UK startup Olix raised $312M for photonic chips that use light instead of electricity. Lower energy and cost could benefit blockchain AI networks, challenging Nvidia's dominance.
Alpha Score of 70 reflects strong overall profile with moderate momentum, weak value, strong quality, moderate sentiment.
A UK startup building chips that use light instead of electricity just closed one of the largest Series B rounds in European tech history. Olix Computing raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation, the company said Tuesday.
The round values the 15-month-old company at more than triple its February valuation of roughly $1 billion. Olix, formerly Flux Computing, makes what it calls Optical Tensor Processing Units, or OTPUs. The chips process AI workloads with photons rather than electrons, which travel faster and generate less heat.
Olix claims its architecture eliminates the need for high-bandwidth memory, the expensive component that makes Nvidia's data center GPUs costly. The company describes its design as a "token factory" – a data center purpose-built for AI inference at scale.
James Dacombe, a 25-year-old Thiel Fellow, founded the company in March 2024. He now leads a business valued at $3.3 billion.
Hummingbird Ventures, Plural, Vertex Ventures and Entrepreneurs First backed the round. Total funding surpasses $300 million. The company plans to expand into the US and Canada, focusing on what it calls "AI infrastructure sovereignty."
Olix is not alone in challenging Nvidia's dominance. Cerebras and Groq have pitched alternative silicon architectures. Olix's photonic approach is distinct because it does not rely on the same memory architecture as conventional GPUs, the company said.
The $3.3 billion valuation is aggressive for a Series B. Cerebras was valued at around $4 billion before its IPO filing, and that company had years of revenue history.
Photonic computing has been a long-promised technology, and scaling it to commercial production with competitive yields remains unproven, analysts said. Academic labs have demonstrated the physics, but manufacturing at scale is an unsolved engineering challenge.
The energy efficiency of photonic chips could also benefit blockchain-based AI networks, where compute costs are a major constraint. Cheaper inference would reduce the cost of running AI models on decentralized platforms, potentially accelerating adoption.
Nvidia, with an Alpha Score of 71, remains the dominant player but faces growing competition from photonic architectures.
Olix plans to begin shipping its first commercial chips in late 2027, the company said.
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