Meet the technical founders of: Orbital Materials
An ongoing series on the technical talent that we back
Fly Ventures exists to be the preferred first check VC for technical founders solving hard problems. As we reflected internally we realized that a lot of the press coverage our portfolio receives is on the second half of that statement so we’re taking it upon ourselves to highlight the talent that we’re lucky enough to back.
Meet Jonny, James and Dan
If we had to sum up the Orbital Materials team in a single phrase it would be IQ horsepower. The individuals assembled are truly world class and hail from some of Europe’s most influential organizations and academic institutions. They come with stellar references and CVs that anyone would be envious of.
Jonny Godwin, OM’s CEO, is an exceptional machine learning researcher that spent five years literally building the bleeding edge of AI while at Deepmind. He boasts 1500+ first-author citations in premier scientific journals, which highlight his pushing the boundaries of material science. In spite of his extreme intelligence Jonny has provided himself to be a thoughtful, people-oriented leader who cares deeply about building an exceptional performance culture.
James Gin-Pollock (CTO) is an 3x former founder with one exit already under his belt having previously built and sold his former startup, Datasine, to Shutterstock. James has demonstrated a true love for building zero-to-one technical teams and has a remarkable ability to nerd out to the latest and greatest in the ml world. His experience building high velocity systems (content recommendation, sports analytics, etc.) gave us a great degree of confidence that the day one OM platform will be built with scale in mind.
Dan Miodovnik (COO) has forged a unique path that balances commercial leadership and policy. Dan previously co-founded Social Finance Digital Labs, a pioneering govtech company in the UK. Under Dan’s leadership his team quickly became the most commercially successful business unit within the company and sold complex technical solutions to multiple government agencies and departments. He also serves as an advisor to the International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence under the auspices of UNESCO.
We were fortunate enough to invest in Orbital’s pre-seed round late last year and have since been astonished by both the technical achievements they’ve unlocked and caliber of individuals they’ve assembled. The Orbital Materials founders exemplify the types of hard problem technical talent that we built Fly to support.
If you’re a deeply technical talent, or know one who is, and is thinking of starting a new venture. Please reach out to anyone from the Fly Ventures team.
