A 25-year-old British entrepreneur has raised $220mn for a secretive UK semiconductor start-up that reckons it can build AI chips faster and cheaper than Nvidia’s.
London-based Olix, launched in 2024 by James Dacombe, has quickly pulled in 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 more than $1bn, according to the FT.
Hummingbird has previously backed fintechs Kraken and Revolut and food-delivery app Deliveroo.
Rather than trying to slug it out with Nvidia on today’s AI workloads, Olix is building a fresh chip design aimed at the growing demand for AI “inference”.
The latest AI agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and other AI tools that can “reason” or do deeper research before replying, chew through far more compute than earlier chatbot generations, such as ChatGPT or Copilot.
Plenty of chip start-ups have tried to loosen Nvidia’s grip by tweaking the GPU architecture it inherited from making a video game kit 30 years ago.
Olix claims it is building a “new class of accelerator” 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.
Olix, formerly known as Flux Computing, aims to ship its first products to customers as early as next year, according to people familiar with the matter.
No start-up has yet meaningfully dented Nvidia’s dominance, but the chip giant’s recent deal with rival start-up Groq has helped jolt investor interest back into a category long treated as expensive pain.
“This magnitude of systems-level rearchitecting is brutally hard, and James and team are executing faster than companies with 10 times their resources,” he said.
Some UK investors hope Olix can give Britain a firmer foothold in the booming AI infrastructure market, dominated by US players.
UK financing for chip companies still trails Silicon Valley by a mile, with California-based Cerebras announcing a new $1bn fundraise last week that valued it at $23bn.
