In 2017, James Dacombe dropped out of high school to found CoMind, a startup that developed technology to monitor brain activity. Four years later, he received a Thiel Fellowship, choosing to skip college and devote himself to his business venture.
Today, the 25-year-old Briton is the youngest self-made billionaire in Europe, thanks to Olix, a chip-making company just two years old, as well as an undisclosed stake he holds in CoMind, which he continues to manage independently.
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Olix, headquartered in London and founded in 2024, tripled its valuation in just six months, reaching $3.3 billion in early August. The surge in its value came after it raised $312 million from investors, including the New York-based investment firm Fundomo, the Nasdaq-listed chip design company Arm, the U.S. quantitative fund Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings.
The British government’s Sovereign AI Fund also participated in the funding round.
The new funding has propelled Dacombe—who is estimated to own approximately 30% of Olix—into the exclusive club of billionaires. He also holds a 12% stake in CoMind, which raised $102.5 million in August 2025, though it did not disclose its valuation.
Dacombe is one of only 11 self-made billionaires in the world who are under 30 and one of only four based outside the U.S.
The next youngest self-made billionaire in Europe after Dacombe is 26-year-old Arvid Lunnemark, co-founder of the popular artificial intelligence company Cursor, which develops tools for AI programming.
The Swede had moved to the U.S. to study at MIT, and in 2022 he founded the company along with three of his fellow students. He currently lives in San Francisco. The 26-year-old Lunnemark and his three co-founders nearly doubled their net worth, reaching an estimated $2.4 billion each, following SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor. Cursor’s oldest co-founder, Sualeh Asif of Pakistan, is also 26 years old.
Coincidentally, there is another 26-year-old Swedish billionaire whose fortune nearly doubled in the same week.
He is Fabian Hedin, co-founder of Lovable, who lives in Stockholm and is just a few months older than Lunnemark. Hedin became a billionaire in December when his startup, which specializes in so-called “vibe coding” (a new way of developing software, where the user describes to artificial intelligence in natural language what they want to create, and the AI writes a large portion—or even all—of the code), raised funds at a valuation of $6.6 billion.
Lovable announced earlier this week a new round of funding totaling $400 million, bringing the company’s valuation to $13.3 billion. As a result, Hedin’s net worth nearly doubled, reaching an estimated $3.1 billion.
These young entrepreneurs are part of a global wave of startup growth that is creating billionaires at increasingly younger ages and at an unprecedented pace.
In the U.S., in fact, the title of youngest self-made billionaire has changed hands several times in the past year alone.
Currently, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire is the American Surya Midha. He was just 22 years old when Mercor, the AI startup in the recruitment sector that he co-founded, raised funds at a $10 billion valuation in October, catapulting his estimated net worth to $2.2 billion.
Midha narrowly surpasses his co-founders, Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath, who are about two months younger. All three are now 23 years old.
Midha took the title from Polymarket’s Shayne Coplan, 28, who had won it just a few weeks earlier from Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, 29.
Olix’s Bet on AI Chips
Dacombe’s big bet is based on the idea that it makes no sense to use Nvidia’s powerful chips for every artificial intelligence task.
Instead, Olix is attempting to develop chips specialized for different parts of an AI model’s inference stage—that is, the process by which the model processes data and produces a result.
This approach differs from using a single type of chip for all tasks.
Olix’s chips are also photonic. This means that data is transmitted between them via light rather than electrical signals, which can reduce latency and energy consumption.
At the same time, the company is deliberately avoiding the use of expensive, high-bandwidth memory hardware, which is currently in limited supply.
According to a company announcement, Olix plans to deliver the first chips to its customers in the second half of 2027.
Competition, however, is intensifying.
d-Matrix, based in Silicon Valley and backed by Microsoft, has already begun marketing its Corsair chips. At the same time, London-based startups such as MatX, Etched, and Fractile have also secured significant funding over the past year.
Nvidia is also entering the fray. In December, the chip giant signed a $20 billion licensing agreement with Groq, a chip manufacturer founded by Jonathan Ross, who had been involved in the initial deals for Google’s artificial intelligence TPU chips.
Dacombe, despite having no prior experience in the chip industry before founding Olix, believes that the experience he gained from developing photonic technologies at CoMind could give his new company an edge over Groq and other industry giants.
The capital to fund all these ambitious ventures appears to be available. The big prize, however, will go to whoever manages to develop the technology that prevails.
As Dacombe recently told the Financial Times, the enormous economic value generated by the ability to run very large and powerful artificial intelligence models quickly, for a large number of users and at low cost, makes the decomposition of individual tasks and the use of specialized silicon, designed specifically for them, particularly attractive.
For the 25-year-old entrepreneur, the challenge is now clear: to prove that the next generation of AI chips will not be based exclusively on Nvidia’s current dominance.
Source: forbesgreece.gr
