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How school dropout James Dacombe built a $3.3B AI chip startup and became Britain’s newest billionaire at 25
The milestone came after London-based Olix raised £232 million ($312 million) in a funding round led by New York-based Fundomo that tripled the company’s valuation to £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in six months.
The round attracted investment from British chip designer Arm, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, Hudson River Trading and Sovereign AI, the U.K. government’s investment vehicle for promising AI companies.
According to an analysis of publicly available shareholding data cited by theDaily Mail, Dacombe owned more than one-third of Olix before the fundraising. At the company’s latest valuation, his stake would be worth about £946 million ($1.27 billion), although his exact ownership after the funding round has not been disclosed.
The funding also prompted congratulatory messages from his family. His mother, Jane, a freshwater ecologist at the Environment Agency, commented on LinkedIn: “An alchemy of your vision and drive together with an amazing team. So very proud of you,”
His sister Martha, who studied at the University of Cambridge and now works at a think tank, wrote: “Huge congrats! Very proud of you”.
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James Dacombe, founder of AI chip startup Olix. Photo courtesy of CoMind |
Raised in Harrogate, northern England, Dacombe began teaching himself computer programming at 13, building websites and applications while still in school.
Unlike his sisters, who went on to study at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, he chose a different path. After leaving Ashville College in 2017, Dacombe enrolled at St Aidan’s and St John Fisher Sixth Form College but dropped out after just two days.
The following year, at 17, he founded CoMind, a medical technology startup developing non-invasive devices to monitor blood flow and pressure in the brain. The idea came from watching relatives affected by strokes and dementia, inspiring him to look for ways to help doctors monitor patients without opening the skull.
CoMind is currently being trialled at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London ahead of a planned commercial launch
His early work earned him a place in the Thiel Fellowship in 2022, a program established by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel that supports young entrepreneurs building companiesinstead of pursuing traditional higher education.
The fellowship provides funding and mentorship, allowing recipients to focus on building their businesses full time. The grant was originally worth $100,000 and has since increased to $250,000.
Its alumni include Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo and world’s youngest self-made billionaires, Mercor’s founders Surya Midha, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath.
While CoMind focused on healthcare technology, Dacombe soon saw another opportunity as AI created soaring demand for computing power.
In 2024, he founded Olix, initially under the name Flux, through his holding company, Bletchley Industries. Instead of developing AI applications, Olix focused on the chips that power them.
The company develops inference chips, specialized semiconductors designed to run trained AI models. According to Olix, its chip designs use beams of light instead of copper to move data, an approach the company says can improve performance while reducing costs.
It says its technology can “unlock a step change in AI performance and cost.”
Olix’s approach has positioned it among a growing group of startups seeking to challenge Nvidia, whose graphics processing units dominate the global AI chip market. In the same year, Dacombe was named to The Sunday Times’ inaugural Young Power List.
Reflecting on starting a business as a teenager, he said: “An advantage of starting my business so young was naivety.”
“You don’t have the scar tissues from what hasn’t worked, so you just try a lot of things. Fortunately, some of them work.”
Dacombe told theFinancial Times that specialized chips, rather than general-purpose graphics processors originally designed for gaming, would shape the future of AI computing.
“Today, where there is such an economic prize from being able to run very large powerful [large language models] fast and to a large number of users at a low cost, it really pays to disaggregate and have custom silicon that is good at that.”
“The velocity and culture of delivering when you say you will deliver is really key. We are on track to be the fastest company to go from founding to full chip tape out of any company in this space.”
Olix plans to finalize the design of its DX-1 chip this year before ramping up production in late 2027. The company employs more than 140 people across London, Bristol, Toronto, Austin and San Francisco. It also offers a £2,000 annual proximity bonus to employees who live within 20 minutes of its London King’s Cross office.
Olix’s rapid growth comes as Britain seeks to strengthen its position in the global AI hardware industry by supporting domestic semiconductor companies through Sovereign AI.
The startup is one of several British AI companies to secure major funding this year as investors race to capitalize on growing demand for AI infrastructure.
AI minister Kanishka Narayan said Olix is “exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI,” adding that the startup had become one of the U.K.’s most exciting AI companies in just two years through its breakthrough chip technology.
Alongside the latest funding, Olix appointed Stanford University computer scientist Nick McKeown to its board and named former Wise executive Nick Briers as chief financial officer
Despite its rapid rise, Olix remains much smaller than Nvidia, whose graphics processing units have become the backbone of the global AI boom. Nvidia, valued at just under $5 trillion, briefly lost its position as the world’s most valuable listed company to Apple last week.
Joséphine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, said she left her first meeting with Dacombe “convinced he’d be one of the most important founders of his generation.”
“The company [Olix] is two years old and already one of the most ambitious hardware businesses in Britain. James not only wants to win globally, but he’s also proud of where he’s from.”
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