Orbital Industries raises £37M Series B led by Plural to build AI-designed data centre hardware

May 28, 2026

Orbital Industries, a London- and San Francisco-based industrial-hardware startup, has raised £37M ($50M) in a Series B funding round led by Plural.

As AI compute demand climbs and GPU density rises, data centre operators face mounting constraints around power, heat and how quickly new capacity can be brought online. Orbital is targeting those bottlenecks directly, with physical hardware rather than software alone.

The company describes itself as an “AI industrial” business. It uses an in-house AI engine called Orb — which simulates the quantum-mechanical behaviour of atoms, and which the company says can model 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and runs faster than competing systems from larger rivals — to design materials and hardware. Its first products, sold through a commercial arm called Orbital IT, are a PFAS-free dielectric cooling fluid and refrigeration system for next-generation GPUs, and a modular data centre system built off-site that the company says cuts deployment from up to three years to as little as six months.

Founded in 2022 as Orbital Materials and rebranded alongside this round, the company employs around 50 people across London and San Francisco and is developing its cooling technology with data centre operators under a multi-year partnership with AWS. Its founding team is chief executive Jonathan Godwin, a former DeepMind researcher; chief technology officer James Gin-Pollock, a repeat founder who previously sold the startup Datasine to Shutterstock; and chief operating officer Daniel Miodovnik, whose background spans finance and government AI advisory work.

The round was led by Plural, the European venture firm whose partner Ian Hogarth has been a prominent figure in UK AI policy, with participation from Nvidia’s NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures. Orbital says the capital will scale commercial deployment of its data centre products, expand its AI and engineering teams, and extend its platform to sectors including semiconductors, aerospace, critical minerals and energy.

Sources

James Gin-Pollock

Orbital Industries