- London-based Orbital Industries has raised $50M in a Series B led by Plural to commercialise an AI-designed, PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular data centre systems for next-generation GPUs — addressing the physical infrastructure bottleneck that compute density growth is creating.
- The company’s AI engine Orb is the only model capable of simulating 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and runs 10x faster than its nearest alternative, outperforming models from Microsoft, Meta and leading academic labs, according to independent benchmarks.
- The data centre infrastructure market stands at $344B today and is projected to surpass $2 trillion by 2032.
The GPUs powering the current generation of AI models run so hot that the cooling systems built to manage them are themselves becoming a bottleneck. Water-based cooling is approaching its physical limits. The chemicals historically used in dielectric cooling fluids are now subject to tightening environmental regulation across Europe and the US. And the time it takes to design a new cooling material – typically close to a decade –- is incompatible with the speed at which GPU density is increasing.
Orbital Industries, the London-headquartered industrial technology company founded in 2022 by Jonathan Godwin, James Gin-Pollock, and Daniel Miodovnik, has raised $50M in a Series B led by Plural, with participation from NVentures – NVIDIA’s venture arm and returning investors Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures. The company employs 50 people across London and San Francisco. Godwin spent nearly a decade at DeepMind, five of those years on AI for science, engineering, and advanced materials design. Gin-Pollock previously sold a company to Shutterstock. Miodovnik’s background spans finance, government AI, and advisory work for the UN.
What it does and why conventional materials development cannot keep up
Orbital Industries designs, engineers, and manufactures physical infrastructure using AI to accelerate how new technologies are discovered and brought to market. At the centre of the platform is Orb: the company’s AI engine for simulating the quantum mechanical behaviour of atoms. Independent benchmarks show Orb is the only model capable of simulating 100,000 atoms on a single GPU, where every competitor crashes, and it runs 10x faster than the nearest alternative, outperforming models from Microsoft, Meta, and leading academic labs – turning week-long simulations into computations that take minutes, according to benchmarks published in npj Computational Materials in 2026.
Its first commercial product is a dielectric cooling fluid engineered specifically for next-generation GPUs. Unlike most competing cooling technologies, it is entirely free of PFAS forever chemicals, enabling compliance with tightening regulations across both the EU and the US. Orbital says its AI-led approach compressed a development timeline that traditionally takes close to a decade into months. In parallel, it has developed a modular data centre system that can be manufactured off-site and deployed in as little as six months – compared to traditional build timelines of up to three years. Both products are being developed through a multi-year partnership with AWS.
Godwin said, “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. 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.”
The investors
Plural, the early-stage fund co-founded by Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus and serial entrepreneur Ian Hogarth, based in Tallinn and London led the round. The firm previously backed Helsing, the European defence AI unicorn, and Proxima Fusion, the Munich-based nuclear fusion startup. Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, said, “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.”
NVentures joined this round as a new investor, NVIDIA’s strategic participation signals direct interest in ensuring cooling infrastructure keeps pace with its GPU roadmap. Radical Ventures, the Toronto-based deep AI fund, and Fly Ventures return from earlier rounds.
The competitive landscape
The liquid cooling market for data centres is consolidating fast. LiquidStack, previously one of the most prominent independent immersion cooling providers, was acquired by Trane Technologies in February 2026, removing it as an independent competitor. Submer, the Barcelona-based immersion cooling specialist with $55.5M raised, counts CERN among its customers but focuses on tank-based immersion systems rather than fluid chemistry and modular architecture. Neither builds the underlying cooling materials using AI. Orbital’s differentiation sits one level deeper, designing the materials themselves using atomic simulation, then commercialising the hardware built around them.
The data centre infrastructure market stands at $344B and is projected to surpass $2 trillion by 2032. Orbital’s long-term ambition extends beyond data centres – applying the same AI-to-hardware model across semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace, and energy.
The unanswered question for Orbital and for the AI infrastructure market broadly is whether the pace of GPU density growth will continue to outrun the ability of any single company, however AI-accelerated, to design and deploy new physical infrastructure fast enough to keep the next generation of compute online.