- Olix has raised $312 million in new funding, bringing its valuation to $3.3 billion. This is a significant jump from just over $1 billion in February.
- Networking expert Nick McKeown has joined Olix’s board as the company moves closer to delivering its first customer racks.
- Matt Briers, the new CFO and former Wise executive, has joined Olix. Existing investors have also increased their investments.
James Dacombe started Olix in London in 2024 when he was 23. Two years later, the AI chip startup raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation. This is more than triple its valuation from February, which was just over $1 billion.
The funding round was led by Fundomo, an investment firm from New York. Arm, Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, who invested as an angel, also took part.
Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court, and Transition increased their investments, according to Olix. Tech Funding News reported on Olix’s $220 million round in February, when the company first passed the $1 billion mark.
A new board member and CFO
Along with the fundraise, Olix has named Nick McKeown to its board. McKeown helped create software-defined networking, OpenFlow, and P4. He won the 2025 Marconi Prize and is a professor emeritus at Stanford in computer science and electrical engineering.
He also co-founded Nicira, which VMware bought, and Barefoot Networks, which Intel acquired. At Intel, he later led the networking division.
Matt Briers, the new CFO, spent nine years as CFO at Wise. He joined Wise from Google in 2015, when Wise had about 500,000 customers and was not yet profitable. He led Wise through its 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange, which was the first for a tech company in London and the largest tech listing there at the time. Wise was valued at £8.75 billion, or about $12 billion, and stayed profitable throughout, according to Olix.
What Olix is building
Olix says it treats a data centre running AI inference like a factory that produces tokens. Each token needs hundreds of operations and different hardware.
Most companies use a single general-purpose chip for everything, but Olix’s X-1 platform distributes the model across several specialised chips, each handling a specific task. The system uses a flexible compute fabric instead of locking in a model’s design.
The chips use an optical interconnect, sending data via light rather than copper. Olix says this lowers latency and saves energy. The first chip, DX-1, is a decode accelerator for the stage when a model creates its output.
For models with 100 billion parameters, Olix claims that DX-1 can deliver over 10,000 tokens per second per user and use less power than general-purpose chips for large batches. The design is meant to scale to models with 10 trillion parameters or more.
Olix has over 140 employees in London, Bristol, Toronto, Austin, and San Francisco. The new funding will help launch DX-1 to its first customers in the second half of 2027, and support more platform development and manufacturing to increase chip production.
The AI chip sector is very competitive
In May, TFN reported that Fractile, based in Bristol and founded by Oxford researcher Walter Goodwin, raised $220 million in a round led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund. Etched doubled its valuation to $10.3 billion in a Sequoia-led round in July, and SambaNova raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic.
Even though Olix’s $3.3 billion valuation is three times higher than in February, it is still much lower than its US rivals.
The AI chip market was valued at about $84 billion in 2026 and is expected to grow by more than 35% annually through 2030. This shows the size of the opportunity investors see, even as public markets slow down.
Olix has tripled its valuation twice in two years, added a leading networking expert to its board, and hired a CFO with experience taking a fintech public. However, it remains to be seen whether DX-1 will achieve its projected throughput once customers begin using it in 2027.
This performance, rather than the size of the funding round, will be the key metric to watch.
