UK AI chip startup Olix raises $312M at $3.3B valuation with backing from Sovereign AI fund

Olix, a UK-based AI chip startup focused on specialized inference processors and photonic interconnect technology, has raised $312 million in a Series B financing round, more than tripling its valuation to $3.3 billion in just six months. The round included participation from Arm, Fundomo, Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, with the UK government's Sovereign AI venture fund also confirming its investment in the company.

The funding follows Olix's February 2026 Series A round, in which the company raised $220 million at a $1 billion valuation. The startup said the new capital will support the delivery of its first chip to customers in the second half of 2027, accelerate the build-out of its custom silicon platform, and help meet manufacturing and supply chain commitments.

Founded in 2024 by 25-year-old James Dacombe, Olix is developing a suite of inference accelerators built around a novel photonic interconnect. The architecture allows each stage of the inference process to run on specialized chips optimized for that specific step, starting with its first product, DX-1, which the company says is designed to deliver the best possible decode performance across every key metric. Its chips integrate SRAM-based architecture with photonics, an approach Olix claims enables them to outperform HBM-based designs in throughput per megawatt and total cost of ownership. By avoiding HBM entirely, the company also says its hardware will be less exposed to the supply chain constraints currently affecting the broader semiconductor industry.

Olix describes its "slow and wide" optical interconnect as capable of moving data directly from die to die at ultra-low latency and low energy cost, allowing up to 10,000 chips to be linked in a multi-rack scale-up domain. The company says this setup enables frontier models to run at efficiency and speed levels that are not feasible on traditional systems.

Alongside the raise, Olix appointed Professor Nick McKwoen, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, to its board of directors, and hired former Wise chief financial officer Matt Briers as its CFO, according to a LinkedIn post from Dacombe.

The UK government's backing through its Sovereign AI venture fund underscores the strategic importance of domestic chip development. "The future of AI will be built on chips that power models. Countries that build chips will build leverage," said UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan. "Olix is exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI. In just two years, it has established itself as one of the UK's most exciting AI startups, developing breakthrough chip technology with the potential to help shape the future of AI."

The investment reflects a broader trend of governments and strategic investors moving to secure domestic AI compute capabilities, particularly as demand for inference infrastructure grows. Dacombe, who also serves as CEO of brain monitoring startup CoMind — a company he founded as a teenager and which has raised $100 million to date — is positioning Olix at the intersection of next-generation chip design and national AI strategy.