Netflix co-founder backs $312M round for optical inference appliance maker Olix
Artificial intelligence hardware startup Olix Computing Ltd. today announced that it has raised $312 million in funding.
The Series C round included contributions from Arm Holding plc, Netflix Inc. co-founder Reed Hastings and several others. Olix is now valued at $3.3 billion, about triple what it was worth after its previous raise in February.
When a large language model receives a prompt, it turns the text into a collection of mathematical values called a KV cache. It then uses the KV cache to generate a prompt response. The latter phase of the inference workflow is known as the decode stage.
London-based Olix is developing a chip called the DX-1 that is specifically optimized for decode workloads. It plans to ship the DX-1 as part of a data center appliance known as the X-1. According to Olix, the chips inside the system will be linked together using an optical interconnect that transmits data as light.
