James Dacombe, the 25-year-old British founder of London-based chipmaker Olix, has become Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire after his two-year-old company tripled its valuation to 3.3 billion dollars in early August 2026, following a 312 million dollar funding round.
The raise drew a notable roster of investors: New York-based investment firm Fundomo, Nasdaq-listed chip designer Arm, American quant fund Hudson River Trading, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI fund. Dacombe holds an estimated 30 per cent stake in Olix, founded in 2024, and that position alone is sufficient to place him firmly among the world’s youngest billionaires. He also retains a 12 per cent stake in CoMind, the brain monitoring startup he founded in 2017 after dropping out of high school, which raised 102.5 million dollars in August 2025 at an undisclosed valuation. He continues to run both companies.
Dacombe is one of eleven self-made billionaires globally who have yet to turn 30, and one of only four from outside the United States.
The technology underpinning Olix reflects a deliberate departure from the current industry norm. Rather than competing directly with Nvidia’s dominant general-purpose AI chips, Dacombe’s approach centres on building chips specialised for distinct parts of an AI model’s inference stage. Olix’s chips are photonic, transmitting data as light rather than electrical signals, which reduces latency and cuts power consumption. The design also sidesteps expensive high-bandwidth memory hardware, a component currently in short supply across the industry. The company expects to deliver chips to customers in the second half of 2027.
It is a competitive field. Silicon Valley’s d-Matrix, backed by Microsoft, is already shipping its Corsair chips, while startups including MatX, Etched and London’s Fractile have each attracted significant investment in the past year. Nvidia itself signed a 20 billion dollar licensing deal with Groq in December.
Dacombe, who had no prior experience in the chip industry before founding Olix, believes his photonics background through CoMind gives the company a meaningful edge. He said that given the economic prize attached to running large language models quickly and cost-effectively at scale, it “really pays to disaggregate and have custom silicon that is good at that.”
Olix and CoMind did not respond to requests for comment.
