A 25-year-old British founder has just pulled off one of the most impressive fundraises in UK tech history. James Dacombe’s London-based startup Olix has raised $220 million in a round led by Hummingbird Ventures, pushing the company past the $1 billion valuation mark, as first reported by the Financial Times.
That is a staggering milestone for a company that only launched in 2024 and has now raised a total of $250 million.
What Is Olix Building?
Olix is not trying to beat Nvidia at its own game. Instead of tweaking the existing GPU architecture that has powered AI for years, the company is building what it calls the Optical Tensor Processing Unit (OTPU), a completely new type of AI accelerator designed from the ground up for inference workloads.
The OTPU integrates SRAM memory architecture with photonics, an approach that Olix says enables it to surpass HBM-based architectures in both throughput per megawatt and total cost of ownership. By deliberately avoiding HBM (high-bandwidth memory), Olix also sidesteps the supply chain bottlenecks that have constrained virtually every other chip company trying to compete with Nvidia.
As Olix wrote in its recently published Compute Manifesto: from a supply chain and fabrication perspective, a new architecture must avoid HBM, advanced packaging, or any other technology that is supply chain-constrained by current incumbents. When even the biggest hyperscalers are struggling to secure capacity, a startup simply cannot compete on those terms.
This matters because inference, the process of actually running trained AI models, is becoming increasingly expensive. The latest generation of AI agents and reasoning tools consume far more computing power than earlier chatbots. Every time an AI tool reasons through a problem or conducts deeper research before responding, the compute bill climbs significantly.
Jonathan Heiliger, general partner at Vertex Ventures and a former Facebook infrastructure executive, told the FT that today’s GPU-based approach forces a compromise between speed and cost. He described Olix’s approach as radically different, designed to deliver a step change in both.
Who Is James Dacombe?
Dacombe is not a first-time founder. He is also the chief executive of CoMind, a brain monitoring startup he founded as a teenager that has raised $100 million in funding to date. At 25, he is now running two companies with a combined fundraising total north of $350 million.
The investors backing Olix include Plural, Vertex Ventures, LocalGlobe, and Entrepreneurs First, alongside lead investor Hummingbird Ventures. Hummingbird’s portfolio includes names like Kraken, Revolut, and Deliveroo. Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise and general partner at Plural, confirmed he led Plural’s investment into Olix, stating that the world needs vastly more compute and that current hardware is reaching a physical wall.
Olix has grown from a founding team to over 70 employees and is aiming to scale to over 200 this year. The company, which until recently was named Flux Computing, is hiring across London, Bristol, Austin, San Francisco, and Toronto.
Why This Matters for the UK
The UK has been building serious momentum in AI, with over 2,300 VC-backed AI companies and record capital flowing into British startups. But when it comes to AI hardware and semiconductor design, the country has struggled to keep pace with Silicon Valley.
California-based Cerebras announced a $1 billion fundraise last week, valuing it at $23 billion. D-Matrix, another US chip startup targeting AI inference, has raised $450 million to date. Meanwhile, the UK’s most notable chip company, Arm, is headquartered in Cambridge but majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank, which also acquired Bristol-based AI chipmaker Graphcore in 2024.
Olix reaching unicorn status is a significant signal. It suggests that UK-based chip startups can attract the kind of capital needed to compete in what is one of the most capital-intensive sectors in tech.
Plural’s Hinrikus made this point directly, noting that while Silicon Valley has long been the centre of gravity for classical processors, Olix represents a rare opportunity for Europe to establish a genuine position in the AI compute market. He argued that Olix’s European roots are a competitive advantage, given that the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands are home to world-leading research institutions in photonics and precision engineering.
The timing also aligns with broader government support. Fractile, another British AI chip startup, announced plans this week to invest £100 million to expand its facilities in London and Bristol. The UK’s AI minister Kanishka Narayan used the Fractile announcement to urge British tech entrepreneurs and investors to embrace risk and back homegrown innovation, as reported by the FT.
Can Anyone Actually Challenge Nvidia?
This is the billion-dollar question, quite literally. No startup has yet managed to significantly loosen Nvidia’s grip on the AI infrastructure market. Many have tried and most have either pivoted, been acquired, or quietly faded.
But the landscape is shifting. Nvidia’s recent $20 billion deal with startup rival Groq, which brought in Jonathan Ross, one of the original creators of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), has helped reignite investor appetite for alternative AI chip architectures. The deal validated what many in the industry had been arguing: that inference workloads need purpose-built hardware, not just repurposed GPUs.
Heiliger, who previously helped launch Meta’s Open Compute Project, told the FT that AI inference demands a ground-up reconsideration of how chips are built. He noted that the kind of systems-level rearchitecting Olix is attempting is extremely difficult, but added that Dacombe and his team are executing faster than companies with ten times their resources.
Olix reportedly plans to deliver its first products to customers as soon as 2027. If they can pull it off, it would be a defining moment not just for the company but for the entire UK AI ecosystem.
What Founders Should Take Away
For early-stage founders watching from the sidelines, Olix’s story carries a few lessons worth noting.
First, solving a real infrastructure bottleneck attracts capital fast. The AI inference cost problem is one of the biggest constraints facing the industry right now. Olix positioned itself directly against that pain point with a genuinely novel technical approach.
Second, a strong founder story matters. Dacombe’s track record with CoMind gave investors confidence that he could execute on something this ambitious at a young age. As Plural noted, his approach centres on taking contrarian bets and attracting exceptional talent to make those bets consensus.
Third, the UK funding environment for deep tech is improving. While it still trails Silicon Valley, rounds like this prove that British founders do not necessarily need to relocate to raise serious money for hardware startups. The disciplines that matter most for what Olix is building have deep academic and industrial roots across Europe.
The AI chip race is far from settled. And with Olix now armed with a billion-dollar valuation, a quarter of a billion dollars in funding, and a fundamentally different approach to AI compute, the UK has a genuine contender in the ring.
This article references reporting by Tim Bradshaw at the Financial Times. For more on UK AI investment trends, see our Top 100 UK AI Startup Investments in 2025 and our guide on turning UK innovation into prosperity.