Orbital Industries, a London-based company developing industrial hardware and infrastructure using AI-driven engineering and materials discovery systems, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Plural, with participation from existing investors including NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures.
Founded by Jonathan Godwin, James Gin-Pollock, and Daniel Miodovnik, Orbital Industries is focused on applying AI to accelerate how physical technologies are designed, tested, and brought to market.
The company describes its approach as an “AI industrial” model, integrating materials discovery, engineering, and manufacturing into a single system aimed at reducing development timelines and enabling smaller engineering teams to develop industrial technologies more efficiently.
Orbital Industries is initially targeting data centre infrastructure through Orbital IT, its commercial division focused on cooling and deployment systems for high-density AI computing environments. As AI workloads continue to increase, data centres face growing pressure around power consumption, heat management, and deployment speed, with existing cooling systems approaching technical limitations.
To address these challenges, the company has developed a dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system designed for next-generation GPUs and high-density compute environments. According to Orbital Industries, the fluid is free from PFAS chemicals and was developed using its materials discovery platform.
Underlying these products is Orb, the company’s simulation engine designed to model the quantum mechanical behaviour of atoms at scale. Orbital Industries says the system enables significantly faster materials simulations compared to traditional approaches and is being used to accelerate industrial product development.
The company is also developing modular data centre infrastructure intended to reduce deployment timelines for new compute capacity. Orbital Industries says the systems are manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units designed to accelerate the rollout of AI infrastructure.
According to Jonathan Godwin, co-founder and CEO of Orbital Industries, advances in AI are allowing smaller teams to move more quickly from scientific discovery to commercial hardware development.
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, so what used to take a decade, we can now do in months. We're starting with some of the most pressing challenges in data centres, but the scope of what this approach can unlock is much, much bigger.
The funding will be used to scale Orbital Industries’ data centre products, expand its AI and engineering teams, and accelerate the development of industrial applications beyond data centre infrastructure.
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