan Godwin (formerly of DeepMind), CTO James Gin-Pollock, and COO Daniel Miodovnik, initially focusing on AI-discovered carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuel chemistry.

      Since then, the company has shifted, or rather broadened, its focus toward data center infrastructure, driven by significant commercial demand. The new name, Orbital Industries, reflects this expanded vision, with aspirations to apply the same model to semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace, and energy.

      The company has two key products worth detailing. The first is a PFAS-free dielectric cooling fluid intended for the latest high-density GPUs. PFAS, known as “forever chemicals,” have been integral to two-phase immersion cooling systems in data centers for years, but they are now facing stricter regulatory bans from the EPA and EU. 3M entirely ceased production of its Novec PFAS-based coolants in 2024, leaving data center operators seeking alternatives as Nvidia’s new GPU generations require power densities that water cooling cannot manage alone. Orbital’s fluid, created with its AI materials platform, fills this gap.

      The second product is a modular data center system manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units. Orbital asserts that this method reduces deployment timelines to as little as six months, compared to the typical three years for specially built high-density facilities. The capacity constraint is evident, as companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta have struggled to obtain sufficient power and cooling capacity for their planned computational growth, leading to a trend towards modular prefabrication as the industry standard.

      Orbital distinguishes itself through an AI-driven engineering process that designs the modules rather than merely assembling them off-site. The core technological 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, the latest version, v3, can perform fully solvated 20,000-atom enzyme simulations at scale, with claims of maintaining stable simulations of up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU. Published benchmarks show that Orb operates three to six times faster than existing universal interatomic potentials and achieves a 31% reduction in error compared to the Matbench Discovery benchmark.

      The AWS partnership publicized 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 accessible to AWS customers through SageMaker JumpStart and the AWS Marketplace. This commercial relationship serves as the primary near-term revenue source for the cooling fluid product line.

      The Plural-led funding round represents a significant vote of confidence in the European deeptech sector. Plural partner Ian Hogarth, who spearheaded the investment, is a prominent figure in UK AI policy and previously chaired the UK AI Safety Institute’s predecessor organization. Noteworthy is the participation from Nvidia NVentures; the chip maker’s strategic investment arm typically does not invest directly in hardware infrastructure startups, and its involvement here suggests that Orbital’s cooling fluid may indeed be relevant for the deployment of Blackwell GPUs and beyond.

      Godwin, on the company’s behalf, joined DeepMind during the AlphaFold project and worked on AI applications for science and materials before leaving to establish Orbital. The company has not disclosed its revenue figures, specific customer counts, or the post-money valuation resulting from the Series B round.