London-based Oriole Networks raises €20.2 million to reduce energy consumption of AI data centres | EU-Startups

Oriole Networks, a company using light to train Large Language Models with a fraction of the usual AI energy consumption, has raised an additional €20.2 million from leading investors to further scale its “super-brain” solution.  The round was led by Plural with all existing investors – UCL Technology Fund, XTX Ventures, Clean Growth Fund, and Dorilton Ventures – reinvesting.

Oriole Networks solves AI’s biggest challenges – speed, latency and sustainability. It uses light, via advanced photonics technology, to create networks of AI chips and combine their processing power. With this novel approach, LLMs can be trained up to a 100x faster, whilst consuming a fraction of power, allowing algorithms to run with much lower latency. Oriole’s technology dramatically reduces the energy consumption of data centres which is putting a huge strain on energy grids in both the US and Europe. If data centre demand triples by 2035, as expected, and developers struggle to install new wind and solar, power sector emissions could be more than 56 per cent higher than forecast, according to research by Rhodium Group.

Founded in 2023 out of University College London (UCL), Oriole Networks brings together pioneering science in optical networks, with first-hand founder experience from a tech entrepreneur who has built major businesses in the sector. CEO James Regan, who built EFFECT Photonics, has put together an extremely experienced commercial team to bring the technology and unique IP developed over two decades at UCL by founding scientists Professor George Zervas, Alessandro Ottino, and Joshua Benjamin to a sector that is crying out for a solution to its sustainability problems. Ian Hogarth, who led the investment on behalf of Plural, will be joining the board to help support the team through this crucial scaling phase. 

In less than a year, Oriole has assembled an experienced, proven photonics team that is unparalleled in the UK, including a team out of Lumentum. The company is backed by professionals in high-performance clusters, including the venture arm of XTX Markets, which operates one of the largest GPU clusters in the world.

James Regan, CEO of Oriole Networks, 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.”

AI’s energy consumption problem is well known with a report published in September suggesting that ChatGPT alone uses enough energy to power the entire country of Gibraltar for a year. A single ChatGPT query uses >25x more energy than a Google search, according to research from Stanford University. At the same time, AI computing power is doubling every 100 days and is set to increase by more than a million times in the next five years. Oriole’s tech addresses this demand without sacrificing our planet to do so. 

The recent funding takes the total raised by Oriole Networks this year to $35 million and will be used to increase Oriole’s pace even further by expanding its team and engaging with high-volume suppliers. By 2025, it plans to have its early-stage products in the hands of customers, creating an ecosystem of photonic networking for AI.

Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, added: “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.”