Oriole Networks – a company transforming the performance of AI systems and data centers – announced it has successfully raised £10 million in seed funding. The funding round was co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures, and Dorilton Ventures, with support from Innovate UK Investor Partnership.
UCL spinout Oriole Networks was launched in 2023 by four founders: Professor George Zervas, James Regan, Alessandro Ottino, and Joshua Benjamin. Its IP is licensed through UCL’s technology transfer company, UCLB.
UCL scientists George, Alessandro, and Joshua found a way to utilize light to connect thousands of AI GPUs directly to each other, resulting in much higher performance. And James Regan already had a track record of building successful tech companies from university spinouts as he spun out and built EFFECT Photonics.
Data centers have played a major role in the proliferation of SaaS companies and support the predicted platform shift toward AI. But the increasing demands placed on data centres and the approach underlying their networking are leading to systemic problems and unsustainable power consumption.
Through Oriole’s novel approach, Large Language Models can be trained up to a hundred times faster, consuming only a tiny fraction of the power. So, machine learning algorithms can run with a thousandth of the latency, revolutionizing time-critical tasks such as algorithmic trading and speeding up AI adoption and AI algorithmic progress.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI computational needs are increasing by 10 times every 18 months. This leads to distributed training and inference across large numbers of xPUs. Collective data movement across the servers in the data centre becomes a bottleneck which in turn limits the training and inference completion time. This requires a fundamental shift in the co-design of next generation networked systems.”
- George Zervas, CTO
“As the demand for compute continues to increase, it is critical to find new solutions that can address these challenges in a sustainable and carbon efficient manner. Our novel approach to harness the power of light has already demonstrated significant technical performance improvements, up to 100 times speed up in completion time and 40 times improvements in energy consumption.”
- James Regan, CEO
“It’s rare to have such depth of innovation over many years at UCL combined with an experienced entrepreneur with domain knowledge and a massive market that is looking for this solution. This is going to be an exciting journey.”
- David Grimm, Partner UCL Technology Fund
“We invest in companies in the IT infrastructure, data science, and cyber security segments whose products support computationally driven businesses. Over the last decade, compute performance has improved ten times faster than networking performance, so HPC environments are highly network constrained. Oriole’s exciting approach can unlock the latent potential in existing infrastructure.”
- Daniel Freeman, General Partner at Dorilton Ventures
“The world’s data centres already consume as much electricity as the whole of the UK, and it is rising rapidly, threatening to consume as much as the whole of Europe unless something is done. This radical approach to Net Zero innovation is exactly what is needed.”
- Beverley Gower-Jones OBE, Managing Partner of Clean Growth Fund
