If you haven’t already heard of James Dacombe, you will soon.
At 25, he’s the boss of UK unicorn Olix – or Olix Computing Limited, to give it its full title – which is designing the next generation of AI chips.
He only founded the business in 2024, but it made global headlines on Monday when it announced a $312m Series B raise that valued the startup at $3.3bn (£2.5bn).
The remarkable thing about Dacombe is that Olix isn’t even his first business, as he’s also the founder and CEO of CoMind, which is revolutionising brain healthcare with its non-invasive technology.
So what’s the story behind the UK Gen Z AI boss taking the world by storm?
James Robert Dacombe is from Harrogate, the historic North Yorkshire spa town famous for the discovery of its mineral springs in 1571.
Between 2012 and 2017, he attended Ashville College in Harrogate before moving on to St Aidan’s and St John Fisher’s Associated Sixth Form to take A-levels in physics, mathematics, economics and business.
Dropped out after two days
According to his LinkedIn profile, his time at sixth-form college was short-lived. “Dropped out after 2 days,” is all it says.
The teenager taught himself how to code and founded neurotechnology company CoMind in 2018.
The HealthTech startup is on a mission to revolutionise how clinicians monitor the brain. Its non-invasive device measures cerebral blood flow, intracranial pressure and cerebral autoregulation without puncturing the skull.
One of his investors, Entrepreneur First, spoke of his ‘insane determination’ and ‘unstoppable’ drive to get his products into US hospitals while he was still a teenager.
Krishna Visvanathan, co-founder and partner at Crane Venture Partners, first met a ‘fresh-faced’ Dacombe in 2019 and quickly recognised his star quality.
“It was immediately evident that James was destined to be an entrepreneur of substance and the decision to co-invest in CoMind’s pre-seed round led by Julia Hawkins was an easy one,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
Tim Sadler, co-founder and CEO of Tessian, a venture-backed cybersecurity company, described Dacombe as ‘one of the most important and inspiring founders I’ve met’.
In 2025, CoMind announced it had secured £102.5m in a funding round led by Plural, with participation from existing investors Angelini Ventures, LocalGlobe, Octopus Ventures, Crane, Backed VC and Entrepreneur First.
The investment was used to advance regulatory approval of its first product, CoMind One, as well as support the completion of additional clinical trials, team expansion and manufacturing partnerships.
Running one hugely successful company would be enough for most people – but James Dacombe is not most people.
In 2024, he launched Olix to develop faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient AI chips.
Olix is reinventing the chips that underpin AI, with a view to making the technology much cheaper and better-performing than it is today.
It is doing this by developing a family of ‘inference chips’ – designed specifically with AI in mind – each of which specialises in a particular part of an AI model’s ‘thinking’ process.
Specialised chips working together in this way – similar to how work is coordinated across a factory production line – could pave the way for AI that is cheaper, uses less energy and performs better.
Olix quickly joined the ranks of British unicorns, and its latest Series B raise of $312m has propelled its valuation to $3.3bn.
Thiel fellow
Dacombe’s success isn’t all that surprising, given that he’s been a fellow of the prestigious Thiel Fellowship since 2022.
The Thiel Fellowship is the brainchild of billionaire PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and gives $250,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.
As of October 2025, companies and projects created by Thiel Fellows were said to be worth more than $750bn.
That’s why, if you haven’t already heard of James Dacombe, you will soon.