The explosion in AI capabilities over the past two years has been extraordinary. But as the technology shifts from development to deployment across every industry, from healthcare to manufacturing to delivery, the industry is running into a critical problem: the world needs vastly more compute, and the hardware we have today is reaching a physical wall.

This is not just the familiar story of Moore’s Law slowing down. The constraint is more specific and more consequential. AI inference, the process of actually running trained models for users is fundamentally bottlenecked by how fast data can move through the processor, not just by how much raw compute you can fit onto a chip.

Every major accelerator today is built around the same memory architecture, and that architecture forces a hard tradeoff: you can serve models with high throughput, or you can serve them with high interactivity, but you cannot do both at once. As models handle longer tasks requiring exponentially more tokens, this tradeoff is becoming the defining constraint on what AI can actually deliver at scale.

I believe OLIX is the company that will build the next paradigm for AI compute, and that is why Plural is backing the company in a $250 million round to do it.

A fundamentally new approach

London-headquartered OLIX is building the Optical Tensor Processing Unit (OTPU), a new class of accelerator designed to deliver high throughput and high interactivity simultaneously on the most demanding AI inference workloads. The OTPU is an optical digital processor which performs bit-perfect computations (not analogue approximation), with a novel memory and interconnect architecture that addresses the data movement bottleneck at its root.

There is no shortage of well-funded challengers trying to take on the dominant incumbents in AI compute. Most have failed because they are competing within the same architectural paradigm, fighting for the same constrained supply chain components and are structurally condemned to ship behind the next-generation GPU from NVIDIA. OLIX is playing in a different arena entirely. Its architecture avoids supply chain dependencies, and does not require advanced packaging, HBM memory or leading-edge silicon.

Remarkable pace of execution

The technical thesis is compelling, but what ultimately drove my conviction was the speed at which this team is executing.

OLIX was founded less than two years ago. In that time, the company has demonstrated that its foundational technology works and can be manufactured, completed integration of its optical, electronic and software systems, and has begun development of its custom ASICs. The company has grown from a founding team to over 70 people and is aiming to scale to over 200 this year.

A world-class team

James Dacombe, who also founded and runs Plural portfolio company CoMind, is a relentless founder whose approach centers on taking contrarian bets and attracting exceptional talent to make those bets consensus.

What OLIX is attempting requires deep expertise across optics, semiconductor design, high-speed electronics, compiler engineering and systems software. The number of people in the world with this combination of skills is small. Yet James and his team have recruited an engineering leadership team with backgrounds spanning high-frequency trading infrastructure, hyperscalers, leading silicon players and some of the most respected AI and computer vision firms. These are people who left senior, well-compensated positions because they were convinced by OLIX’s approach and ambition.

Right from the start, OLIX established a unique culture which acts as a force multiplier. Every employee must live within forty-five minutes of their office, and eighty-five percent live within twenty minutes. At the three-month mark, every team member who is performing well is offered a significant financial package to leave if they don’t buy into the culture or company. The result is a team with an unusual degree of cohesion, where everyone knows that the person alongside them has faced the same decision and made the same commitment. Team members have relocated to join the company from all over the world.

A new market that Europe can win

There is a common assumption that a semiconductor company of this ambition must be headquartered in Silicon Valley. I believe the opposite: OLIX’s European roots are a genuine competitive advantage.

The disciplines that matter most for what OLIX is building—photonics, optical systems and precision engineering—have deep academic and industrial roots across Europe. The UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands are home to world-leading research institutions that have spent decades advancing photonics, producing a concentration of specialist talent from which OLIX has recruited.

Crucially, OLIX’s architecture does not depend on the same supply chain geography that has historically tied semiconductor companies to East Asia and the US West Coast. The OTPU is built from components that are more broadly available from multiple suppliers globally, with no single-source dependencies on the constrained resources that virtually every other GPU maker is competing for.

OLIX is actively recruiting in London, Austin, Toronto, Bristol and San Francisco, drawing from the deepest talent pools in photonics and semiconductor engineering on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Silicon Valley has long been the centre of gravity for classical processors, OLIX represents a rare opportunity for Europe to establish a genuine position in the AI compute market.

Why now

Entrepreneurs like James need investors who match their ambition. OLIX has raised $250 million which gives it the capital to execute on its next critical phase: scaling the engineering team, taping out, and delivering a production-ready system. The window is narrow and the stakes are high, but the company that solves inference-era compute at scale will define the infrastructure upon which the next decade of AI is built.

I believe OLIX has the vision, the team and the culture to be that company. If it succeeds, OLIX will deliver GDP level growth in Europe, and transform industries and societies around the world.

To learn more about OLIX’s vision, you can read its compute manifesto here.