UK-based chip startup Olix has raised $220 million for the development of AI chips that the company claims will be faster and cheaper than Nvidia’s.

According to a report from the FT, the startup, which was founded in 2024 by James Dacombe, has been valued at $1 billion following a funding round led by Hummingbird Ventures. The company has previously attracted investment from Plural, Vertex Ventures, LocalGlobe, and Entrepreneurs First.

Instead of challenging Nvidia’s current iteration of hardware, Olix is developing an optical digital processor with a “novel memory and interconnect architecture” that is compatible with existing AI models and can support inferencing workloads.

On its website, the company claims that existing semiconductors are unable to serve current user demands and, consequently, Olix is “building a new class of accelerator designed to achieve high throughput and high interactivity on the most demanding inference workloads, free from the architectural and supply chain constraints of the current regime.”

Olix’s chips integrate SRAM-architecture with photonics, an approach which it says enables them to surpass HBM-based architectures in terms of throughput/MW and total cost of ownership. Additionally, by forgoing HBM in its hardware, Olix said its chips will be better insulated from supply chain constraints that are currently facing the industry and anticipated to run into 2027.

“From a supply chain and fabrication perspective, a new architecture must forego HBM, advanced packaging, or any other technology that is supply chain-constrained by current incumbents. When even the biggest hyperscalers are struggling to secure capacity, a startup simply cannot compete,” Olix wrote in its ‘Compute Manifesto.’

Per the FT report, the company, which until recently was named Flux Computing, has declined to comment on its latest funding round, but acknowledged the article on its LinkedIn page, where it said it was hiring in London and Bristol in the UK, and Austin, San Francisco, and Toronto in North America. Sources cited by the FT said Olix is hoping to deliver its first products to customers as soon as 2027.

Dacombe, Olix’s 25-year old founder, is also CEO of CoMind, a brain monitoring startup he founded as a teenager, which has raised $100m in funding to date.