See more Daily Mail on Google -save us as a Preferred Source A 25-year-old sixth-form dropout is on the verge of becoming Britain's newest tech billionaire – after his company was valued at £2.5billion following a nine-figure investment round.
James Dacombe's firm Olix is hoping to capitalise on the overwhelming demand for the extremely powerful computer chips needed to run artificial intelligence software.
Following a $312million (£232million) funding round that counted the UK Government among its investors, the company has been valued at $3.3billion – tripling its value in just six months.
Analysis of the most recent publicly available shareholding data suggests Mr Dacombe holds more than a third of the company's capital, giving him a $1.27billion (£946million) payday were he to sell it at its current valuation.
Born in September 2000 in Harrogate, he began teaching himself computer programming from a young age, building apps and websites at 13 years old.
His mother Jane, an environmental scientist who works for the Environment Agency, wrote on social media that she was 'so very proud'. His father, Paul, is an energy industry consultant who now lives separately in Dorset.
The young entrepreneur comes from a family of high achievers: his sisters graduated from sixth-form with top marks and went on to study at Cambridge and the London School of Economics.
His story, however, has markedly different beginnings. After attending the £23,000-a-year Ashville College, Mr Dacombe dropped out of the state-funded St Aidans and St John Fisher Associated Sixth Form College after just two days.
At the end of 2018, at the age of 18, he launched his first company, called CoMind. It is developing brain-monitoring tools that will allow doctors to observe patients' brain activity without invasive surgery.
James Dacombe could be Britain's newest billionaire after his firm was valued at $3.3billion following an investment round
Mr Dacombe, from Harrogate in Yorkshire, also runs medical tech firm CoMind, developing non-invasive brain monitoring for use in hospitals
He has said the idea for the company was born out of 'personal experiences with family members affected by strokes and dementia'.
Clinical trials of its tools have been carried out at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London and in the US, with a view to launching commercially next year.
In 2022, Mr Dacombe was selected to undertake a Thiel Fellowship – a highly sought-after grant named after its benefactor Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and AI firm Palantir, for entrepreneurs without university degrees.
The programme gave him $100,000 (since elevated to $250,000 for new applicants) so he could pursue his business ideas outside of further education.
Mr Dacombe then founded Olix in 2024 under the name Flux. CoMind and Olix are both controlled by Mr Dacombe's holding firm, Bletchley Industries – named after Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern computing.
Investors are prizing Olix as it seeks to break hardware giant Nvidia's grip in the market for semiconductors – the underpinnings of the extremely powerful computer chips used to power AI software.
At present, AI data centres rely on highly advanced computer chips derived from those used to draw graphics in video games.
But demand for these, and the memory chips computers need to carry out complex tasks, has driven a shortage known as 'RAMageddon' that is pushing up the prices of consumer goods such as laptops and PlayStations.
Olix says the 'inference chips' it is developing are custom-built for AI software and do not rely on the memory chips and other components currently in short supply, making them cost-effective and more powerful.
It plans to 'tape out', or finalise, its DX-1 chip this year before moving towards production at the end of 2027. It is hiring at its five offices in London, Bristol, and across the US and Canada to support this.
However, investors have been selling off stakes in other chip firms such as Nvidia and Intel amidst anxiety about the AI sector at large, which is increasingly saddled with debt.
Among the latest investors is the UK Government's AI investment arm, Sovereign AI, which is betting big on AI as a cornerstone of the British economy.
Olix is the fifth firm Sovereign has invested taxpayer money in since it launched in April. The amount invested was not specified, though Sovereign itself says it writes cheques of between one and ten million pounds.
Joséphine Kant, of Sovereign AI, said James Dacombe was 'one of the most important founders of his generation', adding: 'James not only wants to win globally, but he’s also proud of where he’s from.'