Orbital Industries has raised $50 million in Series B funding to accelerate the commercial rollout of AI-designed industrial hardware for next-generation data centres. The round was led by Plural, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture arm, alongside Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures. The London and San Francisco company, formerly known as Orbital Materials, is positioning itself as an AI-first industrial business focused on turning advances in materials discovery, engineering and manufacturing into deployable physical infrastructure.
Funding and Strategic Focus
The new capital will be used to scale Orbital Industries’ data centre products, grow its AI and engineering teams, and expand development of its platform for industrial applications beyond data centres. The company is entering the market through Orbital IT, its commercial infrastructure division, as AI workloads create rising demand for higher-density compute, faster deployment and more efficient cooling. By concentrating on these bottlenecks, Orbital aims to address a growing challenge for hyperscale operators as new AI systems require more power, generate more heat and place greater pressure on existing construction timelines.
Data Centre Bottlenecks
The announcement reflects a wider shift in AI infrastructure, where progress is increasingly limited not only by chips and models but also by the physical systems that support them. As next-generation GPUs become denser and more power-intensive, conventional cooling and traditional data centre buildouts are facing technical and operational limits. Orbital is targeting this pressure point with products designed to improve thermal performance and shorten the time needed to bring new compute capacity online.
Technology Platform and Products
Orbital Industries has developed a dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system designed for next-generation GPUs operating in dense compute environments. The company says the fluid is free from PFAS chemicals, a feature intended to help operators meet tightening regulatory standards while improving thermal performance for advanced AI hardware. It is also building modular data centre infrastructure manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units, with the goal of reducing deployment timelines from years to months.
Leadership and Company Background
The company was co-founded in 2022 by CEO Jonathan Godwin, CTO James Gin-Pollock and COO Daniel Miodovnik. Godwin previously worked at DeepMind on AI for science, engineering and advanced materials design, while Gin-Pollock is a repeat AI founder and Miodovnik brings experience across finance, government AI and advisory work. The leadership team has built Orb, an AI engine for simulating atomic-scale behaviour, as the core technology behind Orbital’s broader push to connect materials research with commercial hardware development.
Orbital’s funding comes as demand for AI infrastructure continues to expose constraints around power availability, heat management and the speed of data centre construction. The company has said its long-term ambition is to apply the same AI industrial model to sectors such as semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace and energy, while its near-term focus remains on data centre cooling and modular infrastructure. With fresh backing from strategic and venture investors, Orbital Industries is moving from materials discovery toward commercial deployment, aiming to show that AI can shorten the path from scientific breakthrough to industrial-scale infrastructure.