OLIX Raises $312M at a $3.3b Valuation and Appoints Professor Nick McKeown to its Board

OLIX, building the infrastructure for frontier AI, led by James Dacombe and the team, has raised a $312m Series B financing round at a $3.3bn 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. Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court, and Transition all increased their commitments.

Alongside the funding, OLIX appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors. A pioneer in modern networking, McKeown co-invented software-defined networking, OpenFlow and P4. He is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, recipient of the 2025 Marconi Prize, and has co-founded companies including Nicira and Barefoot Networks, both of which were acquired by major technology firms.

OLIX has appointed Matt Briers as Chief Financial Officer. Briers previously served as CFO of Wise, where he helped lead the company from an early-stage fintech to its 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange, the exchange's largest technology listing at the time, valued at £8.75 billion (approximately $12 billion).

OLIX believes the current approach to AI inference hardware is approaching its efficiency limits. Rather than relying on increasingly powerful general-purpose chips, the company argues that AI inference can be made more efficient by using specialized hardware optimized for different stages of token generation.

OLIX is building AI inference systems around specialized chips designed for different stages of token generation. Its X-1 platform distributes models across multiple chips, enabling each to process a specific part of the workload while retaining the flexibility to support evolving AI model architectures.

The X-1 platform uses a "slow and wide" optical interconnect that transfers data between chips using light instead of copper, reducing latency and energy consumption. Combined with rack-scale co-design and a deterministic compiler, the architecture is designed to improve AI inference efficiency while supporting increasingly powerful future models.

OLIX's first chip, DX-1, is a decode accelerator designed for AI reasoning and token generation. Optimized for models with around 100 billion parameters, it delivers high inference performance and energy efficiency, with an architecture that scales to models exceeding 10 trillion parameters across multiple racks.

DX-1 stores AI models in fast on-chip SRAM, eliminating the need for advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory to improve efficiency while reducing supply chain constraints. The new funding will support delivery of DX-1 to its first customers in the second half of 2027, further development of OLIX's custom silicon platform, and expansion of its engineering teams across London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto and San Francisco.

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