High school dropout, net worth over 100 million at age 25: he relied on chips to become Europe's youngest billionaire

Source: Forbes

Original title: Europe's youngest self-made billionaire is born: 25 years old, starting by dropping out of high school

In 2017, James Dacom dropped out of high school and founded CoMind, a brain monitoring startup. After four years, he received a Till scholarship and gave up college to focus on building his first startup.

Today, the 25-year-old is the youngest self-made billionaire in Europe with Olix, a chip company that was founded only two years ago, and his shareholding in CoMind (he is still running the company, the exact share ratio is not disclosed).

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Orix is headquartered in London and was founded in 2024. At the beginning of August, the company raised $312 million from investors such as New York investment company Fundomo, NASDAQ listed chip design company Arm, US quantitative fund Hudson River Trading, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. The valuation tripled to $3.3 billion in six months. The UK government's sovereign AI fund also participated in this round of investment. After a new round of financing, it is estimated that Dacom, who holds 30% of the company's shares, joined the billion-dollar club. He also holds 12% of CoMind's shares. The company raised US$102.5 million in August 2025, but the valuation was not disclosed. Neither Orix nor Comind responded to Forbes' requests for comment.

Counting Dakom, there are now 11 self-made billionaires in the world who have not yet reached the age of 30. Only four of them are from outside the US, and Dacom is one of them.

Europe's second-youngest self-made billionaire after Dacom is Arvid Lunnemark (Arvid Lunnemark), the co-founder of popular AI code editing company Cursor, now 26 years old. This Swede went to the US to study at MIT, co-founded the company with three college friends in 2022, and currently lives in San Francisco. On August 14, local time, SpaceX bought Cursor for 60 billion US dollars. The wealth of Lunnemark and the three co-founders all almost doubled, reaching an estimated 2.4 billion US dollars. The oldest Cursor co-founder was Sualeh Asif (Sualeh Asif), a Pakistani native who is also 26 years old. Coincidentally, recently another 26-year-old Swedish billionaire almost doubled his wealth. He is Fabian Hedin (Fabian Hedin), the co-founder of Lovable.

Herding lived in Stockholm, a few months older than Lennemark. In December of last year, his “Ambient Programming” startup was raised at a valuation of $6.6 billion, making him a billionaire. On August 12, Lovable announced that it would refinance $400 million at a valuation of $13.3 billion. Herding's net worth almost doubled to an estimated $3.1 billion.

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These young giants are in the midst of an entrepreneurial boom spreading around the world, and this wave is spawning a wave of younger and younger billionaires at an alarming rate.

In the US, 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 (Surya Midha) of the United States. In October of last year, Mercor, the AI recruitment startup he co-founded, raised it at a valuation of 10 billion US dollars, and at the age of 22, his net worth increased to 2.2 billion US dollars. Mida narrowly beat co-founders Brendan Foody (Brendan Foody) and Adarsh Hiremath (Adarsh Hiremath) in the battle for the title, both of whom were about two months older than Mida (they are now 23). Mida took over the title from Polymarket's Shayne Coplan (Shayne Coplan) at the time, while Coplan, 28, took this honor from Scale AI's Alexander Wang a few weeks ago. The latter was 29 years old.

Dakom's big bet is based on the idea that Nvidia's AI chip is powerful, but not all tasks need to be done with it. His idea is to develop special chips for different aspects of the AI model inference stage (that is, the stage of model generation and output), rather than just using a single type of chip. Orix chips also use photonic technology, where data is transmitted between chips in the form of light rather than electrical signals, thus helping to reduce latency and power consumption. The company is also deliberately avoiding expensive high-bandwidth storage hardware, which is currently in short supply. According to a company press release, Orix plans to deliver the chips to customers in the second half of 2027.

More and more opponents are entering the game. D-Matrix, headquartered in Silicon Valley, has received an investment from Microsoft, and sales of its Corsair chips have begun; startups such as mATX, Etched, and London-based Fractile have also completed large financing over the past year.

Nvidia also joined the competition. In December of last year, the chip giant signed a $20 billion licensing agreement with Groq; Groq founder Jonathan Ross (Jonathan Ross) participated in the early work of Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) AI chip. Before founding Orix, Dakom had no experience working in the chip industry, but he seemed to think that his photonic technology experience accumulated in CoMind would give this startup an advantage and keep it from falling behind in competition with Groq and other chip giants. Today, the industry is well-capitalized to support all ideas, but in the end, the huge rewards are only those that win with technology.

As Dacom recently told the Financial Times: “Today, if you can quickly run a super powerful (big language model) for a large number of users at a low cost, you can get extremely impressive financial returns. Therefore, breaking down computational tasks and using customized chips that specialize in specific tasks can bring great benefits.”

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