A Gen Z high school dropout with two tech businesses to his name has become Europe's youngest self-made billionaire after a breakout investing round—before even turning 30. James Dacombe, the 25-year-old serial entrepreneur behind AI chipmaker Olix and brain-monitoring startup CoMind, has crossed a personal net worth of more than $1 billion.

Dacombe launched his London-based firm Olix just two years ago. The company has tripled in value since February and raised $312 million from investors earlier this month, boosting its market cap to $3.3 billion. The round lands amid booming demand for the silicon underpinning the AI boom—Nvidia, whose chips power much of the world's AI systems, has ridden that surge to become one of the world's most valuable companies. The funding round also pushed the bank account of Dacombe, who owns an estimated 30% stake in the company, past the billion-dollar threshold.

He also owns a 12% stake in CoMind, a company he created in 2017 and still leads. CoMind raised $102.5 million in August last year, further contributing to his net worth. CoMind develops brain-monitoring technology, a corner of the neurotechnology field that has gained mainstream visibility since Elon Musk's Neuralink began implanting its devices in human patients in 2024.

The British Gen Z founder is one of just 11 self-made billionaires in the world under the age of 30, and one of only four who do not live in the United States—a rarity that underscores just how heavily the AI boom's wealth creation has been concentrated in the U.S.

How James Dacombe became a billionaire

Dacombe appeared destined to build from an early age. He began programming apps and websites at just 13 years old, attending Ashville College, a private school in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, before taking his A levels in physics, math, economics, and business. But the then-teenager already knew the academic life was not for him.

So at 17, Dacombe dropped out of high school to scale his budding company, CoMind. Four years later, he took on a major opportunity to accelerate the business: the Thiel Fellowship, a competitive two-year program established by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel that grants budding entrepreneurs $250,000 to skip college and pursue their entrepreneurial passions.

The fellowship has kick-started the careers of billion-dollar successes such as ScaleAI's Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo—and Dacombe can now add his name to the list of success stories.

"An advantage of starting my business so young was naivety," Dacombe told the Sunday Times in 2024. "You don't have the scar tissues from what hasn't worked, so you just try a lot of things. Fortunately, some of them work."

Fortune reached out to Olix and CoMind for comment.

The tech revolution is minting Gen Z billionaires

The tech revolution is breaking market cap records and minting billionaires at a breakneck pace. The workforce's youngest generation is leveraging its tech savvy to found unicorn companies before even hitting their thirties, and Gen Z founders now constantly beat one another out in the race to be the youngest self-made billionaires in the world.

In the explosion of the internet era, Mark Zuckerberg quickly floated to the top of that list. He built Facebook out of his college dorm room—a company now known as the $1.5 trillion titan Meta—and hit a net worth of $1 billion in 2008 at just 23 years old. He held the spot for several years before being overtaken by his slightly younger Facebook cofounder, Dustin Moskovitz, who reached the 10-figure threshold in his mid-twenties.

Other tech visionaries have since swooped up the spots. In 2015, fellow college dropout Evan Spiegel, the cofounder of Snapchat, took the throne when he became a billionaire at 24.

Now, AI is generating a tidal wave of wealth flowing into the pockets of Gen Zers. The sector minted more than 50 new billionaires in 2025 alone, as investors funneled over $200 billion into the industry and AI startups were on the receiving end of 50% of funding worldwide. Over the past year, U.S. AI startups have created 19 billionaires with a combined fortune of $59.3 billion, according to a March 2026 Bloomberg analysis.

In 2022, ScaleAI raised $325 million at a $7.3 billion valuation, catapulting then-24-year-old entrepreneur Wang to the youngest self-made billionaire spot. Wang's fellow cofounder, Guo, later surpassed Taylor Swift in becoming the youngest woman to hit the eye-watering net worth, and has since passed the baton to Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara. Shayne Coplan, the founder and CEO of prediction market giant Polymarket, later held the world title at 27 years old—and less than a month after, a new Gen Zer assumed his spot at the top.

In 2025, Mercor's twentysomething founders—Surya Midha, Brendan Foody, and Adarsh Hiremath—all became billionaires after the company was valued at $10 billion in a private funding round last October. They have since held on to their status as the youngest self-made billionaires, boasting net worths of around $1.9 billion to $2.2 billion.

Young tech founders are accumulating wealth at a dizzying pace—and Mercor's founders say the wealth still feels somewhat abstract.

"It's definitely crazy," Foody told Forbes after hitting the $10 billion valuation last year. "It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com