A UCL spinout which is building a technology that could make data centres dramatically more energy efficient, helping to cut the escalating electricity demand of artificial intelligence, has got a huge funding boost.
Oriole Networks has raised £16.8 million from the London-based venture capital firm Plural, with all existing investors reinvesting. It follows a £10 million initial funding round earlier this year.
The firm, which was founded out of UCL last year, is trying to tackle a huge global technological problem - the vast, and ever-increasing, amount of energy used up in data processing in the AI age.
Conventional network systems, while many transmit data via light, need to convert it back to electrical impulses for processing and then back again to light for transmission. Oriole Networks uses photonics, an optical switching technology which enables complete processing as light rather than electronic impulses.
The benefits are threefold - it's much quicker (information can be transmitted at the speed of light without the need for conversion to electricity for processing); it uses much less electricity (photonics uses far less electricity to process data than electronics and photonic signals produce no heat, so don't require huge amounts of power to cool the equipment).
Crucially, the increase in processing speeds means that AI applications such as Large Language Models - which are driving the huge demand for data processing centres and energy supply - can be trained up to 100 times faster.
Oriole Networks CEO James Regan said: "This funding is yet another milestone for Oriole following a year of rapid pace and growth.
"This is a booming market desperate for solutions and our ambition is to create an ecosystem of photonic networking that can reshape this industry.
"Building on decades of research, we're paving the way for faster, more efficient, more sustainable AI."
Founded in 2023 out of University College London (UCL), Oriole Networks is a spinout from University College London (UCL), it leverages years of research within UCL's Optical Networks laboratories, with the technology licensed through UCL's technology transfer company, UCL Business (UCLB).
Robert Thompson, Vice-Dean (Enterprise) in the UCL Faculty of Engineering Sciences, said: "We champion the power of fundamental research to address major societal challenges.
"Oriole Networks exemplifies this, with decades of research into optical networks at UCL now providing innovative solutions to meet society's growing data needs while minimizing environmental impact."
Marina Santilli, Associate Director of the Physical Sciences and Engineering, UCLB, said: "The Oriole team were already pushing forward at pace with the translation of UCL research into commercial hardware following their seed round earlier this year, so this new funding gives that timeline an extra boost.
"The sooner Oriole can realise their vision of an energy-efficient, all-optical data centre, the better for the planet."
Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, said: "Applying 20 years of deep research and learning in photonics to create a better AI infrastructure demonstrates how much more innovation there is to come to help reap the benefits of this technology.
"The team behind Oriole Networks have proven experience in both company building and bringing deep science to commercialisation and are creating a fundamental shift in the design of next generation networked systems that will reduce latency and slash the energy impact of data centres on which we now rely."
Latency is the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer.
In conventional data centres, computers communicate with each other through ethernet cables like those attached to internet routers.
These cables cannot carry data at the rate the computers can produce it, creating a bottleneck, and they are also energy-inefficient, accounting for between a fifth and a half of the data centre's total electricity consumption.
Mr Regan said their technology cuts the electricity demand of data transmission by 97 per cent, enabling some data centres to cut their overall electricity usage almost in half.
The organisations which have re-invested in Oriole are UCL Technology Fund, XTX Ventures, Clean Growth Fund and Dorilton Ventures.
