{"slug": "billionaire-gen-zer-dropped-out-of-high-school-to-launch-his-start-up-at-17-now", "title": "Billionaire Gen Zer dropped out of high school to launch his start-up at 17—now he’s the richest self-made 25-year-old in the U.K and all of Europe", "summary": "James Dacombe, the 25-year-old founder of AI chip-making firm Olix and brain monitoring startup CoMind, has become Europe's youngest self-made billionaire with a net worth exceeding $1 billion after Olix raised $312 million, boosting its market cap to $3.3 billion. Dacombe, who dropped out of high school at 17 and owns an estimated 30% stake in Olix and 12% of CoMind, is one of 11 self-made billionaires under 30 worldwide.", "body_md": "One Gen Z high school dropout with two tech businesses to his name has just become Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire following a breakout investing round—before even turning 30. James Dacombe, the 25-year-old serial entrepreneur behind AI chip-making firm Olix and brain monitoring startup CoMind, just hit a personal net worth of over $1 billion.\n\nDacombe launched his London-based firm Olix just two years ago, which tripled in value since February and raised $312 million from investors earlier this month, boosting the company’s market cap to $3.3 billion. It also pushed the bank account of Dacombe, who owns an estimated 30% stake in the company, over the billion-dollar threshold.\n\nMeanwhile, Dacombe also owns a 12% stake in CoMind—a company he created in 2017, and still leads—raised $102.5 million in August last year, which contributes to his eye-watering net worth.\n\nThe British Gen Z founder is just one of 11 self-made billionaires in the world under 30 years old, and one of four who don’t live in the U.S.\n\n## How James Dacombe became a billionaire\n\nDacombe was destined to build. He began programming apps and websites at just 13 years old, attending private school Ashville College in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, before taking his A levels in physics, math, economics, and business. But the then-teenager knew the academic life wasn’t for him.\n\nSo at 17 years old, Dacombe dropped out of high school to scale his budding company: CoMind. And four years later, he’d take on a major opportunity to accelerate his business.\n\nThe founder then took the [Thiel Fellowship](https://fortune.com/2025/08/16/gen-z-millennial-founders-college-dropout-entrepreneurs-peter-thiel-fellowship/): a two-year competitive program established by [Palantir](https://fortune.com/company/palantir-technologies/) cofounder [Peter Thiel](https://fortune.com/tag/peter-thiel/) that grants budding entrepreneurs $250,000 to skip college and pursue their entrepreneurial passions.\n\nIt’s a fellowship that has kick-started the careers of billion-dollar successes like [ScaleAI](https://fortune.com/company/scale-ai/)’s [Alexandr Wang](https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/alexandr-wang-technology-self-starter-gen-z-billionaire-alexandr-wang-tells-13-year-olds-they-should-be-more-like-bill-gates-who-sneaked-out-of-the-house-to-code-at-night-mark-zuckerberg-scale-ai/) and [Lucy Guo](https://fortune.com/2025/06/08/youngest-self-made-billionaire-on-the-planet-still-shops-at-shein-and-pulls-up-to-work-in-a-honda-civic-act-broke-stay-rich-lucy-guo-says/)—and now, Dacombe can add his name to the list of success stories.\n\n“An advantage of starting my business so young was naivety,” Dacombe [told](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/young-power-list-2024-revealed-sunday-times) *The Sunday Times* in 2024. “You don’t have the scar tissues from what hasn’t worked, so you just try a lot of things. Fortunately, some of them work.”\n\n*Fortune *reached out to Olix and CoMind for comment.\n\n## The tech revolution is minting Gen Z billionaires\n\nThe [tech revolution is breaking](https://fortune.com/2026/07/28/meet-the-ai-centurions-vertiv-seagate-sandisk-western-digital-ge-vernova-applovin/) market cap records and minting billionaires at a breakneck pace. And the workforce’s youngest generation is [leveraging their tech savvy](https://fortune.com/2026/08/16/hp-exec-george-brasher-hits-back-at-gen-z-lazy-label-great-at-listening-building-relationships/) to [found unicorn companies](https://fortune.com/2025/11/29/self-made-billionaire-artifical-intelligence-brendan-foody-mercor-silcion-valley-startup-founders-technology/) before even hitting their 30s. Now, Gen Z founders are constantly beating each other out in being the youngest self-made billionaires in the world.