A 25-YEAR-OLD who quit sixth form after just two days is on the brink of becoming Britain’s newest billionaire.
James Dacombe’s tech firm Olix has been valued at a staggering £2.5billion after a huge cash injection from investors around the world.
The company, which designs computer chips for artificial intelligence, tripled its value in just six months following a £232million funding round.
Analysis of shareholding records suggests Mr Dacombe owns more than a third of the business.
Sign up for the Money newsletter
Thank you!
That stake alone would be worth around £946million if he decided to cash it in today.
The entrepreneur was born in Harrogate and taught himself computer coding as a young teenager, building apps and websites by the age of 13.
MAPPED
Postcodes where Brits are taking £40k losses to escape – is YOUR area on the list?
BILL BLOW
Fury as Brits face paying £100 extra to holiday in UK under government plans
He came from a high-achieving family, with his sisters heading off to top universities including Cambridge and the London School of Economics.
But Mr Dacombe took a very different path after leaving £23,000-a-year Ashville College in the town.
He enrolled at St Aidan’s and St John Fisher’s sixth form to study A-levels but dropped out after just two days.
At 18, he launched his first company, CoMind, which builds technology to monitor brain activity in patients without invasive surgery.
He has said the idea came from watching family members suffer the effects of strokes and dementia.
CoMind’s tools have already been trialled at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, with a commercial launch planned for next year.
In 2022, Mr Dacombe was handed a prestigious Thiel Fellowship, a grant scheme set up by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel for young entrepreneurs who skip university.
He used the cash boost to help fund his next big idea.
Two years later, in 2024, he founded Olix, originally under the name Flux, to build a new generation of computer chips built specifically for AI.
Both CoMind and Olix are controlled through his holding company Bletchley Industries, named after the codebreaking hub Bletchley Park.
Investors are backing Olix in the hope it can break the grip tech giant Nvidia holds over the chip market.
Most AI data centres currently rely on adapted gaming chips, but a global shortage of memory components has sent prices soaring, hitting everything from laptops to games consoles.
Olix says its new “inference chips” are built purely for AI and do not rely on the parts in short supply, making them cheaper and more powerful.
The firm is aiming to finalise its DX-1 chip design this year, before ramping up production in late 2027.
It currently has offices in London, Bristol and across the US and Canada, and is hiring heavily.
Staff who live within 20 minutes of its King’s Cross office are even handed a £2,000 “proximity bonus” each year.
The latest funding round saw big-name backers including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and chip giant Arm pile in.
The UK Government’s own AI investment arm, Sovereign AI, also chipped in taxpayer cash as part of the deal.
Joséphine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, hailed Mr Dacombe as “one of the most important founders of his generation.”
