An SDN pioneer joins a $3.3 billion startup building optical interconnects specifically designed for AI infrastructure data centers.

Olix, a London-based AI infrastructure startup founded in 2024 by Thiel Foundation fellow James Dacombe, has raised $312 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its valuation to $3.3 billion. The funding round was led by venture capital firms Fundomo and Hudson River, with existing investors increasing their commitments. The capital will support customer deliveries in the second half of 2025, expansion of Olix's custom silicon platform, and hiring across its offices in London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto, and San Francisco.

The startup's financial backing includes support from Arm and Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix. Olix is developing specialized chips built around an optical interconnect designed to deliver ultra-low-latency performance for frontier AI inference.

Nick McKeown, a pioneering figure in software-defined networking (SDN) from his work at Stanford University, has joined Olix's board. McKeown previously founded Nicira Networks, which VMware acquired in 2012, and Barefoot Networks, which Intel acquired in 2019. In a LinkedIn post announcing the appointment, McKeown highlighted his reasoning for joining: "Inference is bounded by moving data, not by arithmetic. Olix's approach stands out because they refuse to treat the chip, the interconnect, and the compiler as separate problems. Designing them together, with light doing what copper no longer can, is how you get a step change instead of just another increment. It was their creative full systems thinking that got me involved."

Olix's technical approach centers on a "slow and wide" optical interconnect that moves data directly between chips using light rather than copper. Unlike competitors in the optical interconnect space, Olix operates at the rack scale across every part of the link. Each workload is scheduled across racks using a fully deterministic compiler—a strategy comparable to Nvidia's Groq 3 language processing unit. The startup uses static random-access memory (SRAM) for on-chip storage rather than high-bandwidth memory (HBM), enabling lower latency during AI model inference while avoiding supply-chain constraints associated with HBM.

Dacombe described the company's vision in his own LinkedIn post: "Olix's mission is to build the infrastructure for frontier AI. Instead of forcing a single chip to do everything, we build specialized silicon and an optical network to connect it, unrolling models across racks like an assembly line. A different answer to the industry's supply chain constraints, built on components available at scale today."