James Dacombe launched his first company, CoMind, a brain-scanning business, at the age of 17 in 2018A British start-up founded by a 25-year-old school dropout has been valued at £2.5bn as it develops new chips for the AI boom. The deal values Olix at $3.3bn, tripling its valuation since February, when the start-up raised a further $220m. Fractile, a Bristol start-up, raised $220m in May this year in a fundraising round led by Mr Thiel's Founders Fund, which was an early investor in tech giants, including SpaceX, Palantir and Facebook. CuspAI, a start-up using AI to discover new materials for chip design, secured $450m last week from investors, including Jeff Bezos. Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, said: "Olix is exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI."