Ricursive Intelligence has raised $300 million in Series A funding at a $4 billion post-money valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round comes less than two months after the company’s public launch and includes participation from DST Global, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, Radical AI, and Sequoia Capital.

The AI lab was founded by Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, the scientists behind AlphaChip—a technology that has been deployed across four generations of Google’s TPU chips and adopted by external semiconductor companies. Their work established AI-driven chip design as a viable approach to an industry that has historically relied on manual processes.

Closing the Loop Between AI Models and Hardware

Ricursive is building a platform that creates a recursive feedback loop between AI models and the chips that power them. The approach addresses what the founders describe as the primary bottleneck to AI progress: semiconductor design remains slow and capital-intensive, unable to keep pace with the rapid advancement of AI algorithms.

The company’s platform applies AI and distributed computing to compress semiconductor development timelines. Rather than treating chip design as a one-time process, Ricursive’s system enables continuous improvement where AI designs silicon that powers the next generation of AI models.

Scaling Research Teams and Compute Infrastructure

The new capital will fund expansion of Ricursive’s research and engineering team while significantly increasing its compute infrastructure. This will enable faster iteration across the full semiconductor design stack, from architecture to physical layout.

“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.”

Addressing the Hardware-AI Performance Gap

The rapid follow-on financing reflects strong conviction from investors across both AI and semiconductor sectors. Industry leaders see the gap between AI advancement and semiconductor capability as one of the most pressing challenges facing the technology industry today.

“To advance the state of the art in AI, we must operate at the Pareto frontier of intelligence and computational efficiency,” said Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, co-founder and CTO of Ricursive Intelligence. “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.”

The company has already attracted top-tier talent from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Apple, and Cadence—positioning itself as a foundational player at the intersection of artificial intelligence and compute infrastructure.

Building on AlphaChip’s Foundation

Dr. Goldie and Dr. Mirhoseini’s previous work on AlphaChip demonstrated that AI could learn to design chips more efficiently than traditional methods. Their research showed that machine learning models could optimize chip floor planning—a complex task that typically requires significant human expertise and time.

At Ricursive, the founders are expanding beyond that initial proof of concept. The goal is to create a full-stack platform that automates and accelerates the entire semiconductor design process, from high-level architecture decisions to low-level physical implementation.

Strong Investor Conviction in Technical Approach

Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, explained the firm’s investment thesis: “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.”

The participation of NVentures is particularly notable, given NVIDIA’s position as the dominant supplier of AI training chips. The investment suggests that even incumbent hardware providers recognize the need for new approaches to semiconductor design as AI workloads continue to grow in complexity and scale.

The company’s vision extends beyond incremental improvements. By removing the hardware bottleneck that has historically constrained AI progress, Ricursive aims to enable what it describes as “a Cambrian explosion of custom chips”—a future where specialized silicon can be developed quickly enough to match the pace of AI innovation.

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/former-google-deepmind-scientists-raise-300m-for-ai-chip-startup/
Originally Posted: Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:48:18 +0000