Source : THE AGE NEWS
A British start-up founded by a 25-year-old school dropout has been valued at £2.5 billion ($4.8 billion) as it develops new chips for the AI boom.
Olix, led by James Dacombe, an entrepreneur, raised $US312 million ($445 million) from investors as it looks to compete against Nvidia in the market for high-tech chips.
The deal values Olix at $US3.3 billion, tripling its valuation since February, when the start-up raised a further $US220 million.
Dacombe started Olix two years ago when he was just 23, having launched his first company as a teenager after dropping out of his sixth form college in Harrogate, just two days into starting his A-levels.
He launched his first company, CoMind, a brain-scanning business, at the age of 17 in 2018, and continues to work as its chief executive as well as running Olix.
Dacombe was made a fellow of billionaire Peter Thiel’s charitable foundation in 2022, which provides grants to young entrepreneurs who drop out of college to launch startups.
His new start-up is working to develop faster microchips to lower the costs of AI and now employs more than 140 staff across London, Bristol, Canada and the US.
The start-up says its chip designs, which rely on beams of light to move data instead of copper such as a traditional semiconductor, can help “unlock a step change in AI performance and cost”.
Investors in Olix’s latest funding round included Cambridge semiconductor giant Arm, Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder and Hudson River Trading, the US trading firm.
It also secured backing from the Government’s £500 million Sovereign AI Fund, set up under Labour to invest in promising technology companies in an effort to keep them in the UK.
A series of new British start-ups has raised hundreds of millions of pounds this year as venture investors seek to capitalise on booming demand for AI chips.
Fractile, a Bristol start-up, raised $US220 million in May this year in a fundraising round led by Mr Thiel’s Founders Fund, which was an early investor in tech giants, including SpaceX, Palantir and Facebook.
CuspAI, a start-up using AI to discover new materials for chip design, secured $US450 million last week from investors, including Jeff Bezos.
Alongside the funding, Olix said it had appointed Professor Nick McKeown, a Stanford University electronics expert, to its board, while Nick Briers, a former executive at the financial technology business Wise, had joined as its chief financial officer.
Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, said: “Olix is exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI.”
Telegraph, London
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