London-based OLIX has raised $312 million in Series B financing at a $3.3 billion valuation, tripling its valuation from $1 billion in February 2026. The round was led by Fundomo with participation from semiconductor giant Arm, quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings as an angel investor. The UK government's Sovereign AI venture fund also participated, signaling photonic computing as a strategic national priority. Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court and Transition all increased their commitments.
OLIX is building specialized inference accelerators connected via a proprietary photonic interconnect that avoids high-bandwidth memory (HBM) entirely, using on-chip SRAM instead. The company's DX-1 decode accelerator is designed to deliver over 10,000 tokens per second per user for 100-billion-parameter models, with optical die-to-die communications capable of scaling to over 100,000 interconnected chips. By sidestepping HBM—a supply-constrained component manufactured by only SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron—OLIX targets both cost reduction and supply-chain independence. First customer deliveries are targeted for H2 2027, with tape-out expected later in 2026.
This round reflects investor conviction that photonic inference architectures can overcome HBM supply bottlenecks that have made Nvidia GPUs expensive and difficult to procure. OLIX's board appointments—networking pioneer Professor Nick McKeown and former Wise CFO Matt Briers—underscore institutional ambitions and operational maturity. For architects evaluating inference infrastructure, OLIX's approach signals a market bet that rack-scale, photonically connected systems will compete with GPU-centric inference at scale. The $3.3B valuation and strategic investor composition (Arm's participation especially) suggest the semiconductor establishment views this as credible enough to merit active stakes.