James Dacombe, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Harrogate, has become Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire after AI chip startup Olix raised $312 million in a Series B round that valued the company at $3.3 billion. Dacombe owns an estimated 30% stake in Olix, worth about $990 million at that valuation, and also holds 12% of neurotechnology firm CoMind, which raised $102.5 million in August 2025, taking his net worth past the billion-dollar threshold. Olix was founded as Flux Computing in March 2024 and rebranded in January 2026. Its valuation was about $1 billion in February 2026 before tripling six months later. The company has raised about $612 million in total from backers including Fundomo, Arm, Hudson River Trading, Reed Hastings and the UK government’s Sovereign AI fund. Investor interest has centered on Olix’s Optical Tensor Processing Unit, a photonic chip for AI inference that uses light rather than electricity to move data, a design aimed at improving speed and energy efficiency. The company’s rise underscores investor appetite for alternatives to Nvidia’s GPU-based dominance as AI hardware groups seek to address supply constraints and high-bandwidth memory shortages.