AI Chip Startup Ricursive Reaches $4B Valuation Just Two Months After Launch

Recursive Intelligence, an AI chip startup focused on building systems that can design and iteratively improve AI hardware, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company said Monday that Lightspeed led the Series A round.

Ricursive says its technology is designed to autonomously generate and refine silicon substrate layers, enabling faster cycles of AI chip development. The founders argue that repeating this process at scale could accelerate progress toward artificial general intelligence.

The Series A comes just two months after Ricursive formally launched, following a seed round led by Sequoia. According to reporting from The New York Times, the company has now raised a total of $335 million.

Ricursive was founded by former Google researchers Anna Goldie, who serves as CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, the company’s CTO. The pair previously worked on AlphaChip, a reinforcement learning–based method for designing chip layouts. Recursive says AlphaChip has already been used across four generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chips.

Additional investors in the new round include DST Global, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, and Radical AI.

Recursive is separate from another similarly named startup, Recursive, which prominent natural language processing researcher Richard Socher reportedly founded. That company is also said to be in discussions to raise a large funding round at a $4 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. It is likewise developing AI systems designed to improve themselves.

The space is becoming increasingly crowded. As TechAmerica previously reported, Naveen Rao’s AI hardware startup Unconventional AI is also pursuing the idea of an intelligent substrate. In December, the company raised a $475 million seed round at a $4.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC.