University College London (UCL) spinout Oriole Networks has raised £10 million ($12.6m) in seed funding.

The round was co-led by UCL Technology Fund, Clean Growth Fund, XTX Ventures, and Dorilton Ventures, with support from Innovate UK Investor Partnership.

Founded in 2023 by three UCL scientists and the former CEO of Effect Photonics, James Regan, Oriole Networks uses light to connect thousands of AI GPUs directly to each other. It claims this will allow LLMs to be trained a hundred times faster, with a thousandth of the latency, while only using a fraction of the power consumed by traditional training methods.

The company says this method will help to reduce the unsustainable power consumption challenges currently facing data centers as they grapple with supporting high-intensity AI workloads.

“As the demand for compute continues to increase, it is critical to find new solutions that can address these challenges in a sustainable and carbon-efficient manner,” said Regan, who has taken the CEO role at Oriole. “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.”

George Zervas, co-founder and CTO, added: “AI computational needs are increasing by 10 times every 18 months. This leads to distributed training and inference across large numbers of xPUs. Collective data movement across the servers in the data center becomes a bottleneck which in turn limits the training and inference completion time. This requires a fundamental shift in the co-design of next-generation networked systems.”