AI chip startup Ricursive has reached $4 billion valuation two months after launch

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

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

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

Ricursive was founded by former Google Scholar CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalea Merhosini. The startup says their work on a new reinforcement learning method for designing chip layouts, called AlphaChip, has been used in four generations of Google’s TPU chips.

DST Global, the venture capital arm of Nvidia NVentures, 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 Sucher, a well-known researcher in the field of natural language processing. Bloomberg reported last week that the Oudi is also in talks to raise a $4 billion mega round. It is also working on artificial intelligence systems that improve themselves.

These two companies are not the only startups working on this 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.