London AI infrastructure startup OLIX has raised $312 million in Series B financing at a $3.3 billion valuation, Converge Digest reported. The round adds Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading as new investors, with Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings participating as an angel. Existing backers Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court and Transition all increased their commitments. TechTimes reported that Fundomo led the round and that the UK government's Sovereign AI Fund also took part, and called the raise the largest semiconductor venture round ever closed by a European company.
What OLIX is building
The company designs the chips, the lasers and the network that connects them, and ships the result as a complete rack rather than as components for a customer to integrate. Its platform is called X-1. Instead of running a whole model on one large general-purpose chip, X-1 "unrolls" a model across a large number of chips, assigning each chip a single stage of the inference pipeline — a production line rather than a single machine. Each chip keeps a flexible compute fabric rather than hard-coding one model architecture, so the hardware is not obsoleted by the next model design.
The first chip in the platform is DX-1, a decode accelerator. Token generation splits into two phases: prefill, which processes the input prompt in parallel and is limited by arithmetic throughput, and decode, which produces the output one token at a time and is limited by memory bandwidth. DX-1 targets decode. Because each chip handles only one stage, its working set fits in on-chip SRAM, so OLIX drops high-bandwidth memory entirely — removing its dependence on the advanced packaging and stacked-DRAM supply chain that constrains most AI accelerators. Holding the design together is a proprietary "slow and wide" photonic interconnect that moves data between chips using light rather than copper. Converge Digest reports the optical die-to-die network scales to more than 100,000 interconnected chips; TechTimes, citing Data Center Dynamics, puts the count at up to 10,000 chips within a single rack-scale domain.
OLIX says that for 100-billion-parameter models, DX-1 delivers more than 10,000 tokens per second per user at a higher output-token-per-watt rate than general-purpose chips running large batch sizes, and that the architecture scales to models of 10 trillion parameters and above. Those are company figures; no independent benchmark exists yet. Google put the same energy-per-token question in a consumer device when it launched the Pixel 11 lineup on its Tensor G6 chip. The financing funds delivery of DX-1 to first customers by the second half of 2027, plus the manufacturing and supply-chain commitments behind it. The company is hiring across silicon, photonics, compiler and systems engineering in London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto and San Francisco.
Who is running it
OLIX is led by James Dacombe, who is 25. TechTimes reports he founded the company in London in March 2024, at 24, under the name Flux Corp Ltd., and renamed it Olix Computing Ltd. in January 2026 after its first major raise. He is a Thiel Fellow and remains chief executive of CoMind, the non-invasive optical brain-monitoring company he founded as a teenager in 2018 and which has separately raised about $100 million. BusinessCloud reports he dropped out of sixth form.
Alongside the round, OLIX appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board. McKeown co-invented software-defined networking, OpenFlow and the P4 programming language, is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford and won the 2025 Marconi Prize. He co-founded Nicira, acquired by VMware, and Barefoot Networks, acquired by Intel, where he went on to run Intel's networking business. The company also named Matt Briers as chief financial officer; Briers spent nine years as CFO of Wise, joining in 2015 from Google and taking the company through its 2021 London listing.
Related AI infrastructure rounds
The raise lands in a stretch of very large private rounds for AI infrastructure. Baseten, which serves models rather than building silicon, raised $1.5 billion at up to a $13 billion valuation, and coding-agent company Cognition raised $1 billion at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. A month later, inference-chip startup Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation led by Jane Street, roughly doubling the $10.3 billion mark it carried in July.
Capital is flowing to the deployment layer as well as the silicon: Thrive Holdings raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation to put AI into accounting and IT firms it owns outright.
Source: Converge Digest, FinSMEs.
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