Michelmores advises tech start-up Oriole Networks on £10m AI raise

Michelmores has advised London tech start-up Oriole Networks on its £10m seed round, which will support its mission to speed up and reduce emissions involved in the training of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models using data centres.

The round was co-led by XTX Ventures, the venture arm of algorithmic trading firm XTX; Clean Growth Fund, Dorilton Ventures and the UCL Technology Fund, with support from Innovate UK Investor Partnership.

The University College London (UCL) spin-out was created in 2023 by four founders, Professor George Zervas, James Regan, Alessandro Ottino and Joshua Benjamin, with IP licensed through UCL’s technology transfer company UCLB.

UCL scientists George, Alessandro and Joshua had found a way to use light to connect thousands of AI GPUs directly to each other, resulting in much higher performance. James Regan already had a track record of building successful tech companies from university spinouts, having spun out and built EFFECT Photonics.

Data centres have played a critical role in the proliferation of SaaS companies and are also supporting the predicted platform shift towards AI. However, the increasing demands placed on data centres and the approach underlying their networking are leading to systemic problems and unsustainable power consumption. With Oriole’s novel approach, Large Language Models can be trained up to a hundred times faster, whilst consuming only a fraction of the power. As a result, machine learning algorithms can run with a thousandth of the latency, revolutionising time critical tasks such as algorithmic trading, and speeding up AI adoption and AI algorithmic progress.

The Michelmores team was led by Partner Harry Trick (Corporate), with support from Tom Torkar (Partner – Technology), Gruff Cartwright (Solicitor – Corporate), Cathy Bryant (Partner – Tax), Noel Beale (Partner – Regulatory) and Omar Mahboob (Associate – Employment).

Oriole chief executive James Regan said:

“As the demand for computing continues to increase, it is critical to find new solutions that can address these challenges in a sustainable and carbon-efficient manner. 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.”

“It was a pleasure to work with the highly competent and hard-working team at Michelmores to get this done.”

David Grimm, Partner UCL Technology Fund, said:

“It’s rare to have such depth of innovation over many years at UCL combined with an experienced entrepreneur with domain knowledge and a massive market that is looking for this solution. This is going to be an exciting journey.”

Other advisors included Osborne Clarke (XTX Investments and UCL Technology Fund) and Shoosmiths (Clean Growth Fund).