London-based AI chip startup has been valued at $3.3bn (£2.5bn) Olix after announcing a $312m Series B financing round.
The valuation is remarkable as Olix was only founded in 2024 by 25-year-old James Dacombe – who famously dropped out of sixth form after just two days.
The round included Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, with existing investors all increasing their commitments.
Olix, which is designing the next generation of AI chips, has also secured backing from the UK Government’s Sovereign AI venture fund.
Based in London and with offices in Bristol, Olix is developing faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient AI chips and is one of the UK’s newest unicorns.
Alongside the round, Olix has appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors.
James Dacombe profile: Meet the UK’s 25-year-old unicorn boss
One of the defining figures of modern networking, McKeown co-invented software-defined networking, OpenFlow and P4.
He is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and winner of the 2025 Marconi Prize.
He co-founded several companies, including Nicira, acquired by VMware, and Barefoot Networks, acquired by Intel, where he went on to lead the company’s networking business.
Olix has also appointed Matt Briers as chief financial officer.
Briers was CFO of Wise for nine years, joining in 2015 from Google when the company had around 500,000 customers and was loss-making through taking it public in a 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange.
Wise’s direct listing was the first by a technology company in London and the exchange’s largest technology listing, valuing Wise at £8.75bn, approximately $12bn. He built the finance function that carried Wise from private company to the public markets while it remained profitable throughout.
Olix is building the infrastructure for frontier AI inference. Founded in London in 2024, the company designs every part of its systems: the chips, the lasers and the network that connects them. Its systems are delivered as complete racks for the most demanding inference workloads.
Dacombe said: “Olix’s mission is to build the infrastructure for frontier AI. Instead of forcing a single chip to do everything, we build specialised silicon and an optical network to connect it, unrolling models across racks like an assembly line. A different answer to the industry’s supply chain constraints, built on components available at scale today.”
Before founding Olix, Dacombe established neurotechnology company CoMind.
Earlier this year, at 25, he led Olix as it secured $220m Series A financing – one of the largest Series A rounds ever raised by a UK technology company.