James Dacombe, who left secondary school in 2017 to found CoMind, has joined the ranks of self-made billionaires at the age of 25. Dacombe’s wealth stems from his stake in CoMind and from Olix, the chip company he founded in 2024. The American Forbes estimates his stake in Olix at roughly 30 percent; he also holds about 12 percent of CoMind.
Rapid growth at Olix and the latest funding round
Olix, headquartered in London and founded in 2024, saw its valuation triple in six months: in early August 2025 it was valued at $3.3 billion after raising $312 million. Investors in that round included New York-based Fundomo, Arm (the Nasdaq-listed chip designer), quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading, and Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix. The British government’s Sovereign AI fund also participated. Neither Olix nor CoMind responded to Forbes’ requests for comment.
With that funding round, Dacombe — whose Olix stake Forbes puts at about 30 percent — entered the billionaire club. Separately, CoMind raised $102.5 million in August 2025; the company did not disclose its valuation for that round.
Technology approach: photonic, task-optimized inference chips
Olix is developing photonic chips, where data moves as light rather than electrical signals. The company says this can reduce latency and energy consumption. Dacombe’s strategy is premised on the view that not every AI workload needs Nvidia’s high-performance chips; instead, he advocates creating chips optimized for specific parts of the inference (the phase that generates model outputs).
Olix also deliberately avoids relying on expensive, high-bandwidth memory, which is in short supply in the industry today. The company says it plans to deliver chips to customers in the second half of 2027.
Competitive landscape: startups and incumbents jockey for position
The competitive field is expanding. Silicon Valley-based d-Matrix, backed by Microsoft, is already selling Corsair chips, and MatX, Etched and London-based Fractile raised significant capital over the past year. Nvidia has also been active: in December it signed a $20 billion licensing deal with Groq, the chipmaker founded by Jonathan Ross.
Dacombe himself had no prior industry experience in chipmaking before founding Olix, but he believes the photonics experience he gained at CoMind can give his new company an edge against Groq and other large chipmakers. While there is ample funding available to pursue multiple approaches, the ultimate prize will go to the technology that proves superior in practice.
Broader context: part of a wave of very young billionaires
Dacombe is one of eleven self-made billionaires worldwide who have not yet turned 30; only four of them are non-U.S. nationals. The article notes other young European billionaires such as Arvid Lunnemark, co-founder of Cursor (26), whose net worth rose sharply after SpaceX acquired Cursor for $60 billion, and Fabian Hedin (26), co-founder of Lovable, whose wealth rose to an estimated $3.1 billion following recent funding that valued the company at $13.3 billion.
Globally, the title of youngest self-made billionaire has changed hands several times in the past year in the United States; currently Surya Midha is the youngest, having become a billionaire at age 22 after Mercor, his AI recruiting startup, raised funding at a $10 billion valuation.
Dacombe told the Financial Times that when running very large and high-performance language models cheaply and at scale delivers a major economic advantage, it makes sense to split tasks and use chips specifically optimized for those tasks.
