OLIX raised $312 million Series B at $3.3 billion valuation to scale its frontier AI inference platform and specialized chip architecture, backed by the UK government's Sovereign AI venture fund.
OLIX, a London-based AI infrastructure company, has raised $312 million in Series B funding at a $3.3 billion valuation, just two years after its founding. The round included participation from Fundomo, Arm, and Hudson River Trading, along with angel investors including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court, and Transition also increased their commitments.
The funding will support OLIX's delivery of its first DX-1 inference systems to customers in the second half of 2027. The company plans to expand its custom silicon platform and establish the manufacturing and supply chain commitments needed to produce advanced inference hardware at scale. OLIX is actively hiring across silicon, photonics, compiler, and systems engineering, with team expansion underway in London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto, and San Francisco.
The company has appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors. McKeown is a co-inventor of software-defined networking, OpenFlow, and the P4 programming language. Now Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, he received the 2025 Marconi Prize and has co-founded networking companies including Nicira (acquired by VMware) and Barefoot Networks (acquired by Intel). Following Intel's acquisition of Barefoot Networks, McKeown led Intel's networking business. OLIX expects his expertise in networking, programmable infrastructure, and company building to inform the development of its rack-scale AI systems.
OLIX also appointed Matt Briers, former Wise executive, as chief financial officer. Briers served as Wise's CFO for nine years after joining the financial technology company from Google in 2015, when Wise had approximately 500,000 customers and was operating at a loss. He built the finance organization that supported Wise's transition to public markets while maintaining profitability. Wise completed a direct listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at a valuation of £8.75 billion, approximately $12 billion at the time.
OLIX is developing hardware to address efficiency limitations inherent in using general-purpose chips for AI inference. The company models a data center running AI models as a token factory, where generating each token requires hundreds of different operations, each placing distinct demands on hardware. While current AI systems typically run all stages on the same general-purpose processor, OLIX believes performance and cost can be improved by assigning different token-generation stages to specialized chips optimized for their particular workloads.
The X-1 platform distributes AI models across a large number of specialized chips, operating as a production line where each chip handles a particular portion of the model. Rather than permanently embedding a specific model architecture, the chips retain a flexible compute fabric, allowing the system to adapt as model architectures evolve. The platform also employs what OLIX describes as a "slow and wide" optical interconnect, moving data directly between chips using light instead of copper to reduce latency and energy consumption. This optical system is enabled through rack-scale co-design, with a deterministic compiler scheduling workloads across the racks.
DX-1 is the first chip OLIX is developing for the X-1 platform, designed specifically for the decode stage of inference when an AI model reasons and generates output. For models with approximately 100 billion parameters, DX-1 can simultaneously deliver more than 10,000 tokens per second per user while providing higher output-token throughput per watt than general-purpose processors operating with large batch sizes. The architecture scales to models with 10 trillion parameters or more through its multi-rack scale-up domain design.
DX-1 stores the model in fast on-chip static random-access memory (SRAM) to improve energy efficiency and reduce latency. Notably, the chip does not require advanced packaging or high-bandwidth memory—two components facing significant supply constraints across the AI hardware industry. OLIX designed the system this way to maximize its ability to expand production despite broader supply chain shortages.
OLIX was founded in London in 2024 and develops complete rack-scale systems for demanding AI inference workloads, designing the chips, lasers, and networking technology used throughout its platform.