Orbital Industries has raised a $50 million in a Series B funding round. This investment will help accelerate the commercial launch of Orbital Industries’ AI-optimised data centre cooling fluids and modular high-density compute platform, addressing the severe power and thermal obstacles faced by next-gen GPU clusters.
The round was led by European deep-tech growth fund Plural with strategic participation from Nvidia Ventures. Other institutions to increase their stake in the company include Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures.
In addition to the cash injection, the company published its newly revamped image from Orbital Materials to Orbital Industries to indicate its widened commercial emphasis to scale up industrial tech from the atom to fully scaled computing infrastructure.
The Thermal and Spatial Bottleneck of Frontier AI
As tech giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta race to deploy massive frontier models, they are running into severe physical walls. Next-generation AI chips generate extreme levels of heat inside increasingly dense environments, pushing standard water-based cooling systems past their physical limits. Simultaneously, traditional data centre permitting and construction timelines can drag out for three to seven years, creating a massive supply lag.
Source: orbital industries
Originally founded in 2022 by Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Godwin (formerly a machine learning researcher at Google DeepMind), Chief Technology Officer James Gin-Pollock, and Chief Operating Officer Daniel Miodovnik, the startup initially focused on using AI to discover materials for carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuels. However, intense market pull from the infrastructure sector led the founders to pivot toward solving the hardware constraints of advanced AI data centres.
“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,” said CEO Jonathan Godwin in a statement. “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. What used to take a decade, we can now do in months.”
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Molecular AI Meets Modular Engineering
Orbital Industries separates itself from standard hardware manufacturers through its underlying technical asset: Orb, the company’s open-source AI model designed to simulate the quantum-mechanical behaviour of atoms. Instead of relying on a decade of trial-and-error laboratory experiments, Orbital uses its proprietary AI loop to design advanced chemical structures from scratch.
The capital from the Series B will scale two core product lines:
- PFAS-Free Cooling Fluid: An AI-formulated, non-toxic, and non-hazardous liquid designed specifically for immersion cooling setups. This fluid protects high-density GPU architectures (such as Nvidia’s Blackwell chips) from overheating without relying on harmful forever chemicals. This line is supported by a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to optimise data centre decarbonisation and water utilisation.
- Modular Compute Infrastructure: Prefabricated, off-site manufactured data centre units designed by AI algorithms to house ultra-dense computing clusters. Orbital claims this approach compresses traditional three-year construction pipelines down to just six months, allowing operators to deploy plug-and-play high-density facilities exactly when and where energy grids have available capacity.
Institutional Validation
The participation of Nvidia’s NVentures stands out as a strong industry validation. The chipmaker rarely backs physical infrastructure startups directly, signalling that Orbital’s molecularly designed cooling fluid is a highly plausible answer to the immense thermal output expected from upcoming chip generations.
“The capacity obstacle in AI is entirely real,” noted Plural partner Ian Hogarth, who led the investment. “Orbital is addressing the fundamental constraints of power, cooling, and speed of deployment. By bypassing traditional chemical development cycles using their Orb platform, they are establishing an entirely new category of automated industrial hardware design.”
With engineering hubs split between London and San Francisco, Orbital Industries plans to use the $50 million to rapidly expand its deployment team and continue upgrading its atomic simulation models, with an eye toward eventually applying its AI materials platform to semiconductors, critical minerals, and aerospace.
