London-based Oriole Networks gets €11.6M to optimise machine learning processing: Here’s how

London-based Oriole Networks, a developer of artificial intelligence (AI) optimisation technology, announced on Thursday that it has raised £10M (approximately €11.6M) in the Seed funding round. 

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.

What does Oriole Networks solve?

Data centres have played a critical role in the expansion of SaaS companies and are supporting the predicted platform shift toward AI. 

However, their increasing demands on data centres and their networking approach are causing systemic problems and unsustainable power consumption.

James Regan, CEO, says, “As the demand for computing 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.”

Oriole Networks: Enhancing the efficiency of ML processing

Founded as a UCL spinout in 2023 by Professor George Zervas, James Regan, Alessandro Ottino, and Joshua Benjamin, Oriole Networks takes a novel approach. 

According to Oriole Networks, Large Language Models (LLMs) can be trained up to a hundred times faster, whilst consuming only a tiny fraction of the power.

As a result, machine learning algorithms can run with a thousandth of the latency, revolutionising time-critical tasks such as algorithmic trading, and speeding up AI adoption and AI algorithmic progress.

Oriole Networks’ founding trio uses light to connect thousands of AI GPUs directly to each other, resulting in much higher performance. 

James Regan already had a track record of building successful tech companies from university spinouts, having spun out and built EFFECT Photonics.

George Zervas, CTO, says “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.”

The investors

The UCL Technology Fund exists to help solve the world’s most pressing problems: a healthy planet, healthy people, and healthy work. 

David Grimm, Partner UCL Technology Fund, says “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.”

Dorilton Ventures leads significant minority investments in early- to mid-stage technology companies focused on data-centric segments such as IT infrastructure, data science, and cyber security.

Daniel Freeman, General Partner at Dorilton Ventures, says, “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.”

Clean Growth Fund is a £101M venture capital fund that is targeting the UK’s most promising early-stage “clean growth” companies that are pioneering carbon emission reductions in the areas of power and energy, buildings, transport, agriculture, and waste.

Beverley Gower-Jones OBE, Managing Partner of Clean Growth Fund, says, “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.”