Plural, the investment group run by government AI advisor Ian Hogarth, has led a $22m (£16.9m) round into a London startup using light to train large language models (LLMs).

Oriole Networks, a spinout from University College London, has raised a total of $35m this year, having previously raised £10m in March.

Founded in 2023, Oriole Networks aims to make generative AI faster and more sustainable with advanced photonics technology.

The company claims it can use light to create networks of AI chips to combine their processing power. Oriole Networks said this approach can train LLMs up to 100 times faster with a fraction of the power required for traditional methods.

The energy consumption of data centres to train and run LLMs is currently one of the biggest challenges to scaling the generative AI sector.

“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,” said Hogarth.

“The team behind Oriole Networks have proven experience in both company building and bringing deep science to commercialisation 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.”

Hogarth has been heavily involved in the British government’s recent AI endeavours. The entrepreneur and investor was appointed by the previous government to lead its AI taskforce, which led to him acting as chair of the AI Safety Institute.

Hogarth previously spent over a decade leading live music startup Songkick and currently holds equity in a number of prominent tech firms, including the UK government-supported quantum group Phasecraft.

Hogarth co-founded Plural with Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, former Skype executive Sten Tamkivi and former Bigpoint Games CEO Khaled Helioui.

Oriole Networks’ existing investors UCL Technology Fund, XTX Ventures, Clean Growth Fund and Dorilton Ventures also participated in the round.

“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,” said Oriole Networks CEO James Regan.

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

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