London AI chip startup OLIX raises $312M Series B at $3.3B valuation

London-based AI chip startup Olix has raised $312 million in a Series B funding round led by Fundomo, tripling its valuation to $3.3 billion. Founded by 25-year-old Thiel Fellow James Dacombe, the company is developing specialized photonic chips, starting with the DX-1 decode accelerator, to bypass supply chain bottlenecks like high-bandwidth memory. Backed by Arm, Reed Hastings, and the UK's Sovereign AI Fund, Olix aims to deliver its co-designed, rack-scale systems to customers by late 2027.

Olix Series B funding round

• ▪Olix raised $312 million in a Series B funding round led by Fundomo, valuing the startup at $3.3 billion.
• ▪Olix's Series B round included backing from Arm, Hudson River Trading, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and the UK Government's £500 million Sovereign AI Fund.
• ▪Olix's valuation rose to $3.3 billion from just over $1 billion in February 2026, when it raised $220 million.
• ▪Olix appointed former Wise chief financial officer Matt Briers as its CFO and Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors.

Specialized AI inference chip architecture

• ▪Olix plans to deliver its first chip, the DX-1 decode accelerator, to customers in the second half of 2027.
• ▪The DX-1 chip is designed to store models in fast on-chip SRAM, avoiding advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory components that are in short supply.
• ▪For 100-billion-parameter models, the DX-1 chip is designed to deliver over 10,000 tokens per second per user.

Rack-scale co-design approach

• ▪Olix delivers its systems as complete, co-designed racks where workloads are scheduled across the hardware using a fully deterministic compiler.
• ▪Olix's X-1 platform unrolls AI models across specialized chips connected by a 'slow and wide' optical interconnect that uses light instead of copper.

James Dacombe founder background

• ▪James Dacombe founded brain-monitoring startup CoMind in 2018 at age 17 and continues to serve as its chief executive.
• ▪James Dacombe, the 25-year-old founder of Olix, dropped out of high school to become a software engineer and was named a Thiel Fellow in 2022.

Hardware-software co-optimization trend

• ▪Venture investors are pouring capital into British AI chip startups, including recent rounds for Axelera, Fractile, and CuspAI.
• ▪AI hardware designers are shifting toward rack-scale co-design, a strategy also pursued by Nvidia's Vera Rubin and AMD's Helios architectures.

8 sources