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High school dropout James Dacombe just became Europe’s youngest billionaire. At 25-years-old, he’s the founder of Olix, an AI chip maker that was valued at $3.3 billion this month. With an estimated 30% stake in the company, Dacombe’s fortune skyrocketed, too, making him a newly minted member of the three-comma-club at a roughly $1 billion net worth.
The Under 30 alum started the London-based AI chip manufacturer two years ago, betting AI is becoming far too complex to rely on a one-size-fits-all chip approach. Instead of making general purpose chips like existing powerhouse Nvidia does, Olix makes different chip versions for each step on the AI model assembly line: from ingesting a prompt, making calculations, and generating the response, for instance. Because each task requires vastly different amounts of memory, data, and compute power, Dacombe argues that separate chips will actually make the AI process more efficient, as long as the chips can effectively communicate with each other. That communication is the startup’s current undertaking, which is why they’re also building an “optical network” that uses light signals instead of electrical signals to transmit data between chips, effectively transferring more data while using less energy than would be the case with electrical.
Investors are seeing the light. Investment firm Fundomo, chip designer Arm, Hummingbird Ventures, Creandum and even The U.K. government’s Sovereign AI fund have contributed to the $532 million Dacombe has raised for the company.
While just 25, this isn’t Dacombe’s first time raising money a massive sum of money. As a coding-obsessed teenager he left high school to launch CoMind, a health tech company that developed non-invasive technology to monitor the brain’s blood flow and pressure. Instead of using incisions or drilling into the skull, CoMind (coincidentally like Olix) uses infrared lasers and light signals to measure brain activity.
He started CoMind after loved ones had experienced health conditions like strokes and dementia, and he wanted to find a way to improve healthcare with the coding technology he was experimenting with. His career was jump started with early backing from incubator Entrepreneur First and VC firm LocalGlobe in 2019, and being awarded a Thiel Fellowship in 2022. He then went on to raise a $27 million Series A in 2023 and a $60 million round in 2025.
Today, CoMind is undergoing clinical trials and is hoping for a 2027 commercial launch. In the meantime, they’re also developing CoVision, an AI tool that will turn that brain data into predictions about patient health. CoMind has raised more than $100 million from investors—and Dacombe is still the CEO and has a 12% stake in that company, too.
As funds funnel toward AI startups, Dacombe is one of a growing number of (really) young founders hitting billion-dollar net worths. All four cofounders of AI coding tool Cursor are in their twenties, and count $2.3 billion net worths. Fabian Hedin, the cofounder of Lovable, sits at $3.1. And AI recruitment company Mercor, founded by three twenty-somethings, gave its cofounders $2.2 billion each. As of this spring, Forbes’ billionaire rankings included 35 people under 30—with about a dozen of those being self made.
You can read more about Europe’s newest youngest billionaire here. Or the growing number of Gen Zers with a ten-figure-fortune here.
See you next time,
Alex & Zoya
Small Brands Get Famous On TikTok Shop, But Amazon Is Still King
Courtesy of Jared Mortensen
Influencers aren’t the only ones reaping the benefits of TikTok virality. Brands big and small are cashing in on TikTok Shop (even celebrities like Lili Reinhart are using the affiliate and link-to-shop offerings to boost their brands). But this founder says it still doesn’t beat selling on Amazon.
Lister Lowdown
-Forbes billionaire and U30 Hall of Famer Patrick Collison is making big moves at Stripe: The fintech company has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, according to Bloomberg. OpenRouter is a platform that gives developers a single gateway to access and switch between hundreds of AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic; it was valued at $1.3 billion after a Series B round in May.
-2025 Under 30 lister Shayne Coplan is gearing up for the NFL season. His prediction market startup Polymarket acquired the team behind Turf, which built an interactive NFL game that lets fans call plays and chat with others during live games. Polymarket was last valued at $15 billion, and Forbes covered the deal that originally made Coplan a billionaire. Read it here.
-Mid-Day Squares, the Canadian startup known for its nutrition-first chocolate bars, this week announced it raised $8 million in debt. The round was led by Investissement Québec & Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions as Mid-Day Squares prepares to launch in Walmart and Costco stores in the U.S. Cofounder Jake Karls made the Under 30 list in 2023, and told Forbes the company was on track to hit $45 million in revenue earlier this year.
Remembering Roger Duarte, Miami Entrepreneur And U30 Alum
We are saddened to learn that Roger Duarte, CEO of Hospitality Capital Partners and a Forbes Under 30 honoree, was killed in a helicopter crash in Kenya on Wednesday morning. He was 42.
Duarte was named to the Under 30 list in 2012 after founding George Stone Crab in Miami. He left a career in investment banking to enter the restaurant business and built the company around delivering Florida stone crabs to customers less than 24 hours after they came off the boat. The business grew to become the largest distributor of Florida stone crabs to Latin America. Duarte was 29 when he made the list.
Duarte is survived by his wife, Nicole Valls Duarte, and their two children, according to the New York Post.
The Eurocopter EC130 B4, operated by Lady Lori Helicopters, went down in a remote area of northern Kenya. Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash and working to recover the victims.
The other victims include Telemundo executive José Alberto Suárez; director of Ecuador’s National Intelligence Center Michele Sensi-Contugi and his wife and fashion designer, Stephany Maria Hollihan Vasconez; Henry Parra, U.S. Navy veteran and founder of aviation startup Trax, alongside husband and Mrkt Group cofounder Adam Hlavaty; and pilot Josh Outram.
