Artificial intelligence is advancing at an extraordinary pace. But behind every breakthrough in AI is a physical challenge: the infrastructure powering these systems must become dramatically more efficient if it is to support increasingly capable models at global scale.

Today, we're announcing our investment in OLIX, a UK company building a fundamentally new approach to AI inference infrastructure.

As AI systems become increasingly agenticand reasoning-intensive, inference – the stage where trained models generate responses, make decisions and perform real-world tasks – is becoming one of the defining engineering challenges of the AI era. The question is no longer simply how to build better chips, but how to rethink the systems that produce AI at scale.

What makes OLIX particularly distinctive is that it isn't just building a new chip. The company is designing almost everypart of the system itself – from the chips and the technology that connects them, to the software that coordinates them. This level of vertical integration is unusual in AI hardware and is made possible by the UK's exceptional strengths in semiconductor engineering, photonics, and research.

Companies like OLIX are showing how those strengths can come together to build globally significant AI infrastructure businesses. With engineering teams in both London and Bristol, OLIX is drawing on talent from across the UK's deep technology ecosystem to solve some of the biggest engineering challenges facing AI.

Founded in 2024 by James Dacombe, OLIX has rapidly become one of Europe's most ambitious deep technology companies. Before founding OLIX, James established neurotechnology company CoMind. Earlier this year, at just 25 years old, James and the OLIX team announced a $220 million Series A – one of the largest Series A rounds ever raised by a UK technology company.

That raise propelled OLIX to unicorn statusless than two years after it was founded, reflecting both the scale of the company's ambition and the confidence that some of the world's leading technology investors have placed in James, his team and their vision for thefuture of AI infrastructure.

Josephine Kant, Head of Ventures at Sovereign AI, said:

"I left my first meeting with James convinced he'd be one of the most important founders of his generation.

OLIX is completely rethinking what AI infrastructure should look like from first principles, and doing it from the UK. The company is two years old and already one of the most ambitious hardware businesses in Britain.

James not only wants to win globally, but he’s also proud of where he’s from. You can see both in the name he chose for his holding company: Bletchley Industries.”