James Dacombe was 17 when he enrolled at a sixth form college in his home town of Harrogate and left two days later. Nine years on, the London chip designer he founded has been valued at £2.5bn, and published estimates place him as Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 25.
The company behind that valuation is Olix, founded in 2024 and already one of the most heavily funded hardware businesses Britain has produced. Its £232m Series B, announced in early August, was led by the New York investment firm Fundomo, with participation from the Nasdaq-listed chip designer Arm, the American quantitative trading house Hudson River Trading and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings. The UK government also took equity through its Sovereign AI venture fund, making Olix the fifth company to receive a direct investment from the programme.
Olix is actually his second business, not his first. He continues to serve as chief executive of CoMind, the neurotechnology company he started as a teenager, which has raised £76m of its own. Both sit under his holding vehicle, Bletchley Industries, and he owns an estimated 30% of the chip company alongside a 12% stake in the medical one.
From school dropout to founder
James attended Ashville College in Harrogate between 2012 and 2017 before enrolling to take A-levels in physics, mathematics, economics and business. He walked out almost immediately, taught himself to code and took a job as a software engineer at a startup. The neurotechnology company followed while he was still 17, built on the conviction that the brain was being monitored at the bedside with tools that had barely moved in decades.
That decision was rewarded in 2022, when he was awarded a Thiel Fellowship, the programme created by the PayPal and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel to fund young builders outside formal education. The grant, worth about £74,000 at the outset and since raised to roughly £186,000, bought him time and access to a network of founders and investors. Companies started by fellows of the programme were collectively valued at more than £558bn as of October 2025.
A new design for inference
Olix exists because James concluded that the industry’s approach to AI inference hardware is approaching its efficiency ceiling. The company likens a data centre to a factory whose product is the token, arguing that each stage of producing one places different demands on the silicon. Instead of asking a single general-purpose processor to handle every step, Olix designs specialised chips for each part of the job and connects them optically.
That architecture is called the X-1 platform, and the first accelerator to emerge from it is DX-1, built for decode performance. Models are unrolled across a large number of chips in a production-line arrangement, with data moving die to die using light instead of copper. Up to 10,000 chips can be linked in a single multi-rack scale-up domain, and the design holds models in on-chip SRAM, dispensing with high bandwidth memory and advanced packaging altogether. Both are the components in shortest supply across the industry, which insulates the company from constraints that currently bind its larger competitors.
The pitch is aimed squarely at a market Nvidia dominates, and James has been candid that the incumbent’s position will not be dislodged quickly. His belief is that the era of one chip doing everything has passed.
Tripled in six months
The Series B lands six months after a £163m Series A in February, one of the largest first institutional rounds ever raised by a British technology company, which valued Olix at just over £740m. Tripling that mark to £2.5bn before a single product has shipped says a good deal about investor appetite for alternatives in AI infrastructure, and about the credibility the founder has built with the people writing the cheques. Existing backers including Plural, Crane, Creandum, Hummingbird Ventures, Phoenix Court and Transition all increased their commitments.
Capital from the round funds delivery of the first chip to customers in the second half of 2027, the wider custom silicon platform behind it, and the manufacturing and supply chain arrangements needed to build at volume. The company plans to tape out its chips later this year, the final stage of design and testing before manufacturing begins. Senior hiring has moved at a similar pace: Matt Briers, who spent nine years as chief financial officer of Wise and took the fintech public in 2021, has joined Olix in the same role, while the Stanford professor emeritus Nick McKeown has taken a board seat.
The business of neurotech
CoMind, founded in 2018, addresses a gap in critical care that has persisted for decades. Clinicians treating brain injury have historically faced a choice between drilling into a patient’s skull to insert a pressure sensor or accepting readings from non-invasive equipment too imprecise to guide treatment. Roughly three million Americans suffer a traumatic brain injury each year, yet only 5% undergo intracranial pressure testing, largely because of the risk the procedure carries.
The company’s first product, CoMind One, uses low-powered infrared light delivered through a small adhesive sensor placed on the forehead. It measures cerebral blood flow, intracranial pressure and cerebral autoregulation simultaneously, something not previously possible at the bedside, and feeds real-time data either to its own display or into existing monitors. A proprietary software layer processes the signals to give predictive neurological insight to surgeons, clinicians and nurses.
Funding has kept step with the ambition. The £76m raised in a round led by Plural in October 2025, which followed a £20m Series A in 2023, is being directed at regulatory approval, further clinical trials, team expansion and manufacturing partnerships. The device is in trials at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, with commercial launch targeted for 2027. Dacombe has described the goal simply, saying that CoMind’s mission is to redefine the way the brain is measured and treated to optimise patient outcomes across the care continuum.
Britain buys in
The Sovereign AI investment matters beyond the balance sheet. The fund was created to help promising British AI companies scale without relocating, and Olix, headquartered in London with offices in Bristol, fits that brief precisely. Eleven startups have now received some form of support from the programme, five of them through direct equity, and the government has framed semiconductor capability as central to its industrial strategy on the reasoning that countries which build chips build leverage.
Dacombe is one of eleven self-made billionaires worldwide yet to turn 30, and one of only four from outside the United States. The concentration of that group in America has been a familiar complaint about European technology for a decade, which gives his position a significance beyond personal wealth. Neither of his companies has yet delivered a commercial product at scale, and both face 2027 as the year the engineering has to hold up. On the evidence of a career that began with a two-day stint at sixth form, betting against the timeline would be unwise.