AI chip startup Olix has raised $312 million in a Series B financing round, more than tripling its value from six months ago to $3.3 billion.

The fundraise saw participation from Arm, Fundomo, Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, with the UK government’s Sovereign AI venture fund also announcing it had invested in the startup.

The Series B round comes hot on the heels of Olix’s February 2026 fundraise, which saw the UK-based company raise $220m at a $1bn valuation.

Olix said the financing will help fund the delivery of its first chip to customers in H2 2027, whilst also supporting the build-out of its custom silicon platform and allowing the company to meet its manufacturing and supply chain commitments.

In a LinkedIn post, Olix founder James Dacombe said that, alongside the round, the startup had appointed Professor Nick McKwoen (Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University) to its board of directors and hired former Wise chief financial officer Matt Briers as its CFO.

Founded in 2024 by 25-year-old Dacombe, Olix says it is building systems “around a novel photonic interconnect” that allows each stage of the inference process to run on specialized chips designed to support that specific step. To achieve this, the company is building a “suite of accelerators,” starting with DX-1, which it says has been designed to deliver “the best possible decode performance across every metric that matters.”

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

Regarding its “slow and wide” optical interconnect, Olix says it is able to move data “directly from die to die at ultra-low latency and low energy cost,” with 10,000 chips able to be connected in a “multi-rack scale-up domain to run frontier models at an efficiency and speed that are not feasible on traditional systems.”

“The future of AI will be built on chips that power models. Countries that build chips will build leverage,” said the UK’s AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan. “Olix is exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI. In just two years, it has established itself as one of the UK’s most exciting AI startups, developing breakthrough chip technology with the potential to help shape the future of AI.”

Dacombe is also CEO of CoMind, a brain monitoring startup he founded as a teenager, which has raised $100m in funding to date.