Ricursive Intelligence: AI startup secures $300 million, valuation at $4 billion

Ricursive Intelligence is shaking up Silicon Valley and has completed a Series A financing round of $300 million just two months after its founding. The AI startup from California has already reached a valuation of $4 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the round. Also participating are DST Global, NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm), Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, Radical AI, and Sequoia Capital. In total, Ricursive has raised $335 million, reports the New York Times.

AI that improves itself

Ricursive Intelligence is a frontier AI startup focused on using artificial intelligence to accelerate chip design—particularly with a recursive approach in which AI models optimize the development of new hardware, and this new hardware in turn enables more powerful AI models.

Ricursive Intelligence was founded by CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini. Both previously worked at Google DeepMind, where they worked on AI methods for optimizing systems, particularly in the field of chip design. There, Goldie was co-responsible for the AlphaChip project, which uses AI to optimize chip layouts.

“The pace of AI progress is determined by hardware,” says CEO Anna Goldie. “Ricursive’s mission is to radically accelerate chip design and ultimately develop our own silicon substrate using AI.” CTO Azalia Mirhoseini adds: “To advance the state of the art in AI, we must operate at the Pareto frontier of intelligence and computational efficiency. Ricursive is building toward a future where rapid AI and hardware co-evolution becomes reality.”

Investors see critical bottleneck in AI industry

The financing is intended to grow the team and massively expand compute infrastructure. Guru Chahal, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, explains the investment: “Ricursive addresses what may be the most critical bottleneck facing the AI industry today: the gap between AI progress and semiconductor capability. Anna and Azalia pioneered a new approach to chip design with AlphaChip. At Ricursive, they are building a full-stack platform that creates a continuous improvement cycle between AI models and the hardware that powers them.”

Since launch, Ricursive has recruited top researchers and engineers from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Apple, and Cadence. The company is positioning itself at the intersection of AI and compute infrastructure. The rapid follow-on financing reflects the confidence of the AI and semiconductor industry in the team and technical approach.