Orbital Industries closed a $50m Series B on Thursday 28 May, led by London-based Plural with Nvidia's venture arm NVentures entering for the first time, alongside a multi-year product partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud division1. The founders include Jonathan Godwin, who spent five years at DeepMind, the London AI lab, working on artificial intelligence for materials science. Orbital sells cheaper, cooler compute: a PFAS-free (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the 'forever chemicals') dielectric cooling fluid and modular data centres deployable in six months rather than three years, built on an atomic-simulation engine that models 100,000 atoms on a single graphics processing unit (GPU), ten times faster than the nearest alternative2.
The round is the third time in 18 months a London company founded by ex-DeepMind researchers has landed a major raise, after Isomorphic Labs' $2.1bn Series B and Ineffable Intelligence's $1.1bn seed. DeepMind now functions as Britain's primary deeptech founder factory. The capital stack does not keep pace: Plural is European, while NVentures, Radical Ventures and Compound are American, so not one pound of the $50m came from a UK-domiciled fund or sovereign vehicle. Britain grew the talent and seeded the idea; the growth-stage equity, and the upside that compounds on it, sits abroad.
The product answers a constraint visible since April, when London's data-centre grid hit saturation and AI Growth Zones began pushing capacity north toward Scotland. Orbital's selling point is a way around that wall: modular sites that drop in fast and run hot without toxic coolant. No UK institution writes at the $20m to $60m band these spinouts command, which is why a US chipmaker, not a UK fund, now sets the terms at the stage where ownership of the next decade's compute infrastructure is decided.
