Oriole Networks, a startup focused on light-based technology for AI systems and data centers, has raised £10 million ($13 million) in seed funding. The 2023 spinout of University College London (UCL) founded by George Zervas, James Regan, Alessandro Ottino, and Joshua Benjamin holds intellectual property licensed through UCL’s technology transfer company, UCLB. (From left) Joshua Benjamin, George Zervas, James Regan, and Alessandro Ottino. Courtesy of Oriole Networks. “AI computational needs are increasing by 10 times every 18 months. This leads to distributed training and inference across large numbers of xPUs,” said George Zervas, Oriole's CTO. “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.” With Oriole’s approach, large language models can be trained up to 100X faster, and with a 40X improvement in power efficiency. As a result, machine learning algorithms can run with a thousandth of the latency, enabling time critical tasks such as algorithmic trading, and speeding up AI adoption and AI algorithmic progress. The round was co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures and Dorilton Ventures, with support from Innovate UK Investor Partnership. James Regan, Oriole’s CEO, previously spun out and founded EFFECT Photonics.
