London-based Olix has closed a $312 million Series B at a $3.3 billion valuation, more than tripling its post-money six months after a $220M round, to commercialize photonic-interconnect AI inference chips that skip high-bandwidth memory.
Who Wrote The Checks
New investors include Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, alongside Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings as an angel. Existing backers Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court and Transition returned. The UK government's Sovereign AI Venture Fund also invested, making the round Europe's largest-ever semiconductor financing.
The Architecture
Founder James Dacombe, 25, is building what Olix calls Optical Tensor Processing Units, or OTPUs. The centerpiece is DX-1, a decode accelerator that pairs on-chip SRAM with a "slow and wide" optical interconnect capable of chaining 10,000 chips into a rack-scale scale-up domain. Olix argues the SRAM-plus-photonics stack beats HBM systems on throughput per megawatt and total cost of ownership, and insulates supply from the HBM bottleneck that has strangled competitors.
People Moves
Alongside the raise, Olix appointed Stanford professor emeritus Nick McKeown to its board and hired former Wise CFO Matt Briers as chief financial officer. First customer deliveries are targeted for H2 2027, with the money funding silicon buildout and supply chain commitments.
Why It Matters
Olix joins Lumilens and Source Foundry in a wave of European deep-tech deals betting on photonics and sovereign silicon as the AI inference bill balloons. UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan cast the check as national industrial strategy: "Countries that build chips will build leverage."
Reporting based on coverage from Data Center Dynamics, Yahoo Finance and Vestbee.