OLIX

Who owns OLIX?

OLIX is currently owned by BACKED VC through Backed Fund III (2025 vintage), since 2025. Across its history, OLIX has been through 2 private equity ownership periods, detailed in the timeline below.

Hand-verified · updated 2026-05-27

About OLIX

OLIX is a London-based deep-tech semiconductor company designing photonic chips and complete rack-scale systems for frontier AI inference. Its flagship DX-1 decode accelerator holds models in fast on-chip SRAM and links processors with a "slow and wide" optical interconnect that moves data between chips using light rather than copper, dispensing with high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging to cut latency and energy cost. The company designs its systems end to end, from the chips and lasers to the network that binds them, and positions itself as a European challenger to the incumbent AI accelerator suppliers. It runs operations across London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto and San Francisco, and targets its first customer products for the second half of 2027.

Ownership journey

OLIX was founded in London in 2024 by James Dacombe, a Thiel Fellow who had previously worked in neurotechnology, on the thesis that AI inference needs purpose-built silicon rather than general-purpose chips. In 2025 the company drew early venture backing from Backed, investing through its Backed Fund III. Creandum joined the register in 2026, investing through Creandum VII, as OLIX moved from seed capital into a rapid sequence of larger financings, a roughly $220 million round in February 2026 that valued it at about $1 billion and a $312 million round in August 2026 at a $3.3 billion valuation. Both Backed and Creandum remain active minority venture backers; no exit or secondary transaction has been recorded, and the business stays founder-led. The August 2026 financing ranked among the largest semiconductor rounds ever raised by a European startup.

Under PE ownership

The venture capital funded a rapid build-out of both technology and organisation. Since the early backing OLIX advanced its DX-1 decode accelerator and its optical interconnect architecture, designing chips, lasers and networking in-house, and grew from a single UK base into a five-site operation spanning the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. It recruited senior leadership to match its scale, appointing former Wise finance chief Matt Briers as chief financial officer and adding Stanford networking pioneer Nick McKeown to its board. Its valuation climbed from roughly $1 billion in early 2026 to $3.3 billion by August 2026, one of the largest chip financings closed in Europe, with first customer deliveries targeted for the second half of 2027.