AI Chip Startup Ricursive Achieves $4B Valuation in $300M Series A

Ricursive Intelligence, an AI chip design startup, has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round, reaching a $4 billion valuation merely two months after its formal launch. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and included participation from NVentures, Nvidia's venture capital arm, Sequoia Capital, and others. This brings the company's total funding to $335 million, following a $35 million seed round in December.

Founded by former Google researchers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, Ricursive aims to develop AI systems that design and autonomously improve their own chips. This approach is based on their previous work on AlphaChip at Google, which was used in designing Google's TPU chips. The significant and rapid investment highlights a broader trend of investors pouring capital into specialized AI hardware startups that could challenge the dominance of established players like Nvidia.