UK chip startup OLIX lands $312m to scale frontier inference

OLIX, a UK-based semiconductor and AI chip startup founded in 2024, has secured $312m in a Series B funding round, at a valuation of $3.3bn.

The fundraising saw participation from Arm, Fundomo, Hudson River Trading, and individual investors such as Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings.

Existing investors Plural, Hummingbird Ventures, Phoenix Court, Crane, Creandum and Transition all expanded their commitments in OLIX during this round.

OLIX develops infrastructure for frontier AI inference.

The company designs its systems end to end, including the chips, lasers, and the network that connects them. It delivers these systems as complete racks for high-demand inference workloads.

According to OLIX, current approaches to building AI inference hardware are constrained by efficiency limits.

The firm contends that large data centres, which process tokens for AI models, generally use general-purpose chips throughout, instead of deploying specialised hardware for each stage of computation.

OLIX has developed the X-1 platform, which unrolls AI models across multiple chips, assigning each chip to focus on a single computational stage. Each chip is also designed to remain flexible, without hardcoded model architectures.

The system features a newly designed “slow and wide” optical interconnect, transferring data between chips using light rather than copper, which OLIX says brings lower latency and energy costs.

The firm’s first chip, DX-1, is tailored as a decode accelerator for the output stage of large AI models, especially those with 100 billion parameters.

OLIX says DX-1 delivers over 10,000 tokens per second per user, with higher throughput per watt than general-purpose chips, and that its design omits advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory to help avoid supply chain bottlenecks.

Funds from the Series B will be used to complete DX-1 and expand OLIX’s custom silicon platform, aiming for initial customer access in the second half of 2027.

The company is recruiting staff for roles in silicon, compiler, photonics, and systems engineering across London, Austin, Bristol, Toronto, and San Francisco.

In February, OLIX secured $220m in Series A funding round to support the development of AI chips. The funding round, led by Hummingbird Ventures, valued OLIX at $1bn.

As part of the latest Series B funding announcement, OLIX has added Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors. McKeown is known for his work co-inventing software-defined networking, OpenFlow and P4.

He currently holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and is the 2025 Marconi Prize recipient.

McKeown previously co-founded businesses including Nicira, which was acquired by VMware, and Barefoot Networks, which was purchased by Intel.

OLIX has also announced the appointment of Matt Briers as chief financial officer (CFO), who previously spent nine years in the same position at UK-based fintech company Wise.