Co-founders of Arm and Netflix participate! AI chip startup Olix received US$312 million financing and tripled its valuation in half a year

The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to reports, AI chip startup Olix successfully raised US$312 million in a new round of financing. The investor lineup includes Reed Hastings (Reed Hastings), co-founder of SoftBank's Arm (ARM.US) and Netflix (NFLX.US). The financing tripled the company's valuation to $3.3 billion in just six months.

According to information, this AI chip company founded by James Dacombe (James Dacombe) was founded in 2024 and focuses on developing optical processors to efficiently handle AI inference workloads while avoiding performance limitations caused by traditional memory bottlenecks.

This round of financing was led by Fundomo, an investment agency headquartered in New York, and Arm, Hudson River Trading, and Hastings participated in the investment. After this round of financing, Orix's valuation (including new capital raised) reached 3.3 billion US dollars, far exceeding the valuation level of 1 billion US dollars when it completed the 220 million US dollar financing in February this year.

Along with this funding, Orix also announced the appointment of Matt Briers (Matt Briers), the former chief financial officer of the British fintech company Wise, as the company's CFO.

Recently, Wall Street is worried about the scale of AI infrastructure investment, which is increasingly dependent on debt financing, causing a chain drop in the stock prices of chip makers and storage companies. However, primary market investors continue to inject huge sums of money into chip startups, particularly favoring companies that claim to be able to provide AI services to clients faster or more efficiently.

Currently, Orix has offices in London, Bristol, Toronto, and Austin, and has a total of more than 140 employees. Among them, there is no shortage of core talents from major US technology companies and the semiconductor industry.

Orix plans to enter the chip “flow film” phase later this year — this is the final step in the design verification process before moving to mass production. The first products are expected to be delivered to customers next year. Orix plans to sell its products in the form of server racks, which include not only self-developed chips, but also integrated supporting software and network equipment.