A 25-year-old founder just pulled off Europe’s biggest semiconductor funding round. Olix Computing, a UK-based startup building photonic AI chips, closed a $312 million Series B at a $3.3 billion post-money valuation, making it the continent’s most valuable chip company by fundraising metrics.
The company was founded in 2024 and only rebranded from Flux Computing in January 2026. That timeline, from incorporation to multi-billion-dollar valuation in roughly two years, puts it in rarefied territory usually reserved for Silicon Valley darlings.
The tech behind the valuation
Olix isn’t building another general-purpose GPU. The company is developing what it calls Optical Tensor Processing Units, or OTPUs, which use photonic technology instead of traditional electronic circuits to process AI workloads.
Its flagship chip, the DX-1, is designed specifically for decode acceleration in AI inference. The company claims it can deliver over 10,000 tokens per second per user.
OTPUs eliminate the need for High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM. That’s the specialized memory component that has been one of the tightest bottlenecks in the semiconductor industry, with companies like SK Hynix struggling to meet demand from Nvidia and others.
Who’s writing the checks
The investor roster reads like a who’s who of strategic capital. Arm, the chip architecture company that powers virtually every smartphone on Earth, participated in the round. So did Reed Hastings, the Netflix co-founder. Hudson River Trading, one of the most sophisticated quantitative trading firms in the world, also joined.
Fundomo participated alongside returning investors Plural, Vertex Ventures, and LocalGlobe. The previous Series A round in February 2026 brought in $220 million at roughly a $1 billion valuation, led by Hummingbird Ventures. Total funding for Olix now exceeds $530 million.
The jump from $1 billion to $3.3 billion in valuation between rounds represents a 3.3x step-up in a matter of months.
Why crypto and digital asset markets should care
Hudson River Trading’s involvement is worth noting through a crypto lens. HRT has been one of the most active institutional participants in digital asset markets, running significant trading operations across crypto exchanges.
Olix is targeting initial customer access in the second half of 2027. That’s still over a year away, which means the technology remains pre-revenue and unproven in production environments.