Oriole Networks raises £10m in Seed funding to build AI ‘super-brains’ capable of training LLMs 100x faster with a fraction of energy

London, 27th March 2024: Oriole Networks – the startup using light to train LLMs a hundred times faster with only a fraction of power – has raised £10 million in Seed funding to revolutionise AI performance and adoption, and solve AI’s critical energy problem. The round, which is one of the UK’s largest Seed raises in recent years, was co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures and Dorilton Ventures. It was supported by Innovate UK Investor Partnership.

Founded in 2023 by UCL scientists, Professor George Zervas, Alessandro Ottino and Joshua Benjamin, with seasoned CEO James Regan, Oriole Networks has developed a novel way of using light to connect thousands of AI chips together. Once connected, the power of each individual graphics processing units (GPUs) is combined to form a “super-brain.” This super-brain can be used to train advanced Large Language Models a hundred times faster, with a thousandth of the latency, while using a tiny fraction of energy.