Oriole Networks raises £10 million in seed funding

University College London (UCL) spinout Oriole Networks has raised £10 million ($12.6m) in a seed funding round co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures, and Dorilton Ventures, with support from Innovate UK Investor Partnership.

“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,” said Regan, who has taken the CEO role at Oriole. “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.”

George Zervas, co-founder and CTO, added: “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 center 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.”