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

Brief

Ricursive Intelligence, a startup that builds an AI system to automatically design and improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a valuation of $4 billion. The company said Monday the tour was carried out by Lightspeed.

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

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

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

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

Ricursive should not be confused with the startup of the same name, Recursive, which was reportedly founded by Richard Socher, a well-known neural network researcher in natural language processing. This Recursive is also in talks to raise a giant round at a valuation of $4 billion, Bloomberg reported last week. And he’s also working on self-improving AI systems.

And these two aren’t the only new startups working on the concept. As TechCrunch previously reportedNaveen Rao’s new AI hardware startup named Unconventional AI, is also working on a smart substrate. In December, it raised a $475 million seed round at a valuation of $4.5 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC.

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