Orbital Industries, an AI-powered materials discovery startup, raises $50 million Series B funding led by Plural

Orbital Industries has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by venture capital firm Plural, with participation from Nventures (the venture arm of Nvidia), Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures. The company, which recently rebranded from Orbital Materials and has offices in London and San Francisco, plans to use the capital to scale commercial deployment of its first two products aimed at the data center industry and grow its 50-person team.

Unlike competitors that license discovered compounds to large chemical companies, Orbital pursues a vertically integrated model—it manufactures and sells the materials and hardware devices its AI develops. The company's core AI model, Orb, can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and runs roughly 10 times faster than alternatives from Meta and Microsoft. Orbital is developing a PFAS-free liquid coolant for GPU server racks and a modular data center system that can deploy in as little as six months versus up to three years for conventional builds.

Orbital's cooling fluid, paired with a refrigeration system the company is building, is designed to ship alongside the next generation of GPUs in 2027. If this timeline holds, it would be the first time an AI-designed molecule has hit the commercial market in any industry, according to CEO Jonathan Godwin—a former Google DeepMind researcher who notes that even in drug discovery, no AI-discovered drug candidate has yet completed clinical trials and reached the market.