OLIX raises £231.4m backed by Arm and Hudson River Trading
This article covers OLIX, a London-based AI startup, which has raised £231.4m in a series B funding round at a £2.4bn valuation. The financing will fund delivery of its X-1 inference racks, bring its DX-1 decode accelerator to customers by H2 2027 and underwrite manufacturing and supply-chain commitments, supporting deployment of specialised inference hardware for large language model workloads.
OLIX has raised £231.4m in a series B funding round at a £2.4bn valuation, two years after its 2024 founding. The London-based AI startup says the financing will fund delivery of its first racks of the X-1 inference platform, bring its DX-1 decode accelerator to customers by H2 2027, and support manufacturing and supply-chain commitments; the company also appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board and named Matt Briers as chief financial officer.
Why it matters
Large, dedicated funding for custom AI inference hardware is still relatively rare in the UK. OLIX's round signals investor conviction that specialised architectures—combined with new interconnect approaches—can break the cost and performance constraints of general-purpose chips for inference. A £2.4bn valuation two years after launch also underlines how quickly capital is flowing to companies targeting the infrastructure layer of generative AI.
Inside the product
OLIX builds a rack-scale system it calls X-1, where models are "fully unrolled" across many chips so each device handles a defined stage of inference rather than trying to be a one-size-fits-all processor. The company’s first chip, DX-1, is described as a decode accelerator optimised for the reasoning and token-generation phase of large language models.
Key technical claims in the announcement:
- DX-1 holds model working sets in on-chip SRAM to reduce latency and improve energy efficiency.
- For 100 billion parameter models, OLIX says DX-1 can deliver more than 10,000 tokens per second per user while achieving higher token throughput per watt than general-purpose chips running large batches.
- The architecture is said to scale to models of 10 trillion parameters and above via a multi-rack domain that schedules workloads deterministically with a compiler.
- A novel "slow and wide" optical interconnect moves data between chips using light instead of copper, which OLIX says reduces latency and energy cost and requires rack-scale co-design across the link.
- The design deliberately avoids reliance on advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory to ease manufacturability amid industry supply-chain shortages.
The company positions this approach as a way to make frontier inference more affordable and to enable deployment of much larger models.
Who are the investors?
The £231.4m series B included participation from Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. Existing backers Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court and Transition all increased their commitments.
The announcement does not name a single lead. OLIX says the funds will be used to deliver DX-1 to early customers in H2 2027, expand the wider custom silicon platform, and underwrite the manufacturing and supply-chain commitments that scaling frontier inference hardware requires. The presence of Arm and other strategic backers points to investor interest in both chip design IP and systems-level integration.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of AI venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of AI angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
The announcement highlights two senior hires rather than the founders themselves. Professor Nick McKeown joins OLIX’s board. McKeown is a long-standing figure in networking research; he co-invented software-defined networking concepts such as OpenFlow and P4, is Professor Emeritus at Stanford and was awarded the 2025 Marconi Prize. He co-founded companies including Nicira and Barefoot Networks, both of which were acquired and went on to influence networking at large vendors.
Matt Briers, OLIX’s new CFO, was CFO at Wise for nine years and led its finance function through a 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange. His experience in taking a fast-growing tech company through public markets and building scalable finance operations is likely intended to support OLIX’s manufacturing scale-up and partnerships with chip foundries and suppliers.
The bigger picture
OLIX’s raise joins a small but growing cohort of UK and European companies trying to build vertically integrated AI hardware and systems. Graphcore is a notable regional peer that pursued an IPU route; OLIX differentiates by emphasising specialised chips for pipeline stages and an optical rack interconnect. The deal also illustrates how investors are extending bets beyond models and cloud services into the physical infrastructure needed to run next-generation AI.
If OLIX can meet its H2 2027 delivery target and avoid supply-chain bottlenecks while recruiting across London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto and San Francisco, it would strengthen the UK’s playbook for hardware-led AI companies and add momentum to Europe’s efforts to secure sovereign capabilities in compute infrastructure.
They've invested in OLIX
Get to know these AI investors
| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Hummingbird( ) This venture capital firm is a global seed investor focused on backing outlier f... London  | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
 Fundomo( ) | Series BGrowth | |||
ARM( ) | ||||
| All investors | All investor sectors | All funded startups | All funding rounds |
Click here for a full list of 7,589+ startup investors in the UK