Orbital Industries
London AI-materials company making PFAS-free GPU cooling and modular datacentres using atomic-simulation AI.
Last refreshed: 4 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Can a UK deeptech company fix the AI datacentre cooling crisis without UK capital?
Timeline for Orbital Industries
Mentioned in: Helsing picks Plymouth for £350m plant
UK Startups and InnovationMentioned in: CuspAI closes at $2.6bn, EU fund circles
UK Startups and InnovationMentioned in: CuspAI raising $400m on Bezos money
UK Startups and InnovationMentioned in: PhysicsX hits $2.4bn on Temasek cash
UK Startups and InnovationMentioned in: Ex-DeepMind founders raise £14.9m for Airspeed
UK Startups and InnovationWhat does Orbital Industries make and who backed their $50m round?
Why did Orbital Industries raise $50m with no UK investor leading the round?
What is PFAS-free GPU cooling and why does it matter for datacentres?
Background
Orbital Industries closed a $50m Series B on 28 May 2026, led by Plural with Nvidia's NVentures and an AWS multi-year product partnership. The round attracted no UK-domiciled lead, with equity upside flowing to European and American balance sheets, a pointed illustration of the gap between UK innovation and UK capital.
Founded in 2022 (rebranded from Orbital Materials), the company uses a proprietary atomic-simulation engine to screen hundreds of thousands of material candidates on a single GPU at ten times the speed of prior tools. Its flagship product is a PFAS-free dielectric cooling fluid designed for immersion cooling of GPU racks; it also makes modular datacentres deployable within six months. Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Godwin spent five years at Google DeepMind working on AI for materials Science before founding the company alongside CTO James Gin-Pollock and COO Daniel Miodovnik.
Orbital sits at the intersection of two urgent trends: the soaring thermal load of AI compute infrastructure and the global push to eliminate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances from industrial processes. Its AWS partnership signals hardware-to-hyperscaler commercialisation at a point when datacentre cooling is a strategic bottleneck. The no-UK-lead pattern held through June: PhysicsX's $300m Series c at a $2.4bn valuation closed on 8 June with Singapore's Temasek leading and no UK state vehicle on the cap table, extending the same gap in late-stage domestic capital that Orbital's round exposed.