Orbital Industries lands $50M Series B for AI-powered data center hardware

A London-and-San Francisco-based startup that began life as an AI-driven materials discovery company has raised $50 million in Series B funding, led by Plural, to bring its PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular high-density compute infrastructure to market. The round also saw participation from Nvidia’s NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures.

The company, now rebranded as Orbital Industries, was originally founded in 2022 as Orbital Materials by CEO Jonathan Godwin, a DeepMind alumnus, along with CTO James Gin-Pollock and COO Daniel Miodovnik. Its early focus centered on AI-discovered carbon-capture and sustainable-aviation-fuel chemistry. But the strongest commercial pull has shifted toward data-center infrastructure, prompting both a pivot and a name change that reflects a wider ambition.

The new identity signals an expansion into semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace, and energy over the long term. For now, the company is rolling out two concrete products.

The first is a dielectric cooling fluid free of PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals” long used in two-phase immersion cooling systems. With EPA and EU regulatory bans tightening, and 3M having exited PFAS-based coolant production entirely in 2024, data-center operators face a pressing need for alternatives. This is especially critical as Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin GPU generations push power densities beyond what water cooling alone can handle. Orbital’s fluid, developed using its proprietary AI materials platform, targets that exact gap.

The second product is a modular, off-site-manufactured data-center system delivered as ready-to-deploy units. Orbital claims this approach can slash deployment timelines from the traditional three years to as little as six months. The capacity bottleneck is acute, with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta all struggling to secure enough power and cooling for their planned compute scaling. Modular prefabrication has become the industry’s standard answer, but Orbital differentiates itself with an AI-led engineering loop that designs the modules, not just assembles them.

The core technical asset is Orb, an open-source AI model for simulating the quantum-mechanical behavior of atoms. Published on GitHub under Apache 2.0, its latest v3 release handles fully solvated 20,000-atom enzyme simulations at scale, with stable simulations of up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU. Published benchmarks show Orb running three to six times faster than existing universal interatomic potentials, with a 31% reduction in error against the Matbench Discovery benchmark.

A strategic partnership with AWS, announced in December 2024 under the old Orbital Materials name, covers data-center decarbonization, cooling, and water-utilization technologies. Orb is available to AWS customers via SageMaker JumpStart and the AWS Marketplace, and this relationship serves as the primary near-term revenue anchor for the cooling fluid product line.

The Plural-led round is a significant endorsement in European deeptech. Partner Ian Hogarth, who led the investment, is a prominent UK AI policy figure and chaired the predecessor body to the UK AI Safety Institute. The Nvidia NVentures participation is also notable, as the chip giant’s strategic investment arm rarely backs hardware-infrastructure startups directly. Its involvement signals that Orbital’s cooling fluid is relevant to Blackwell-and-beyond GPU deployment.

Godwin, who joined DeepMind around the time of AlphaFold and worked on AI for science and materials before founding Orbital, has not disclosed revenue figures, specific customer counts, or the post-money valuation implied by the Series B.