Ricursive Intelligence, a startup developing an AI system to design and automatically improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company announced Monday that the Series A round was led by Lightspeed.
Ricursive states its system will be capable of creating its own silicon substrate layer and accelerating AI chip improvements. The founders believe this recursive process of AI designing better AI hardware is a path to achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
This funding comes just two months after the company formally launched with a seed investment led by Sequoia. In total, Ricursive has raised $335 million, according to The New York Times.
The startup was founded by former Google researchers CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini. Their prior work on a novel reinforcement learning method for designing chip layouts, called AlphaChip, has been used in four generations of Google’s TPU chip.
Other investors in the round include DST Global, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, and Radical AI.
Ricursive should not be confused with the similarly named startup Recursive, which was reportedly founded by well-known natural language processing researcher Richard Socher. That Recursive is also in talks to raise a major funding round at a $4 billion valuation, according to a Bloomberg report last week, and is also working on self-improving AI systems.
These two are not the only new startups working on this concept. As previously reported, Naveen Rao’s new AI hardware startup, Unconventional AI, is also developing 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.