UK startup Olix raises $312M, appoints Nick McKeown to its board

UK-based AI chip startup Olix has announced a USD 312 million Series B financing round at a USD 3.3 billion valuation, two years after it was founded.

The round included Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, with existing investors all increasing their commitments, Olix said.

Alongside the round, Olix has appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors. McKeown co-invented software-defined networking, OpenFlow and P4. He is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and winner of the 2025 Marconi Prize. Olix has also appointed Matt Briers as Chief Financial Officer.  

“Olix’s systems are built on the belief that using specialised chips for each stage of the token production process will unlock a step change in AI performance and cost,” Olix said. “In Olix’s X-1 platform models are fully unrolled across a large number of chips, creating a production line which allows each chip to focus on a single part of the model.” 

The first chip Olix is building within the X-1 platform is DX-1, its decode accelerator, designed for the stage at which a model reasons and generates its output. For 100B parameter size models DX-1 can achieve the pareto optimal inference performance delivering simultaneously over 10,000 tokens per second per user at higher output token throughput per watt than general purpose chips running large batch sizes, the company said.

“The future of AI will be built on chips that power models. Countries that build chips will build leverage,” UK’s AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said in a press release. “Olix is exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI. In just two years, it has established itself as one of the UK’s most exciting AI startups, developing breakthrough chip technology with the potential to help shape the future of AI.”