Olix raises $312M at $3.3B valuation from Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Arm, to build Nvidia rival

James Dacombe was 23 when he founded Olix in London back in 2024. Two years on, the chip startup has raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation, more than tripling the roughly $1 billion price tag it carried just eight months ago in February. Fundomo led the round, with Arm, Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings writing checks as an angel. Existing backers including Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court, and Transition all put in more money too.

The raise came with two notable hires. Nick McKeown, the Stanford professor emeritus who helped invent software-defined networking and OpenFlow, is joining the board after building and selling two companies, Nicira to VMware and Barefoot Networks to Intel. And Matt Briers, who spent nine years as Wise's CFO and steered the fintech through its 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange, has come aboard as Olix's finance chief. Wise stayed profitable the entire time Briers ran its books, which is not a small detail for a chip company about to burn through serious capital scaling manufacturing.

What Olix actually builds is a bet against the idea that one chip should do everything. The company treats an AI data center like a factory churning out tokens, and instead of running inference on a single general-purpose processor, it splits the workload across specialized chips connected by optical interconnects, using light instead of copper to move data faster and with less energy loss. Its first product, DX-1, handles the decode stage of inference, and Olix claims it can push out more than 10,000 tokens per second per user on 100-billion-parameter models while burning less power than general-purpose alternatives at scale. The architecture is designed to stretch to models with 10 trillion parameters or beyond, though that's still theoretical.

Olix isn't alone chasing this dream, and the competition says a lot about how much money is flowing into anyone who claims they can dethrone Nvidia. Fractile, out of Bristol, raised $220 million in May. Etched doubled its valuation to $10.3 billion in July. SambaNova landed $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation the same month. Olix's $3.3 billion still looks modest next to those numbers, but the broader AI chip market was worth roughly $84 billion in 2026 and is projected to grow more than 35% a year through 2030, which explains why investors keep writing checks even as public markets cool.

Olix now has over 140 people spread across London, Bristol, Toronto, Austin, and San Francisco, and the plan is to get DX-1 into first customers' racks by the second half of 2027. That's the date that actually matters here, not the valuation. Tripling twice in two years buys attention and a strong board. It doesn't yet prove the chips deliver the throughput Olix is promising once real customers start plugging them in.