A high school dropout is now Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire — and he says one early advantage helped him get rich

In the process of building those businesses, he also became Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire. But despite that accomplishment, he has no plans to slow down.

Dacombe, 25, is the founder of Olix, an AI chipmaker and brain monitoring startup, CoMind.

Olix, launched two years ago, has seen its valuation triple since February, following a $312 million funding round earlier this month that raised its valuation to $3.3 billion. CoMind raised $102.5 million a year ago.

The biggest advantage

Dacombe has some significant backers. Joséphine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, told The Times she was “convinced he’d be one of the most important founders of his generation”.

In 2022, he joined the Thiel Fellowship, receiving a grant from venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. That led to the founding of Olix.

It’s the sort of business fairy tale you rarely see, but Dacombe says a key part of the reason for his success was never realizing just how improbable it was in the first place.

“An advantage of starting my business so young was naivety,” he said when he was named to The Sunday Times’s first-ever Young Power List in 2024. “You don’t have the scar tissue from what hasn’t worked, so you just try a lot of things. Fortunately, some of them work.”

The future of Olix and CoMind

Dacombe has big ambitions for both of his companies. Olix, a semiconductor startup, is attempting to dislodge Nvidia’s grip on the industry. The company is developing “inference chips” to run AI models and says its work will “make today’s frontier AI more abundant and affordable and, more importantly, enable the viability of even more powerful models in the future.”

CoMind, meanwhile, is focusing on a medical sensor worn on the forehead that monitors blood flow and pressure. The device uses infrared lasers to monitor the brain in a non-invasive fashion.

“Our objective is to support clinicians with continuous brain physiology signals that could inform decision-making across a range of critical settings — including cardiac and vascular surgery, intensive care, and traumatic brain injury management,” the company says on its website.

Dacombe has been a programmer since he was 13, making apps and websites for his own amusement, so Olix was a natural extension of that interest. As for CoMind, he reportedly began thinking about the company after reading research papers examining how AI could help diagnose skin cancer using pictures of moles.