Joshua Benjamin

Joshua Benjamin is a British-Asian engineer and co-founder of Oriole Networks, the UCL spinout developing the world's first full-photonic networking platform for AI data centres. He holds a PhD, MRes, and MEng in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from University College London, where he conducted postdoctoral research on ultra-fast optical networks for data centres — the foundational work that would eventually become the basis for Oriole's technology. He subsequently joined BAE Systems Digital Intelligence as a Senior FPGA Engineer, bringing deep expertise in programmable hardware design for demanding, real-time applications.

In 2023, Benjamin co-founded Oriole Networks alongside Professor George Zervas and Alessandro Ottino, translating more than two decades of UCL research into a commercial product. He serves as the company's Network Architect, responsible for the design of the algorithms and network control logic that allow PRISM — Oriole's all-optical switching fabric — to route data between thousands of GPUs at nanosecond speeds without any electrical packet switching. This architecture is central to Oriole's claim that its platform can train large language models up to 100x faster while consuming a fraction of the power of conventional AI interconnect infrastructure.

Oriole Networks raised £10 million in seed funding in March 2024 and a further $22 million Series A led by Plural in October 2024, taking total funding to $35 million from investors including UCL Technology Fund, XTX Ventures, Clean Growth Fund, and Dorilton Ventures. The company is deploying its first hardware with customers and is widely recognised as one of the most technically ambitious startups in the UK deep-tech photonics ecosystem.