Starting from Scratch.

Author / Forbes

Source / Forbes

(ID: forbes_china)

In 2017, James Dakom dropped out of high school and founded the brain monitoring startup CoMind. Four years later, he received the Thiel Fellowship, opted out of college, and focused on building his first startup.

Today, this 25-year-old has become Europe's youngest self-made billionaire thanks to his two-year-old chip company Olix and his stake in CoMind (he is still operating the company, though the exact stake percentage is undisclosed).

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Olix, headquartered in London, was established in 2024. In early August, the company raised $312 million from investors including New York investment firm Fundomo, Nasdaq-listed chip design company Arm, U.S. quantitative fund Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, with its valuation doubling to $3.3 billion in just six months. The UK's sovereign AI fund also participated in this round of investment. After the new funding round, Dakom, who owns 30% of the company's shares, entered the billion-dollar club. He also holds 12% of CoMind, which raised $102.5 million in August 2025, but its valuation was not disclosed. Both Olix and CoMind did not respond to requests for comment from Forbes.

Including Dakom, there are currently 11 self-made billionaires worldwide who are under the age of 30. Only four of them are from outside the United States, and Dakom is one of them.

Europe's second youngest self-made billionaire is 26-year-old Arvid Lunnemark, co-founder of the popular AI code editing company Cursor. This Swede studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. and co-founded the company in 2022 with three university friends, currently residing in San Francisco. On August 14, SpaceX acquired Cursor for $60 billion, almost doubling the wealth of Lunnemark and his three co-founders to an estimated $2.4 billion. The oldest among the co-founders is Sualeh Asif, a 26-year-old from Pakistan. Coincidentally, another 26-year-old Swedish billionaire whose wealth nearly doubled recently is Fabian Hedin, co-founder of Lovable.

Hedin lives in Stockholm and is a few months older than Lunnemark. In December last year, his "atmospheric programming" startup raised funds at a valuation of $6.6 billion, making him a billionaire. On August 12, Lovable announced it had raised $400 million at a valuation of $13.3 billion, nearly doubling Hedin's net worth to an estimated $3.1 billion.

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These young titans are caught in a wave of entrepreneurial fervor spreading globally, which is rapidly spawning an increasing number of younger billionaires.

In the United States, the title of the youngest self-made billionaire has changed hands several times over the past year.

Currently, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world is Surya Midha from the U.S. In October of last year, the AI recruitment startup Mercor, which he co-founded, raised funds at a valuation of $10 billion, increasing his net worth to $2.2 billion at the age of 22. Midha narrowly beat his co-founders Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath in the competition for this title, both of whom are about two months older than Midha (they are now both 23 years old). Midha took over the title from Shayne Coplan of Polymarket, who was 28 years old at the time and had just received it weeks prior from Alexandr Wang of Scale AI, who was 29 years old.

Dakom's major bet is based on the belief that while NVIDIA’s AI chips are powerful, not all tasks need to be completed using them. His idea is to develop specialized chips for different stages of AI model inference (the stage where the model generates outputs) rather than relying on a single type of chip. Olix's chips also employ photonic technology that transmits data in the form of light instead of electrical signals between the chips, helping to reduce latency and power consumption. The company has deliberately avoided the currently scarce and expensive high-bandwidth storage hardware. According to the company's press release, Olix plans to deliver chips to customers in the second half of 2027.

The competition is increasingly fierce. Silicon Valley-based d-Matrix, backed by Microsoft, has begun selling its Corsair chips; startups like MatX, Etched, and London's Fractile have also completed substantial funding rounds over the past year.

NVIDIA has also entered the competition. In December, the chip giant signed a $20 billion licensing agreement with Groq; Groq's founder, Jonathan Ross, was involved in the early work on Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs). Before founding Olix, Dakom had no experience in the chip industry, but he seems to believe that the experience with photonic technology he gained at CoMind gives this new venture a competitive edge against Groq and other chip giants. The capital in the industry is currently ample enough to support all ideas, but ultimately, the substantial returns will only belong to the party with the superior technology.

As Dakom recently told the Financial Times: “Today, if we can operate extremely powerful (large language models) at low costs for a massive number of users, we can achieve very substantial economic returns. Therefore, breaking down computing tasks and using specialized custom chips tailored for specific task segments can yield very large profits.”

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