London AI chip outfit Olix has raised $312mn, tripling its valuation while investors hunt for faster Nvidia alternatives.
According to the Financial Times, Olix has raised fresh cash from investors including Arm, valuing the start-up at $3.3bn.
The company was founded in 2024 by 25-year-old entrepreneur James Dacombe and is trying to outrun a growing pack of AI chip hopefuls. They all want a slice of the booming AI infrastructure market.
The London-based outfit’s $312mn round values Olix at $3.3bn, including the new money. That is up from just more than $1bn in February, when the start-up raised $220mn.
Olix founder James Dacombe told the FT that the era of one Nvidia chip handling every AI job was finished. He said: “we are moving into a world of specialisation”.
“Today, where there is such an economic prize from being able to run large, powerful large language models fast and to a large number of users at a low cost, it really pays to disaggregate and have custom silicon that is good at that,” he said.
Dacombe is not short of side quests. He is chief executive of brain-monitoring start-up CoMind, which he founded as a teenager and has raised about $100mn.
Anxiety among the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street about debt-fuelled AI infrastructure spending has battered chipmakers and memory companies in recent weeks. Private investors, however, are still throwing money at chip start-ups promising faster or cheaper AI serving.
Olix says its chip designs avoid some of the parts now in shortest supply. That includes leading-edge silicon, high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging.
Olix has appointed former UK fintech Wise chief financial officer Matt Briers as its own chief financial officer. Briers arrives as the company tries to look less like a lab project and more like a supplier.
The company employs more than 140 staff in London, Bristol, Toronto and Austin. Many have come from US Big Tech groups and semiconductor companies.
Olix plans to tape out its chips later this year. That is the final design and testing stage before manufacturing, assuming nobody finds something ugly at the last minute.
It expects to ship its first products to customers next year. The plan is to sell the chips as part of a server rack with software and networking gear.
Olix has used AI tools heavily to speed up parts of development. That includes the compiler, which lets AI software run on its chips. Finishing that compiler was a key proof point for investors in the latest round.
Olix’s main differentiator is photonic interconnect, which uses lasers to move data between large chip clusters. The pitch is faster data movement with better energy efficiency, which sounds handy when the AI machine room starts eating the grid.
