A California-based startup that aims to build an AI system to transform AI chip development and production has confirmed $300 million Series A funding at a $4 billion valuation — a mere 55 days after the company launched.
On Dec. 2, Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier lab based in Silicon Valley, announced its arrival via a press release that revealed a $35 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital at a $750 million valuation.
Now, less than two months later, interest in the company is rocketing, with new investment from DST Global, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures and Radical AI.
Much of the enthusiasm is centered around the past work of company founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, former Google researchers who pioneered AI-driven semiconductor design. Their methods have subsequently been adopted across four generations of Google’s tensor processing units and deployed by other semiconductor companies.
The goal of Ricursive Intelligence could have far-reaching consequences: create a platform that uses AI to optimize every step of the AI chip design process.
This forms a “recursive feedback loop,” whereby AI models design the next generation of chips and those chips, in turn, train more advanced AI models, addressing what the startup described as a “primary bottleneck” to AI progress: The slow pace and high cost of semiconductor design.
“The pace of AI progress is dictated by hardware,” Goldie said in a press release. “Ricursive’s mission is … ultimately to use AI to design its own silicon substrate.” This, Mirhoseini added, would represent a “paradigm shift” that will unlock “significant gains in performance and energy efficiency.”
Their ambition has convinced investors, with Stephanie Zhan, partner at Sequoia, hailing the pair as “visionaries” whose work will revolutionize the chip design process that can typically take up to three years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars. “We envision a world where Ricursive helps any company design chips for its own workloads faster, more efficiently and more creatively than is possible today,” she said.
The company currently has fewer than 10 employees but will use the latest funding to beef up its infrastructure and add to its expert team, having already recruited from Anthropic, Apple and Cadence.
Somewhat confusingly, as Ricursive celebrates its investment success, another startup — the similarly named, but entirely different, Recursive — is also making waves with its own plan to develop AI superintelligence that is able to improve itself over time. Bloomberg reported that it is in talks to raise hundreds of million dollars.