Ricursive Intelligence, a newly launched frontier AI lab founded by Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, announced a $300 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that values the company at a $4 billion post-money valuation. The round comes less than two months after Ricursive’s public debut and includes participation from DST Global, NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, Radical AI, and Sequoia Capital, among others.
The company is positioning itself at the intersection of advanced AI and silicon, aiming to compress semiconductor development timelines by creating a tight feedback loop between AI models and the chips that run them. Ricursive’s founders are credited with co-creating AlphaChip, a system that helped establish AI-driven chip design, and that the company says has been used across multiple generations of TPU designs and adopted beyond its original environment.
Ricursive said the new capital will be used to expand its research and engineering organization and to materially scale compute infrastructure so it can iterate faster across the semiconductor design stack. The company framed its mission as removing the hardware bottleneck that can slow AI progress, with an emphasis on co-evolution where improvements in AI capability and computational efficiency reinforce one another.
Lightspeed partner Guru Chahal said the firm was drawn to what it views as a central constraint for the AI industry, and to the founders’ prior work pioneering AI-based approaches to chip design. Ricursive also said it has recruited researchers and engineers spanning AI, systems, and silicon design from organizations including Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Apple, and Cadence, as it builds what it describes as a foundational platform for next-generation compute.
KEY QUOTES
“The pace of AI progress is dictated by hardware,” said Dr. Anna Goldie, co-founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence. “Ricursive’s mission is to radically accelerate chip design, and ultimately to use AI to design its own silicon substrate. This funding will allow us to grow our world-class team and build the infrastructure necessary to meet this challenge.”
Dr. Anna Goldie, Co-founder and CEO, Ricursive Intelligence
“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, unlocking significant gains in performance and energy efficiency. Together with our exceptional team, we are excited to drive this paradigm shift.”
Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, Co-founder and CTO, Ricursive Intelligence
“Ricursive is addressing what may be the most critical bottleneck facing the AI industry today: the gap between AI advancement and semiconductor capability. Anna and Azalia pioneered a new approach to chip design with AlphaChip. At Ricursive, they’re building a full-stack platform that creates a continuous improvement cycle between AI models and the hardware that powers them. The caliber of the founding team, the ambition of what they’re building, combined with the technical progress they’ve already achieved, made this a clear investment for us. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Ricursive Intelligence.”
Guru Chahal, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
