Series A21 October 2024

Oriole Networks raises $22m in Series A funding led by Plural to scale its photonic networking technology

Plural led the Series A round to help the London based startup expand its team and scale its super-brain solution.

$22.0MSeries A

≈ £16.9M at $1 = £0.7703 on 21 Oct 2024

Oriole Networks is a London-based deep-tech company that has developed a photonic networking platform designed to eliminate electronic switches from data centres.

Oriole Networks has secured $22m in Series A funding to accelerate its growth and scale its photonic networking technology. The round was led by Plural, with participation from existing backers including UCL Technology Fund, XTX Ventures, Clean Growth Fund, and Dorilton Ventures.

The capital will be directed towards expanding the team, engaging with high-volume suppliers, and scaling the company infrastructure. The fresh injection follows a seed round secured earlier this year, bringing the total capital raised by the London based startup to $35m.

Ian Hogarth of Plural will join the board as part of the transaction to support the firm through its next phase of commercialisation.

From the founder

"This funding is yet another milestone for Oriole following a year of rapid pace and growth. This is a booming market desperate for solutions and our ambition is to create an ecosystem of photonic networking that can reshape this industry by solving today's bottlenecks and enabling greater competition at the GPU layer. Building on decades of research, we're paving the way for faster, more efficient, more sustainable AI."

James Regan

at Oriole Networks

Investor perspective

"Applying 20 years of deep research and learning in photonics to create a better AI infrastructure demonstrates how much more innovation there is to come to help reap the benefits of this technology. The team behind Oriole Networks have proven experience in both company building and bringing deep science to commercialisation and are creating a fundamental shift in the design of next generation networked systems that will reduce latency and slash the energy impact of data centres on which we now rely."

Ian Hogarth

Partner, Plural