It is the second raise Oriole Networks has completed this year, having announced a $10 million funding round in March.
UK photonic networking startup Oriole Networks has raised $22 million to scale up its technology.
The University College London (UCL) spinout has garnered the cash in a funding round led by VC group Plural, with existing investors UCL Technology Fund, XTX Ventures, Clean Growth Fund, and Dorilton Ventures all contributing.
Founded in 2023, Oriole uses photonics technology to create networks of AI chips and combine their processing power. Not only could this speed up the training of large language AI models, but it may also cut data centre power consumption, the startup says.
Oriole Networks was founded by CEO James Regan, who previously built another optical systems company, EFFECT Photonics, with the support of UCL scientists Professor George Zervas, Alessandro Ottino, and Joshua Benjamin. The company’s IP was developed at the university.
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 by solving today’s bottlenecks and enabling greater competition at the GPU layer.
“Building on decades of research, we’re paving the way for faster, more efficient, more sustainable AI.”
Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, will join Oriole Networks. Hogarth, who led the UK government’s AI taskforce in 2023, 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 commercialization 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.”
It is the second raise Oriole Networks has completed this year, having announced a $10 million funding round in March.
