London-based AI chip startup Olix has secured $312 million in a series B funding round taking its total valuation to $3.3 billion as the funds would help the company build its first chip DX-1 within the X1 platform till 2027.
According to a statement released by Olix on Monday, the James Dacombe founded startup secured funding from Fundomo and Arm and Hudson River Trading, along with angel investor Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix.
“The financing funds the path to deliver DX-1 to OLIX’s first customers by H2 2027, and the build-out of the wider custom silicon platform behind it, together with the manufacturing and supply chain commitments that scaling frontier inference hardware requires,” read a statement from Olix.
Explaining more about the DX-1 chips, Olix said that its decode accelerator has been designed for the stage at which a model reasons and generates its output. The company’s X-1 platform distributes AI models across a large number of chips, with each chip handling a specific part of the model to improve efficiency. It further mentioned that the chips are designed to remain flexible so they can support evolving AI model architectures, rather than being built for a single model.
For models with 100 billion parameters, Olix said that DX-1 can deliver over 10,000 Tokens per second per user at higher output token throughput per watt than general purpose chips running large batch sizes. The design is meant to scale to models with 10 trillion parameters or more.
OLIX will also be hiring across silicon, photonics, compiler and systems engineering in London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto and San Francisco.
The company has received financial backing from the UK government’s Sovereign AI. “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,” said Kanishka Narayan, AI minister, UK government.
Along with the fundraise, the company has named Professor Nick McKeown to its board. “McKeown co-invented software-defined networking, OpenFlow and P4. He is a professor emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and winner of the 2025 Marconi Prize,” the company mentioned.
McKeown has also co-founded several companies, including Nicira, acquired by VMware, and Barefoot Networks, which Intel acquired. At Intel he later led the company’s networking business.
The company has also appointed Matt Briers as chief financial officer (CFO). Briers was CFO at Wise for nine years, which he joined in 2015 from Google.
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