A British start-up developing artificial intelligence chips has been valued at £2.5 billion, despite being founded by a 25-year-old entrepreneur who left school before completing his A-levels. The valuation underlines the intense investor appetite for firms building specialist hardware for AI applications, and highlights how young, non-traditional founders are increasingly able to build significant technology businesses outside the usual university-to-industry pipeline.

The article's full details on the company's name, backers, product and funding history were not available in the retrieved text, which consisted largely of unrelated Daily Mail headlines rather than the story itself. As such, only the core claim from the headline — a sixth form dropout's AI chip venture reaching a £2.5 billion valuation — can be confirmed.