Plural participates in OLIX's $312M Series B funding round
OLIX, a London-based company building the infrastructure for frontier AI inference, has raised $312 million in Series B funding at a $3.3 billion valuation, tripling its valuation in six months. The round was led by New York investment firm Fundomo, with EstVCA member Plural among the existing investors increasing their commitments.
Arm, quant trading firm Hudson River Trading and angels including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings also joined, alongside existing backers Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Creandum, Phoenix Court and Transition. The raise follows OLIX's $220 million Series A in February.
Founded in London in 2024 by James Dacombe, now 25, OLIX argues the industry's approach to AI inference hardware is reaching its limits. Producing a single token takes hundreds of operations with different hardware demands, yet the whole sequence runs on one general-purpose chip. OLIX instead unrolls models across specialised chips connected by a photonic interconnect that moves data using lasers rather than copper, creating a production line where each chip handles one part of the model.
Its first chip, the DX-1, uses no advanced packaging and no high-bandwidth memory, the components in shortest supply industry-wide, and delivers over 10,000 tokens per second per user on 100 billion parameter models. Dacombe told the Financial Times that the era of one Nvidia chip handling every AI task is over, arguing "we are moving into a world of specialisation."
"James Dacombe started building the company just two years ago with the conviction that the industry's approach to AI inference hardware, pushing one general-purpose chip to do everything, was reaching its limits," said Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural.
Alongside the round, OLIX appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board and Matt Briers, CFO of Wise for nine years, as Chief Financial Officer.
The financing funds delivery of DX-1 to first customers by H2 2027 and the wider silicon platform, at a moment when capital is flooding into challengers to Nvidia's dominance of AI compute.
For more information, please visit OLIX's announcement or the Financial Times article.Newer
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