James Dacombe’s Olix raises at $3.3bn valuation
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Olix just raised $312m, tripling its valuation to $3.3bn in months. The UK chip startup wants to beat Nvidia on price without the parts everyone's short on.
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James Dacombe is 25, and he's just talked Arm, Hudson River Trading and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings into backing his second company. Olix, the AI chip startup he founded after leaving brain-monitoring venture CoMind, has closed a $312m round led by New York's Fundomo, pushing its post-money valuation to $3.3bn. That's roughly triple where it stood in February, when Hummingbird Ventures, Plural, LocalGlobe and Entrepreneurs First put in $220m at just over $1bn.
The pitch is blunt: build chips that beat Nvidia's on speed and cost, in a market Nvidia has effectively owned. Olix isn't alone in trying. Dutch outfit Axelera pulled in more than $250m in February, and UK-based Fractile, focused on inference chips, raised $220m in May. Money is flowing into every layer of AI infrastructure right now — chips, data centres, the wiring that connects them — and investors seem happy to keep writing checks even as the sums involved climb fast.
What sets Olix apart, according to the Financial Times, is that its chips sidestep some of the components currently in tightest supply: leading-edge silicon, high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging. That's a deliberate bet, not an accident, and it matters because those shortages have been a real bottleneck for the whole industry. Public chip stocks, meanwhile, have been anything but calm lately, wobbling on worries about how much debt is funding the AI buildout, and rattled further by reports that a Chinese firm has begun mass-producing chipmaking machines — a development some European investors actually think could work in the continent's favour.
Olix has also brought on Matt Briers, Wise's former CFO, to run its finances, which suggests a company gearing up for the operational grind of actually shipping hardware rather than just raising more of it. The plan is to tape out its chips later this year — the last major step before manufacturing begins — with the first products expected to reach customers in 2026. Plenty can go wrong between a taped-out design and a working product in someone's data centre, but Olix has, in a matter of months, gone from a $1bn idea to a $3.3bn one that some serious names are willing to bet on.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Tripling a valuation in under a year on a chip that hasn't taped out yet says more about how frothy AI infrastructure investing has become than about anything Olix has actually shipped. The sidestep-the-shortage angle is genuinely clever and worth watching, but plenty of well-funded chip startups have promised to dethrone Nvidia before hitting the wall between clever design and mass manufacturing. Europe backing its own chip bets is healthy, especially with public markets getting nervous about debt-fuelled AI spending — just don't confuse a big round with a proven product.
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