McKeown, co-inventor of software-defined networking, joins the board as OLIX ramps towards first racks
Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court and Transition all increased their commitments.
LONDON, 3rd August 2026: OLIX today announced a $312m Series B financing round at a $3.3bn 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.
Alongside the round, OLIX has appointed Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors. One of the defining figures of modern networking, 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. He co-founded several companies, including Nicira, acquired by VMware, and Barefoot Networks, acquired by Intel, where he went on to lead the company's networking business.
OLIX has also appointed Matt Briers as Chief Financial Officer. Briers was CFO of Wise for nine years, joining in 2015 from Google when the company had around 500,000 customers and was loss-making through taking it public in a 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange. Wise's direct listing was the first by a technology company in London and the exchange's largest technology listing, valuing Wise at £8.75 billion, approximately $12 billion. He built the finance function that carried Wise from private company to the public markets while it remained profitable throughout.
OLIX believes the industry's approach to building AI inference hardware is reaching its efficiency limits. A datacenter is a factory whose product is the token. Producing a single token takes hundreds of operations, each placing different demands on hardware. Any other factory would give each stage a machine built for it. Instead, the token factory runs every stage on the same general purpose chip. Each new chip generation has improved by pushing single chip specifications higher: an even better generalist but never a specialist.
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. 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. As AI model architectures are rapidly evolving each chip retains a flexible compute fabric and does not hard-code or bake-in a particular model's architecture.
The system is built around a novel 'slow and wide' optical interconnect that moves data directly between chips using light instead of copper, at ultra-low latency and energy cost. This is made possible by rack-scale codesign across every part of the link. Workloads are scheduled across racks by a fully deterministic compiler. OLIX believes this will make existing frontier AI more affordable and abundant, and more importantly, unlock the deployment of far more powerful models in the future.
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 architecture scales performantly to models 10 trillion parameters and above in size thanks to OLIX's multi-rack scale-up domain architecture.
DX-1 holds a model in fast on-chip memory, SRAM, for higher energy efficiency and lower latency. The design uses no advanced packaging and no high-bandwidth memory, the components the industry is in shortest supply of, and is designed to be able to scale volumes in spite of the supply chain shortages across the industry.
The financing funds the path to deliver DX-1 to OLIX's first customers by H2 2027, and the build-out of the wider custom silicon platform behind it, together with the manufacturing and supply chain commitments that scaling frontier inference hardware requires. OLIX is hiring across silicon, photonics, compiler and systems engineering in London, Bristol, Austin, Toronto and San Francisco.
About OLIX
OLIX is building the infrastructure for frontier AI inference. Founded in London in 2024, the company designs every part of its systems: the chips, the lasers and the network that connects them. Its systems are delivered as complete racks for the most demanding inference workloads.
Media contact: Strand Partners | olix@strandpartners.com | press@olix.com