25-year-old founder raises $220mn for secretive UK AI chip start-up
London-based Olix targets development of AI chips that are faster and cheaper than Nvidia’s
A 25-year-old British entrepreneur has raised $220mn for a secretive UK semiconductor start-up aiming to build AI chips that are faster and cheaper than Nvidia’s.
London-based Olix, launched in 2024 by James Dacombe, has quickly attracted a total of $250mn in financing from investors including Plural, Vertex Ventures, LocalGlobe and Entrepreneurs First.
Olix’s latest $220mn funding round was led by London-based Hummingbird Ventures, valuing the start-up at just over $1bn, according to documents seen by the FT. Hummingbird has previously backed fintechs Kraken and Revolut and food-delivery app Deliveroo.
Rather than challenging Nvidia on existing AI workloads, Olix is developing a novel approach to AI chip design that targets the growing demand for AI “inference”.
The latest AI agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and other AI tools that can “reason” or undertake deeper research before responding to users, consume much more computing resources than earlier generations of chatbots such as ChatGPT or Copilot.
Many chip start-ups have tried to take on Nvidia’s dominance in AI infrastructure by adapting the Big Tech company’s graphics processing unit architecture, a descendant of its origins in video games 30 years ago.
But Olix says it is building a “new class of accelerator” designed for high performance that is “free from the architectural and supply chain constraints” of today’s AI processors, according to its website.
The company says it is developing an optical digital processor with a “novel memory and interconnect architecture” that will still be compatible with existing AI models.
“One of the biggest constraints in AI today is the compute required to run these models at scale,” said Jonathan Heiliger, general partner at Vertex Ventures, a former Facebook infrastructure executive.
“Today’s GPU-based approach forces a compromise between speed and cost,” he added. “Olix is taking a radically different approach designed to deliver a step change in both and it has huge promise.”
Olix, which until recently was named Flux Computing, hopes to deliver its first products to customers as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter. The start-up declined to comment on its fundraising.
No start-up has yet succeeded in significantly loosening Nvidia’s grip on the AI market. But Nvidia’s recent deal with start-up rival Groq, which brought in one of the original founders of Google’s AI chip programme, has helped to reignite investor interest in a category long written off as too risky and capital intensive.
“AI inference demands a ground-up reconsideration” of how chips are built, said Heiliger, who previously helped launch Meta’s Open Compute Project. “This magnitude of systems-level rearchitecting is brutally hard and James and team are executing faster than companies with 10 times their resources.”
Dacombe is also chief executive of brain monitoring start-up CoMind which he founded when he was a teenager and has raised $100mn in funding.
Some UK-based investors hope that Olix can give Britain a stronger foothold in a booming AI infrastructure market that is dominated by US players.
However, UK financing for chip companies still trails far behind Silicon Valley. California-based Cerebras last week announced a new $1bn fundraise, valuing it at $23bn. D-Matrix, another Silicon Valley chip start-up targeting the AI inference market, has raised $450mn to date.
Chip designer Arm is headquartered in Cambridge but majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank, which also acquired Bristol-based AI chipmaker Graphcore in 2024.
Fractile, another British AI chip start-up, said on Tuesday that it planned to invest £100mn to expand its facilities in London and Bristol over the coming years.
The commitment was announced in a speech by the UK government’s AI minister Kanishka Narayan, who urged British tech entrepreneurs and investors to “embrace risk” and back “homegrown” innovation.