Oriole Networks, a developer of artificial intelligence (AI) optimization technology based in London, has announced a successful €11.6M Seed funding round. The round was co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures, and Dorilton Ventures, with additional support from the Innovate UK Investor Partnership.
Oriole Networks is tackling the critical role data centers play in the growth of SaaS companies and the anticipated shift towards AI platforms. The company addresses the systemic issues and unsustainable power consumption arising from the increasing demands on data centers and their networking approach.
James Regan, CEO of Oriole Networks, highlighted the company’s breakthrough in using light to significantly improve technical performance and reduce energy consumption. “Our novel approach to harness the power of light has already demonstrated up to 100 times speed up in completion time and 40 times improvements in energy consumption,” Regan stated.
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Revolutionizing Machine Learning Processing
Founded as a UCL spinout in 2023 by Professor George Zervas, James Regan, Alessandro Ottino, and Joshua Benjamin, Oriole Networks employs a unique strategy to enhance the efficiency of machine learning (ML) processing. The company’s technology enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to be trained up to a hundred times faster while consuming only a fraction of the power, significantly reducing latency for time-critical tasks such as algorithmic trading and accelerating AI adoption and algorithmic progress.
Oriole Networks’ founding team uses light to connect thousands of AI GPUs directly to each other, achieving much higher performance. This approach addresses the bottleneck of collective data movement across servers in data centers, which limits training and inference completion time, necessitating a fundamental shift in the co-design of next-generation networked systems.
Investor Confidence in Oriole Networks
The UCL Technology Fund, which aims to solve the world’s most pressing problems, praised Oriole Networks for its innovative solution. David Grimm, Partner at UCL Technology Fund, remarked on the depth of innovation and the massive market looking for Oriole’s solution, anticipating an exciting journey ahead.
Dorilton Ventures, focusing on significant minority investments in early- to mid-stage technology companies, and Clean Growth Fund, a venture capital fund targeting the UK’s most promising early-stage “clean growth” companies, also expressed their support for Oriole Networks’ groundbreaking approach to Net Zero innovation.
With this Seed funding, Oriole Networks is set to lead a transformative shift in the global transportation of data, offering a sustainable and efficient solution to the challenges faced by data centers worldwide.
