UCL spinout raises another £17m to reduce energy consumption in AI data centers | UCL news

Oriole Networks has raised £16.8 million from London-based venture capital firm Plural, with all existing investors reinvesting. It follows an initial £10m funding round earlier this year.

The company, which was founded last year from UCL, aims to tackle a huge global technology problem: the enormous and ever-increasing amount of energy consumed in data processing in the AI ​​age.

Conventional network systems, although many transmit data via light, must convert it back to electrical impulses for processing and then back to light for transmission. Oriole Networks uses photonics, an optical switching technology that enables complete processing as light rather than electronic impulses.

The advantages are threefold: it is much faster (information can be transmitted at the speed of light without having to be converted into electricity for processing); it uses much less electricity (photonics uses much less electricity to process data than electronics and photonic signals do not produce heat, so they do not require huge amounts of power to cool the equipment); and cCrucially, the increase in processing speed means that AI applications such as Large Language Models – which drive the huge demand for data processing centers and energy supplies – can be trained up to 100 times faster.

Oriole Networks CEO James Regan said: “This financing is another milestone for Oriole after a year of rapid pace and growth.

“This is a booming market that is desperate for solutions and our ambition is to create an ecosystem of photonic networks that can reshape this industry.

“Building on decades of research, we are paving the way for faster, more efficient and more sustainable AI.”

Oriole Networks leverages years of research within UCL’s Optical Networks laboratories, with the technology licensed through UCL’s technology transfer company, UCL Business.

Robert Thompson, Vice Dean (Enterprise) of UCL’s Faculty of Engineering, said: “We champion the power of basic research to tackle major societal challenges.

“Oriole Networks is an example of this, with decades of optical networking research at UCL now providing innovative solutions to meet society’s growing data needs while minimizing environmental impact.”

Marina Santilli, Associate Director of the Physical Sciences and Engineering, UCLB, said: “The Oriole team was already translating UCL research into commercial hardware following their seed round earlier this year, so this new funding accelerates that timeline extra boost.

“The sooner Oriole can realize their vision of an energy-efficient, all-optical data center, the better for the planet.”

Ian Hogarth, partner at Plural, said: “Applying 20 years of deep research and learning in photonics to create a better AI infrastructure shows how much more innovation will come to reap the benefits of this technology help pick.

“The team behind Oriole Networks has proven experience in both building businesses and bringing deep science to commercialization and is creating a fundamental shift in the design of next-generation network systems that will reduce latency and reduce the energy impact of data centers where we operate now depend on will diminish.”

Latency is the delay before a data transfer begins following a transfer instruction.

In conventional data centers, computers communicate with each other via Ethernet cables, such as those connected to Internet routers.

These cables cannot transport the data at the speed that computers can produce, creating a bottleneck. Moreover, they are energy inefficient: they account for between a fifth and a half of the data center’s total electricity consumption.

Mr Regan said their technology reduces electricity demand for data transmission by 97 percent, allowing some data centers to almost halve their total electricity consumption.

The organizations that have reinvested in Oriole are UCL Technology Fund, XTX Ventures, Clean Growth Fund and Dorilton Ventures.

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• Second from left: Professor George Zervas, Chief Technology Officer at Oriole Networks and Professor of Optical Networked Systems at the UCL Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering; front center: James Regan, CEO of Oriole Networks.

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