- Olix has raised £231 million ($312 million) in a Series B funding round.
- The investment values the UK AI chip startup at £2.45 billion ($3.3 billion), more than triple its valuation six months ago.
- The company plans to deliver its first AI chip to customers in the second half of 2027.
London-based AI chip startup Olix has raised £231 million ($312 million) in a Series B funding round, pushing its valuation to £2.45 billion ($3.3 billion) as the company looks to challenge established players in the fast-growing AI semiconductor market.
The latest investment marks a sharp jump from February 2026, when the company raised £163 million ($220 million) at a valuation of £743 million ($1 billion). The fresh capital will be used to develop Olix's custom AI chip platform, prepare its first products for commercial delivery in the second half of 2027, and strengthen its manufacturing and supply chain operations.
Backed by global investors as AI chip race gathers pace
The funding round attracted a mix of technology companies and high-profile investors, including Arm, Fundomo, Hudson River Trading, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and the UK government's Sovereign AI venture fund.
Founded in 2024 by James Dacombe, Olix is developing AI chips built around a photonic interconnect, a technology the company says allows different stages of AI inference to run on specialised processors rather than relying on a single general-purpose chip. Its first product, DX-1, is designed to improve the speed and efficiency of AI inference while reducing energy consumption.
Unlike many existing AI chips that rely on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), Olix is combining SRAM architecture with photonics. The company believes this approach could improve performance, lower operating costs and reduce exposure to the supply chain constraints that have affected the semiconductor industry in recent years.
Olix also claims its optical interconnect technology can link up to 10,000 chips across multiple server racks with lower latency and energy use, allowing AI models to run more efficiently at scale.
Alongside the funding announcement, Dacombe said on LinkedIn that Professor Nick McKeown, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, had joined the company's board. Olix has also appointed former Wise chief financial officer Matt Briers as its CFO.
A fast-growing UK challenger in the AI chip market
Olix was founded by 25-year-old Dacombe, who also leads brain-monitoring startup CoMind, a company he launched as a teenager. CoMind has raised around £74 million ($100 million) to date and continues to operate alongside Olix under Dacombe's wider business interests.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Dacombe reportedly said the company's strategy centres on building specialised chips tailored for different AI workloads instead of relying on the more general-purpose hardware widely used across the industry. He also reportedly said Olix remains on track to become one of the fastest companies in the sector to move from founding to producing its first chip design.
The company employs more than 140 people across offices in London, Bristol and the US.
The UK government also backed the latest investment through its Sovereign AI fund. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan reportedly said countries developing advanced semiconductor technology would play an important role in shaping the future of artificial intelligence, adding that Olix represents the type of UK company the government wants to support.
