AI chip startup Ricursive hits $4B 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 Monday the round was led by Lightspeed. Ricursive says the system will be able to create its own silicon substrate layer and speed up AI chip improvements. Rinse and repeat to get to AGI, the founders say."

"Ricursive was founded by former Google researchers CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini. Their work on a novel reinforcement learning method for designing chip layouts, called AlphaChip, has 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 is not to be confused with the similarly named startup Recursive, reportedly founded by well-known natural language processing neural networks researcher Richard Socher."

"And these two are not the only new startups working on the concept. As TechCrunch previously reported, Naveen Rao's new AI hardware startup, named 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."

Ricursive Intelligence raised $300 million in a Series A at a $4 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $335 million. The round was led by Lightspeed with participation from DST Global, NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures and Radical AI. Ricursive develops an AI system that designs and automatically improves AI chips, including creating its own silicon substrate layer to accelerate iterative chip advancements toward AGI. Founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini previously worked at Google and developed AlphaChip, a reinforcement learning method used in four generations of Google's TPU. Other startups pursuing intelligent substrates include Recursive and Unconventional AI.

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