Orbital Industries, a startup using artificial intelligence to design advanced materials, has raised a $50 million Series B led by venture firm Plural. Nventures, the venture arm of AI chip company Nvidia, which had previously backed the company, joined the round alongside prior investors Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures. The deal was first reported by Fortune.
From Orbital Materials to Orbital Industries
The company, which has offices in London and San Francisco and recently rebranded from Orbital Materials, said the new capital will scale commercial deployment of its first two products and grow its 50-person team. Both initial products target the data center industry, and the company also plans to extend its AI platform to industrial applications beyond data centers.
Orb, the model behind the materials
Orbital's core AI model is called Orb, which predicts and simulates the quantum mechanical behavior of atoms. The company says Orb is the only model that can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and runs roughly 10 times faster than alternatives, outperforming models released by Meta and Microsoft. Orbital has made a version trained on publicly available data freely available, including through a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services announced in late 2024, while keeping a separate version trained on proprietary data for its own product work.
First products: PFAS-free coolant and modular data centers
The first product is a new PFAS-free dielectric cooling fluid designed for next-generation high-density GPUs, screened from hundreds of thousands of candidates by the Orb model. Orbital says it has synthesized an entire family of molecules, paired them with a refrigeration system, and is now taking them through qualification with major chip providers, with the fluid designed to ship alongside the next generation of GPUs in 2027. The second product is a modular, off-site-manufactured data center system delivered as ready-to-deploy units that the company says can bring high-density compute capacity online in as little as six months, versus up to three years for conventional builds. Both products are sold through a commercial brand, Orbital IT.
A different business model from rival AI-for-materials startups
Cofounder and CEO Jonathan Godwin, a former Google DeepMind researcher, told Fortune that rather than license its AI-discovered chemistry to large chemicals or coatings companies, Orbital intends to sell the materials directly. "We push the frontier of AI for science and engineering, but we're what's known as vertically integrated," he said. The company is competing with AI-for-chemistry startups including CuspAI and Periodic Labs, and shares some of its vertically integrated playbook with broader physical-AI bets such as Airis Labs' $60 million stealth raise and Hark's $700 million Series A for universal AI hardware.
What the money funds next
Plural partner Ian Hogarth said in a statement that AI progress is now constrained by "energy, heat and infrastructure" and that Orbital was tackling those constraints directly. Godwin said his longer-term ambition is to build "the largest industrial conglomerate" in Europe, an AI-native counterpart to the chemicals giants that emerged a century ago.
Reporting based on coverage from Fortune and Orbital Industries.