UK chip startup Olix raises $312M at $3.3BN valuation

Two years ago James Dacombe was 23 and starting a chip company. Now he's 25 and sitting on a $3.3bn valuation after closing a $312m Series B, up from just over $1bn when Olix raised $220m back in February. That's a tripling of value in roughly nine months, which tells you something about how hungry investors are for anything that looks like it might dent Nvidia's grip on AI hardware.

The round was led by New York firm Fundomo, with Arm, Hudson River Trading and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings all writing checks, and the UK's Sovereign AI fund topping up its existing stake. Olix also brought in some serious adult supervision: Matt Briers, the CFO who took Wise public, is now running finance, and Nick McKeown, a Stanford professor and former Intel executive with deep chip-world credibility, has joined the board.

The pitch is fairly specific, not just "we make AI chips too." Olix is building an optical digital processor with what it calls a novel memory and interconnect architecture, aimed squarely at AI inference rather than training. Dacombe's argument, made to the FT, is that the era of Nvidia's GPUs handling every stage of AI workloads is ending. Producing a single output token, he says, involves hundreds of distinct operations, each with different hardware demands, and running all of them on one general-purpose chip is like running an entire factory off a single machine. Olix wants to build specialist machines for specialist stages instead.

That's a genuinely different bet than most of the well-funded chip challengers, who mostly try to out-generalize Nvidia rather than fragment the workload. Olix says it's in the final stages of designing and testing silicon now, with first customer deliveries targeted for next year, sold not as standalone chips but bundled into full server racks with networking and software included. The new cash goes toward finishing that platform and locking down the manufacturing and supply chain commitments that any hardware startup eventually has to face, no matter how good the architecture slides look.

Dacombe is also running CoMind, a brain-monitoring startup, on the side, which is either an impressive display of bandwidth or a sign that he's spreading himself thin right as Olix enters the hardest part of its existence: actually shipping something.