Guest: Andrew Thompson

Role: CTO, Orbital

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmatthewthompson/

Website: www.orbital.tech (company) | www.andrewthompson.co (personal blog)

This AI platform powered over 200,000 property transactions last year and raised $60M in January to expand even further.

I spoke with Andrew Thompson, CTO at Orbital.

Andrew previously built the Caffè Nero app, ran product and tech at Appear Here, founded his own AI company, and now leads engineering, product and a team of in-house real estate lawyers at Orbital.

We discussed:

→ How Orbital mix both generalist LLM’s and their own classical ML into one product.

→ Why legal is roughly 12-18 months behind software engineering, and how to use that lag.

→ What “ship early and often” actually looks like inside a regulated industry.

→ Andrew’s tips and advice for

Andrew is an absolute genius in everything LLM’s and how to make the most of it in the physical space around us.

I really hope you take away something useful from this.

Want to feature in the Best Practice podcast? Email george@georgehannah.com

Sources mentioned in the episode:

* Orbital’s $60M Series B (Jan 2026, led by Brighton Park Capital): https://tech.orbitalwitness.com/posts/2026-01-23-series-b-announcement/

* Caffè Nero (Andrew’s previous build): https://caffenero.com

* Appear Here (Andrew’s previous build): https://www.appearhere.co.uk

* Seedcamp (where Andrew was a startup mentor): https://seedcamp.com

* ElevenLabs (referenced re: agentic insurance): https://elevenlabs.io

* Legalweek New York 2026 (referenced throughout)

* McKinsey research on automatable legal work (referenced)

* OpenAI ChatGPT and GPT-4 (referenced as the inflection point)

* Anthropic Claude (referenced)

* Google BERT and T5 (Orbital’s pre-LLM stack)

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