New Delhi: At just 25 years old, British entrepreneur James Dacombe has become Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire. His AI chip startup Olix was valued at $3.3 billion after a $312 million funding round announced in August, more than triple its valuation since Olix’s last raise in February.
The 3 August round was led by New York investment firm Fundomo, with backing from chip designer Arm, quant trading firm Hudson River Trading, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund.
Dacombe was just 17 when he started his first company, CoMind. In 2025, he set up Bletchley Industries, the holding company through which he owns his stake in Olix.
The Times reported that Dacombe held a 38.6 per cent stake in Olix through Bletchley Industries before the round. At the new valuation, that holding would be worth about £946 million, or $1.27 billion, before accounting for dilution from the new funding. Forbes has separately estimated his current stake at around 30 per cent.
Dacombe also owns a 12 per cent stake in CoMind, which is developing non-invasive brain-monitoring technology now in trials at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. The company raised $102.5 million last year without disclosing its valuation.
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Who is James Dacombe?
Dacombe grew up in Harrogate in northern England and taught himself to code at 13, building websites and apps. In 2017, he enrolled at a sixth-form college but left after just two days, according to The Times.
“An advantage of starting my business so young was naivety. You don’t have the scar tissues from what hasn’t worked, so you just try a lot of things,” it quoted him as saying.
He started CoMind at 17 and joined the Thiel Fellowship in 2022. Set up by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, the programme gives young entrepreneurs money to build on their ideas instead of going to university. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo came up through the same pipeline.
Dacombe founded Olix, initially called Flux, in 2024. The company is taking on Nvidia in the market for chips that run AI models, but with a different approach. Rather than relying on a single processor for multiple tasks, Olix is developing specialised chips for different parts of the workload, as well as technology that uses light to move data between chips.
Olix now has more than 140 employees across the UK, US and Canada. It plans to finalise its chip designs this year, begin production next year and deliver complete systems by late 2027.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)