Orbital Industries raises $50M Series B to scale AI-designed cooling fluid and data centers

Orbital Industries Secures $50M Series B Funding for AI-Designed Materials

Orbital Industries has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Plural, with participation from Nvidia's NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures1

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. The London-and-San-Francisco startup, formerly known as Orbital Materials, will use the capital to scale commercial deployment of its AI-designed data-centre hardware and expand its 50-person team across both cities2

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Founded in 2022 by CEO Jonathan Godwin, a former Google DeepMind researcher who worked on AI for science and advanced materials, alongside CTO James Gin-Pollock and COO Daniel Miodovnik, the company has rebranded to reflect its broader industrial ambitions1

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. The Plural-led round represents a significant endorsement, with partner Ian Hogarth, a prominent UK AI-policy figure who chaired the UK AI Safety Institute's predecessor body, leading the investment1

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PFAS-Free Cooling Fluid Addresses Regulatory and Performance Challenges

Orbital's first product tackles a critical gap in the data center industry: a PFAS-free cooling fluid designed for next-generation high-density GPUs1

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. PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals that have anchored two-phase immersion-cooling systems for years, face tightening EPA and EU regulatory bans1

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. 3M exited production of its Novec PFAS-based coolants entirely in 2024, leaving data-center operators scrambling for alternatives just as Nvidia's Blackwell and Rubin generations push power densities into ranges that water-cooling alone cannot handle1

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Using its AI platform to screen hundreds of thousands of candidates, Orbital has synthesized an entire family of molecules and is taking them through qualification with major chip providers2

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. Godwin noted that developing a new cooling fluid would traditionally take 10 years and $100 million; Orbital has done it in months for far less2

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. The cooling fluid, paired with a refrigeration system Orbital is also building, is designed to ship alongside the next generation of GPUs in 20272

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. If this timeline holds, it would mark the first time an AI-designed molecule has hit the commercial market in any industry2

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Modular Data-Center Systems Cut Deployment Timeline to Six Months

Orbital's second product is a modular data-center system manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units1

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. The company claims this approach cuts deployment timelines to as little as six months versus the traditional three years for purpose-built high-density facilities1

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. The capacity bottleneck is real: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta have all visibly struggled to secure enough power and cooling capacity to absorb their planned compute scaling1

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Orbital's differentiator is the AI-led engineering loop that designs the modules rather than just assembling them off-site1

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. Both products are sold through a commercial brand, Orbital IT2

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Open-Source AI Model Orb Powers Materials Discovery

The underlying technical asset is Orb, the company's open-source AI model for simulating the quantum mechanical behavior of atoms1

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. Published on GitHub under Apache 2.0, Orb's most recent v3 release handles fully solvated 20,000-atom enzyme simulations at scale, with the company claiming stable simulations of up to 100,000 atoms on a single GPU1

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Published benchmarks show Orb running three-to-six times faster than existing universal interatomic potentials and producing a 31% reduction in error against the Matbench Discovery benchmark1

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. The company says Orb runs roughly 10 times faster than alternatives, outperforming models released by Meta and Microsoft2

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. Orbital has made a version trained on publicly available data freely available, including through a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services announced in December 2024, with Orb available to AWS customers via SageMaker JumpStart and the AWS Marketplace1

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Vertical Integration Distinguishes Orbital from Competitors

Orbital Industries is pursuing a different business model than competitors such as CuspAI, which raised $100 million in a Series A round in September, and Periodic Labs, which raised a $300 million seed round around the same time2

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. Rather than simply use AI to discover new materials and license intellectual property to large chemicals companies, Orbital intends to sell the materials its AI models discover directly2

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"We push the frontier of AI for science and engineering, but we're what's known as vertically integrated," Godwin told Fortune. "We don't sell that software. We have hardware, manufacturing and advanced materials teams, labs and things like that, and we use that software internally to develop new advanced materials and hardware devices, and sell those hardware devices"2

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. The company's long-term ambition is to apply the same model to semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace, and energy1

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The Nvidia NVentures participation signals that Orbital's cooling fluid is plausibly relevant to Blackwell-and-beyond GPU deployment, as the chip giant's strategic-investment arm rarely backs hardware-infrastructure startups directly1

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. The AWS partnership serves as the primary near-term revenue anchor for the cooling-fluid product line1

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. The company has not disclosed revenue figures, customer-count specifics, or the post-money valuation implied by the Series B1

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