UK government backs British AI chip startup OLIX through Sovereign AI fund

[Dom9]

The UK government just announced its Sovereign AI venture fund is backing OLIX, a British startup building next generation AI inference chips, and its a genuinely interesting move in the broader global race over who controls the hardware layer of AI

OLIX secured a nine figure fundraise and is now one of Britains newest unicorns, valued at over 1 billion dollars, based in London with offices in Bristol, and its building what it calls a family of inference chips, each specialised for a particular part of an AI models thinking process, similar conceptually to how work gets coordinated across a factory production line rather than one general purpose chip trying to do everything

Founded just two years ago in 2024 by James Dacombe, who previously started a neurotechnology company called CoMind, OLIX earlier this year raised a 220 million dollar Series A at just 25 years old, which the government is calling one of the largest Series A rounds ever raised by a UK tech company

This is the fifth company to receive equity investment from Sovereign AI since it launched, bringing the total number of startups backed including compute support to 11, and AI Minister Kanishka Narayan framed the logic pretty bluntly, saying countries that build chips will build leverage, and that Britain needs to back the technologies sitting underneath AI rather than just being a country that uses it

The numbers behind the ambition are pretty big too, the global AI chips market is expected to reach a trillion dollars in the early 2030s, and the government reckons even just a 5 percent share of that would bring 50 billion dollars in revenue to the UK along with tens of thousands of high paid jobs

Theres also a nice bit of founder personality in the announcement, Dacombes holding company is apparently called Bletchley Industries, a clear nod to Bletchley Park and Britains historic codebreaking and computing legacy, which the Sovereign AI exec described as reflecting how hes both ambitious globally and proud of where hes from

Sovereign AI invests in UK startup reinventing AI chipswww.gov.uk