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

One of the UK’s hottest chip startups has raised over $300m at a $3.3bn valuation, tripling its valuation, and plans to bring its first products to customers next year, it says. Olix, founded by 25-year-old entrepreneur James Dacombe, has raised a $312m Series B round, two years after it was founded.

The new $3.3bn valuation marks more than a tripling of its $1bn valuation when it raised $220m in February this year.

The round was led by New York VC Fundomo, with participation from chip giant Arm and quant trading firm Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, with existing investors, which include the UK government's Sovereign AI fund, all increasing their commitments, Olix said.

Olix also announced two appointments: former Wise CFO Matt Briers, who took Wise public, has joined as CFO and Nick McKeown, a high-profile figure in the chip world who is a computer science professor at Stanford and former Intel executive, has joined its board of directors.

Chip designer Olix is developing an optical digital processor with a “novel memory and interconnect architecture” that is compatible with current AI models and supports AI inference workloads. Olix is taking on the dominance of Nvidia.

Dacombe, who is also CEO of CoMind, a startup that is developing brain monitoring and treatment technology, told the FT that the days of Nvidia handling all AI chip workloads were over, saying that “we are moving into a world of specialists”.

Olix says: “Olix believes the industry's approach to building AI inference hardware is reaching its efficiency limits. A datacenter is a factory whose product is the token. Producing a single token takes hundreds of operations, each placing different demands on hardware. Any other factory would give each stage a machine built for it. Instead, the token factory runs every stage on the same general purpose chip. Each new chip generation has improved by pushing single chip specifications higher: an even better generalist but never a specialist. Olix's systems are built on the belief that using specialised chips for each stage of the token production process will unlock a step change in AI performance and cost.”

According to the FT, Olix is in the final stages of designing and testing its chips and expects to deliver its first products to customers next year. It also reported that it plans to sell its chips as part of a server rack that also includes software and networking equipment.

Olix says it will use the funding to help bring its chips to market, build out the silicon platform behind it, and fund manufacturing and supply chain commitments.