Olix, a London-based developer of AI inference chips, has secured £160 million in funding led by Hummingbird Ventures, with participation from Plural, LocalGlobe and Entrepreneurs First. The funding lifts its valuation above $1 billion and brings total capital raised since its 2024 launch to roughly £185 million. It is developing specialised hardware designed to run trained AI models more efficiently.
Rising computing demands are making inference increasingly expensive as newer models require more processing power. Olix is building an Optical Tensor Processing Unit that uses photonics rather than traditional GPU architecture, focusing on inference tasks. The design combines SRAM with photonics to improve efficiency and reduce costs compared with systems that rely on high-bandwidth memory.
By avoiding complex memory and packaging approaches, it aims to reduce supply chain constraints faced by other chip makers. The business has grown from its founding team to more than 70 employees and plans to expand to over 200 staff this year, recruiting across London, Bristol, Austin, San Francisco and Toronto. Olix’s 25-year old founder, James Dacombe, is also CEO of CoMind, a brain monitoring startup he founded as a teenager, which has raised £75m in funding to date.
It plans to ship its first products to customers by 2027, targeting a market characterised by high capital requirements and technical complexity.
