UK AI chip startup OLIX raises €270.5M at €2.8B valuation

OLIX, a London-based AI chip startup building the infrastructure for frontier AI inference, today announced a €270.5 million ($312 million) Series B financing round at a €2.8 billion ($3.3 billion) valuation, two years after it was founded. The round included Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, with existing investors all increasing their commitments. Alongside the round, OLIX has appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors. He is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and winner of the 2025 Marconi Prize. The company has also appointed former Wise executive Matt Briers as Chief Financial Officer.  Founded in London in 2024, OLIX designs every part of its systems: the chips, the lasers and the network that connects them. OLIX believes the industry’s approach to building AI inference hardware is reaching its efficiency limits. “A datacenter is a factory whose product is the token. Producing a single token takes hundreds of operations, each placing different demands on hardware. Any other factory would give each stage a machine built for it. Instead, the token factory runs every stage on the same general-purpose chip. Each new chip generation has improved by pushing single-chip specifications higher: an even better generalist but never a specialist,” the startup explained.  The company claims that its systems are built on the belief that using specialised chips for each stage of the token production process will unlock a step change in AI performance and cost. It states that in OLIX’s X-1 platform, models are fully unrolled across a large number of chips, creating a production line which allows each chip to focus on a single part of the model.  As AI model architectures are rapidly evolving, each chip retains a flexible compute fabric and does not hard-code or bake-in a particular model’s architecture. The company highlighted that the system is built around a novel “slow and wide” optical interconnect that moves data directly between chips using light instead of copper, at ultra-low latency and energy cost. This is made possible by rack-scale codesign across every part of the link. Workloads are scheduled across racks by a fully deterministic compiler.  OLIX believes this will make existing frontier AI more affordable and abundant, and more importantly, unlock the deployment of far more powerful models in the future. DX-1 is the first chip OLIX is developing within the X-1 platform, its decode accelerator, designed for the stage where a model reasons and generates its output. The company reports that for 100B parameter size models, DX-1 can achieve Pareto-optimal inference performance, delivering simultaneously over 10,000 Tokens per second per user. It achieves this at higher output token throughput per watt than general-purpose chips running large batch sizes. The architecture scales performantly to models 10 trillion parameters and above in size thanks to OLIX’s multi-rack scale-up domain architecture. DX-1 holds a model in fast on-chip memory, SRAM, for higher energy efficiency and lower latency. The design uses no advanced packaging and no high-bandwidth memory, the components the industry is in the shortest supply of, and is designed to be able to scale volumes in spite of the supply chain shortages across the industry. The company plans to use this funding 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. OLIX is hiring across silicon, photonics, compiler and systems engineering in London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto and San Francisco. The post UK AI chip startup OLIX raises €270.5 million at €2.8 billion valuation just two years after its founding appeared first on EU-Startups.