Arm Holdings backs AI chip startup Olix in a €270.5 million ($312M) funding round for AI inference chip development.

London-based AI startup OLIX has raised 270.5 million euros in Series B funding, valuing the company at 2.8 billion euros. The round was led by Fundomo, Arm, and Hudson River Trading, with participation from notable angel investors including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. The financing arrives less than two years after OLIX's 2024 founding.

To support its expansion, OLIX has appointed Professor Nick McKeown, a Marconi Prize-winning Stanford University faculty member, to its board of directors. Matt Briers, formerly an executive at Wise, has joined as Chief Financial Officer.

OLIX focuses on specialized hardware for AI inference, arguing that general-purpose chips are approaching efficiency limits for token production. The company's X-1 platform uses a production-line architecture in which specialized chips handle different stages of model execution. The design incorporates a novel optical interconnect that transmits data using light rather than copper, reducing latency and energy consumption.

The company is developing the DX-1, a decode accelerator optimized for large-scale models. The DX-1 achieves Pareto-optimal performance for 100-billion-parameter models, delivering over 10,000 tokens per second per user. By leveraging on-chip SRAM memory, the design avoids dependence on high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging, mitigating supply-chain risks.

OLIX plans to deploy the DX-1 to initial customers in the second half of 2027. The funding will support manufacturing scale-up and expansion of engineering teams across London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto, and San Francisco.