OLIX raises £245M in Europe's largest chip round for AI inference

OLIX, a London startup designing chips to run AI models, has raised $312M, or about £245M, in a Series B round that values it at $3.3B, roughly £2.6bn. The company says it is the largest semiconductor venture round Europe has seen, and it triples OLIX’s valuation in under six months. The chip designer Arm and the trading firm Hudson River Trading took part, alongside Fundomo, the Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings as an angel, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI fund. Nick McKeown, a networking pioneer, joins the board.

The company is aimed squarely at the part of AI that now costs the most: not training a model, but running it. That step, called inference, is what happens every time a deployed model answers a question, and at the scale AI is now used it dominates the compute bill. OLIX’s first product, a chip it calls DX-1, is a photonic accelerator built specifically for inference, using light rather than only electrical signals to move data and doing away with the expensive high-bandwidth memory that pins the cost of today’s AI hardware.

For the UK, it is the most eye-catching entry yet in a small but growing cluster of British AI-chip companies, alongside Fractile, which is also chasing the inference market, and Bristol’s Graphcore, now owned by SoftBank. That a two-year-old company founded in 2024 by James Dacombe can raise this much, this fast, says as much about the desperation for alternatives to Nvidia as it does about OLIX. The presence of the government’s Sovereign AI fund is the tell: Britain wants at least some of the hardware underneath the AI boom designed and owned at home.

The hard part is still ahead. Designing a novel chip is one thing; manufacturing it, building the software ecosystem around it, and persuading customers to move workloads onto unfamiliar silicon is another, and OLIX does not expect to deliver DX-1 to its first customers until the second half of 2027. Chip history is littered with promising architectures that never cleared that gap. But a $3.3B valuation buys a lot of runway to try, and it makes OLIX one of the UK companies worth watching most closely.