A London startup two years old has just become one of Britain’s boldest bets against Nvidia. Olix has raised $312m and tripled its valuation to $3.3bn in six months. Its founder, James Dacombe, is 25. And its pitch has a timely twist: a chip that skips the very parts the rest of the industry is fighting over.
The New York firm Fundomo led the Series B, Sifted reported. Arm, the quant trading firm Hudson River Trading and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings also took part. So did the UK government, through its Sovereign AI fund, which counts Olix as one of its first bets. The round values the company at more than triple its February mark of about $1bn.
Dacombe’s pitch is that the age of one chip doing everything is ending. The industry is “moving into a world of specialists,” he told the FT. He likens an AI data centre to a factory whose product is the token. Making one token takes hundreds of operations with different hardware needs, yet every stage runs on one general-purpose chip.
Olix wants to give each stage its own machine. Its X-1 platform spreads a model across several specialised chips, wired together by an optical network that moves data with light rather than copper. The first chip, DX-1, handles the stage where a model writes its output. For very large models, Olix claims it can run faster and on less power than a general-purpose part.
