Michelmores advises photonic start-up Oriole Networks on £17.5M Series Round A led by Plural

Michelmores has advised startup Oriole Networks on its £17.5m Series A funding round. This follows soon after its £10m seed round, which Michelmores also advised on.

The round was led by Plural, with participation from existing investors, including UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures and Dorilton Ventures.

Plural is a London based investment fund that supports founders that are aiming to change the world through technology. It was co-founded by government AI advisor, Ian Hogarth, who will join the Oriole Networks board as part of the investment round.

Set up in 2023 as a spin-out from University College London (UCL), Oriole Networks aims to make generative AI faster and more sustainable with advanced photonics technology. The tech being developed can increase the speed that information can travel by up to 100 times, as well as being able to significantly cut the amount of energy consumption that is used by traditional ethernet cables.

The investment will accelerate Oriole Networks’ growth, with plans to have early-stage products with customers during 2025.

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

Oriole chief executive James Regan said:

“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.”

“It was a pleasure to work again with the team at Michelmores. They have supported us in various areas since our spin-out from UCL, and we have always been impressed by their professional and commercial approach“.

Ian Hogarth, Partner of Plural, said:

“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 commercialization 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.”

More information can be found here.

Other advisors included CMS (Plural) and Shoosmiths (Clean Growth Fund).