AI chip startup Ricursive reaches $4 billion valuation two months after launch | TechCrunch

Ricursive Intelligence, a startup building an AI system to design and automatically improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company said this on Monday the round was led from Lightspeed.

Ricursive says the system will be able to create its own silicon substrate layer and accelerate improvements to the AI ​​chip. Rinse and repeat to get to AGI, the say the founders.

The Series A comes just two months after the company formally launched with a seed investment led by Sequoia. It has raised a total of $335 million, reports The New York Times.

Ricursive was founded by former Google researchers, CEO Anna Goldie, and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini. Their work on a new learning method for designing chip layouts, called AlphaChiphas been used in four generations of Google’s TPU chip, the startup says.

DST Global, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures and Radical AI are also investors.

Ricursive should not be confused with the eponymous startup Recursive, reportedly founded by Richard Socher, a well-known researcher of neural networks in the field of natural language processing. That Recursive is also in talks to raise a giant round at a $4 billion valuation. Bloomberg reports this last week. And work is also being done on AI systems that improve themselves.

And these two aren’t the only new startups working on the concept. As TechCrunch previously reported, Naveen Rao’s new AI hardware startup called Unconventional AI is also working on an intelligent substrate. In December, it 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.