British school dropout-turned-AI chip founder becomes Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire

The London-based company, founded in 2024, more than tripled its valuation in six months after raising $312 million in early August.

The funding round was led by New York investment firm Fundomo and included chip designer Arm, quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. The U.K. government's Sovereign AI fund also backed Olix in the round.

The new valuation propelled Dacombe into billionaire status, with Forbes estimating that he owns about 30% of the company.

He also holds a 12% stake in CoMind, a medical technology company that raised $102.5 million in August 2025 but did not disclose its valuation.

James Dacombe, founder of AI chip firm Olix. Photo from Dacombe's LinkedIn

Dacombe is now one of just 11 self-made billionaires worldwide under 30 and one of four from outside the U.S..

The next-youngest self-made billionaire in Europe is Arvid Lunnemark, 26, a co-founder of popular AI coding platform Cursor. Lunnemark and his three co-founders, who met while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., saw their fortunes surge after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, on Aug. 14.

Dacombe grew up in Harrogate, northern England, and taught himself computer programming at 13 by building websites and apps.

After leaving Ashville College, he enrolled at St Aidan's and St John Fisher sixth-form college in 2017 but dropped out after just two days, British newspaper The Times reported.

The following year, he founded CoMind, which is developing non-invasive brain-monitoring technology designed to help doctors measure brain activity without surgery.

In 2022, Dacombe joined the Thiel Fellowship, a program established by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to support young entrepreneurs who pursue businesses and other projects instead of higher education.

Two years later, Dacombe founded Olix, initially called Flux, through his holding company Bletchley Industries, which also owns CoMind.

Olix is among a growing group of semiconductor startups seeking to challenge Nvidia's dominance of the chips used to train and run advanced artificial intelligence models.

Rather than developing a single processor for every AI workload, Olix is building specialized chips for different tasks involved in running AI models. The company is also developing photonic technology that uses light to move data between its chips, an approach intended to improve speed and energy efficiency.

Olix now employs more than 140 people across the U.K., U.S. and Canada. It plans to finalize its chip designs before beginning production, with complete systems expected to reach customers in 2027.