Orbital Industries raises $50 million Series B to scale its AI engine for the physical economy and build next-generation data centre hardware

• Orbital Industries builds hardware from the atoms up, addressing the physical constraints of AI infrastructure
• Its first products tackle bottlenecks in cooling and deployment, with a non-toxic fluid for next-generation GPUs and modular infrastructure that drastically cuts build times
• Funding will scale commercial deployment, expand the team across London and San Francisco and accelerate the company's AI platform for future industrial applications

 

London, 28 May 2026: Orbital Industries, the company building industrial hardware from the atoms up using AI, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Plural. Existing and previous investors, NVentures (NVIDIA), Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures also participated. The funding will be used to scale Orbital's data centre products, grow its AI and engineering teams and accelerate the development of its platform for industrial applications beyond data centres.

Orbital Industries designs, engineers and manufactures physical infrastructure, using AI to accelerate how new technologies are discovered and brought to market. It was co-founded by CEO Jonathan Godwin, who has been in AI research for nearly a decade, including five years at DeepMind working on AI for science, engineering and advanced materials design, alongside CTO James Gin-Pollock, a repeat AI founder who previously sold a company to Shutterstock, and COO Daniel Miodovnik, whose background spans finance, government AI and advisory work to the UN, united by the belief that advances in AI fundamentally change how industrial companies can be built and run.

From AI models to industrial systems

Orbital Industries is building a new category of company: AI industrial. Instead of treating materials discovery, engineering and manufacturing as separate processes, it integrates them into a single AI-driven system, enabling smaller, highly interdisciplinary teams to move faster and bring new industrial technologies to market more efficiently. Orbital's goal is to apply this model to the physical economy, building the technologies needed to scale energy, compute and industrial systems.

The company is entering the market through Orbital IT, its commercial brand for data centre infrastructure — a $344bn industry set to be worth more than $2 trillion by 2032. Rising AI compute demand and increasing GPU density are pushing infrastructure to its limits, with power, cooling and deployment emerging as the primary bottlenecks to scaling AI. These constraints will determine how quickly new systems can be built and deployed.

As AI models grow more powerful, the chips that run them generate increasing levels of heat in ever more dense environments, pushing conventional water-based cooling to its limits. Within the next few years, new approaches will be required to prevent next-generation GPUs from overheating.

Orbital Industries has developed a dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system designed specifically for these chips; a critical breakthrough that enables future high-density compute. Unlike existing alternatives, the fluid is free from PFAS "forever chemicals", allowing it to meet tightening regulatory standards across the US and Europe. Traditionally, developing a new cooling fluid would take around a decade, but Orbital Industries' AI-led approach has dramatically accelerated this process. The company is working with leading data centre operators, including through a multi-year partnership with AWS, to develop cooling and efficiency technologies, bringing these systems closer to deployment at hyperscale data centres.

This is possible because of Orb, the company's AI engine for simulating the quantum mechanical behaviour of atoms. Just as large language models have scaled to handle longer and longer documents, Orb has scaled to simulate larger and larger physical systems: it is the only model that can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU, where every competitor crashes [1]. It runs ten times faster than the nearest alternative — outperforming models from Microsoft, Meta and leading academic labs — turning week-long quantum simulations into coffee-break computations [1], and independent benchmarks show its predictions don't drift or hallucinate over time, meaning scientists can trust the results without babysitting the model [2]. This positions the company at the centre of one of the most critical bottlenecks in scaling modern AI systems.

Solving the next bottleneck in AI

In parallel, Orbital Industries has developed a modular data centre system designed using AI to solve the engineering challenges of extreme compute density required for next-generation GPUs. The system enables new AI infrastructure to be deployed in as little as six months, compared to traditional timelines of up to three years. Manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units, it allows data centre operators to bring high-density compute capacity online far faster at a time when demand is outpacing infrastructure supply.

With a growing team of 50 across London and San Francisco, Orbital Industries is scaling its products for commercial deployment. Its long-term ambition is to apply the same model across sectors, including semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace and energy, using AI to redesign how critical physical infrastructure is developed, manufactured and deployed.

"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. That's what we set out to do at Orbital Industries. 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."

Jonathan Godwin, co-founder and CEO of Orbital Industries

"AI progress is now constrained by the physical world: by energy, heat and infrastructure. Orbital Industries is tackling those constraints directly, from breakthroughs like its AI-designed cooling fluid, which enables the next generation of GPUs. The ability to discover and deploy these technologies faster than traditional industry will define the next phase of AI and it's clear there is already strong demand for what the team is building."

Ian Hogarth, partner at Plural

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Note:

[1] Rhodes et al., "Orb-v3: atomistic simulation at scale," arXiv:2504.06231, April 2025.

[2] Han, Peng, Cai, Guo, Zhang et al., "LAMBench: a benchmark for large atomistic models," npj Computational Materials 12, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41524-025-01929-3.