Britain’s first big state-backed bet on AI silicon has landed on a London startup that wants to replace HBM with light. Olix closed a $312M Series B at a $3.3B valuation, Europe’s largest semiconductor venture round, with the UK government’s Sovereign AI venture fund among the backers.
Fundomo led the round, joined by Arm, Hudson River Trading and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. The valuation is more than triple the $1B Olix commanded in February, when it raised $220M.
Olix’s pitch is a suite of inference accelerators joined by a photonic interconnect that shuttles data directly between dies at low latency and low energy. Its chips pair SRAM-style memory with photonics, a mix the company says beats HBM-based designs on throughput per megawatt and total cost of ownership. The first accelerator, DX-1, targets decode performance, and up to 10,000 chips can link across a multi-rack scale-up domain for frontier-model workloads.
Founder James Dacombe, 25, said the new cash funds first-chip delivery to customers in the second half of 2027, along with platform build-out and manufacturing commitments.
The round added ex-Wise CFO Matt Briers and Stanford professor emeritus Nick McKwoen to the team, with McKwoen joining the board. UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan framed the bet in national terms: countries that build chips will build leverage. Dacombe also runs brain-monitoring startup CoMind.
