Orbital Industries Raises $50M for AI-Driven Hardware

Jan de Vries · 2026-05-28

Orbital Industries, a British company that builds industrial hardware from the ground up using AI, has just closed a massive $50 million Series B. The funding will help scale up their data center products, grow their AI and engineering teams, and expand their platform beyond just data centers. This round was led by Plural, with big names like NVentures (NVIDIA), Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures joining in too. ### What This Means for the AI Infrastructure Space The $50 million raise is part of a bigger story happening in 2026. Capital is flowing fast into AI infrastructure, data center capacity, photonics, semiconductor tooling, industrial automation, and AI-enabled materials science. Across the year, EU-Startups tracked roughly $1.17 billion in AI infrastructure funding rounds, though that number is skewed by a few massive state-backed deals like Nscale and CamGraPhIC. Orbital's round stands out as a solid bet on the physical layers that make AI work: compute power, cooling, chips, energy systems, manufacturing, and advanced materials. ### How Orbital Is Changing the Game Instead of treating materials discovery, engineering, and manufacturing as separate steps, Orbital smashes them together into one AI-driven system. This lets small, interdisciplinary teams move fast and bring new industrial tech to market way more efficiently. Jonathan Godwin, co-founder and CEO, puts it this way: "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. What used to take a decade, we can now do in months." The company was founded in 2022 by a trio with serious chops: - Jonathan Godwin (CEO) spent nearly a decade in AI research, including five years at DeepMind working on AI for science and advanced materials. - James Gin-Pollock (CTO) is a repeat AI founder who previously sold a company to Shutterstock. - Daniel Miodovnik (COO) brings experience from finance, government AI, and advisory work to the UN. ### The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters Orbital's first target is the data center market, which is already worth $344 billion and projected to hit over $2 trillion by 2032. Rising AI compute demand and denser GPU setups are pushing infrastructure to its limits. Power, cooling, and deployment are becoming the main bottlenecks for scaling AI. Ian Hogarth, partner at Plural, explains: "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 methods could reshape entire industries. Orbital's approach isn't just about data centers either. They're aiming to apply this model to the whole physical economy, building the tech needed to scale energy, compute, and industrial systems. ### What's Next for Orbital? With the fresh cash, Orbital plans to hire more AI and engineering talent, push their data center products further, and start exploring applications beyond data centers. It's an ambitious roadmap, but the team's track record and the growing demand for AI infrastructure make it a compelling bet. For anyone watching the AI hardware space, Orbital Industries is one to keep an eye on.