\n\nIn the explosion of the internet era, [Mark Zuckerberg](https://fortune.com/tag/mark-zuckerberg/) quickly floated to the top as the youngest self-made billionaire. He built Facebook out of his college dorm room—a company now known as the $1.5 trillion titan [Meta](https://fortune.com/company/facebook/)—and hit a net worth of $1 billion in 2008 at just 23 years old. He held the spot for several years before being overtaken by his slightly younger Facebook cofounder [Dustin Moskovitz](https://fortune.com/author/dustin-moskovitz/), who reached the 10-figure threshold in his mid-twenties.\n\nOther tech visionaries have since swooped up the spots.\n\nIn 2015, fellow college dropout [Evan Spiegel](https://fortune.com/tag/evan-spiegel/), the cofounder of Snapchat, took the throne when he became a billionaire at 24. Now, AI is generating a tidal wave of wealth that’s flowing into the pockets of Gen Zers; the sector [minted more than](https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2025/12/25/ai-minted-more-than-50-new-billionaires-in-2025/) 50 new billionaires in 2025 alone, as investors funneled over $200 billion into the industry, and AI start-ups were on the receiving end of 50% of funding worldwide.\n\nOver the past year, U.S. AI start-ups have created 19 billionaires with a combined fortune of $59.3 billion, [according to a](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-new-ai-billionaires-list/) March 2026 *Bloomberg *analysis.\n\nIn 2022, ScaleAI raised $325 million at a $7.3 billion valuation, catapulting then-24-year-old entrepreneur Wang to the youngest self-made billionaire spot. Wang’s fellow cofounder, Guo, later surpassed [Taylor Swift](https://fortune.com/tag/taylor-swift/) in [becoming the youngest](https://fortune.com/article/lucy-guo-scale-ai-youngest-self-made-woman-billionaire/) woman to hit the eye-watering net worth, and has since passed the baton to [Kalshi](https://fortune.com/tag/kalshi/) cofounder [Luana Lopes Lara](https://fortune.com/2025/12/04/meet-luana-lopes-lara-the-29-year-old-ballerina-spent-college-summers-working-for-ray-dalio-worlds-youngest-female-self-made-billionaire-millennial-kalshi-wealth/). Shayne Coplan, the founder and CEO of prediction market giant Polymarket, [later held the world title](https://fortune.com/2025/10/11/shayne-coplan-polymarket-youngest-self-made-billionaire-nyse-investment-success/) at 27 years old. And less than a month later, a new Gen Zer would assume his spot at the top.\n\nIn 2025, [Mercor](https://fortune.com/2026/04/02/mercor-ai-startup-security-incident-10-billion/)’s 20-something founders Surya Midha, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath all became billionaires after the company was valued at $10 billion in a private funding round last October. They’ve since held onto their status as the youngest self-made billionaires, boasting net worths around $1.9 billion to $2.2 billion. Young tech founders are accumulating wealth at a dizzying pace—and Mercor’s founders say the wealth still feels somewhat abstract.\n\n“It’s definitely crazy,” Foody [told Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/10/30/mercor-youngest-self-made-billionaires/) after hitting the $10 billion valuation last year. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.”\n\n*breaks the traditional barrier between audience and newsroom. The show transforms*\n\n**Fortune Daily*** Fortune*’s trusted reporting into actionable, conversational, and entertaining insights for an emerging class of business leaders.\n\n**Watch here.**", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/billionaire-gen-zer-dropped-out-of-high-school-to-launch-his-start-up-at-17-now", "canonical_source": "https://fortune.com/2026/08/17/billionaire-gen-z-james-dacombe-dropped-out-of-high-school-launch-start-up-17-richest-self-made-25-year-old-in-uk-europe/", "published_at": "2026-08-17 15:34:46+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-17 16:10:39.005981+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-chips"], "entities": ["James Dacombe", "Olix", "CoMind", "Thiel Fellowship", "Peter Thiel", "Palantir", "ScaleAI", "Alexandr Wang"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/billionaire-gen-zer-dropped-out-of-high-school-to-launch-his-start-up-at-17-now", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/billionaire-gen-zer-dropped-out-of-high-school-to-launch-his-start-up-at-17-now.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/billionaire-gen-zer-dropped-out-of-high-school-to-launch-his-start-up-at-17-now.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/billionaire-gen-zer-dropped-out-of-high-school-to-launch-his-start-up-at-17-now.jsonld"}}