Billionaire Gen Zer dropped out of high school to launch his start-up at 17—now he’s the richest self-made 25-year-old in the U.K and all of Europe

James Dacombe has joined the very small club of self-made billionaires under 30, and he did it with two startups and a lot of early faith in his own instincts. The 25-year-old British founder now has a personal net worth above $1 billion, making him Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire, according to the source article.

The big trigger was Olix, his London-based AI chip-making company. Founded just two years ago, it has tripled in value since February after raising $312 million from investors earlier this month. That pushed its market cap to $3.3 billion. Dacombe owns an estimated 30% of the company, so the latest valuation shoved his own stake over the billion-dollar line.

But Olix is only part of the picture. Dacombe also holds 12% of CoMind, the brain monitoring startup he created in 2017 and still leads. CoMind raised $102.5 million in August last year, adding more weight to a fortune that was already moving fast.

His path to that point started early. He began programming apps and websites at 13, studied at Ashville College in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, and took A levels in physics, math, economics and business. At 17, he left school to focus on CoMind. Four years later, he took the Thiel Fellowship, the two-year program backed by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel that gives entrepreneurs $250,000 to skip college and build.

Dacombe is one of 11 self-made billionaires in the world under 30, and one of four who do not live in the U.S. The broader pattern is impossible to miss: tech is still minting absurd wealth at absurd speed, and AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The source says the sector created more than 50 new billionaires in 2025 alone, with over $200 billion flowing into it.