One of the UK’s hottest chip startups has raised over $300m at a $3.3bn valuation, tripling its valuation, and plans to bring its first chips to market next year, it says. Olix, founded by 25-year-old entrepreneur James Dacombe, has raised a $312m Series B round, two years after it was founded.
The new $3.3bn valuation marks more than a tripling of its $1bn valuation when it raised $220m in February this year.
The round was led by New York VC Fundomo, with participation from chip giant Arm and quant trading firm Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, with existing investors, which include the UK government's Sovereign AI fund, all increasing their commitments, Olix said.
Olix also announced two appointments: former Wise CFO Matt Briers, who took Wise public, has joined as CFO and Nick McKeown, a high-profile figure in the chip world who is a computer science professor at Stanford and former Intel executive, has joined its board of directors.
Chip designer Olix is developing an optical digital processor with a “novel memory and interconnect architecture” that is compatible with current AI models and supports AI inference workloads. Olix is taking on the dominance of Nvidia.
