Imagine launching a company and hitting a $4 billion valuation before you have barely had time to print business cards. That sounds like a fever dream from the dot-com bubble, but it is exactly what just happened with Ricursive Intelligence. Just two months after their public launch in December 2025, this startup has secured a massive war chest to solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in tech.
According to recent reports, Ricursive has raised a $300M Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. When you tally up their total funding, it sits at $335M. What is driving this frenzy? It isn’t just hype; it is the pedigree of the founders and a specific technology that could rewrite how computers are built.
Who are the minds behind Ricursive Intelligence?
If you follow the deep weeds of AI research, the names Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini might ring a bell. They are former Google researchers who pioneered ‘AlphaChip,’ a revolutionary method that used reinforcement learning to design chip layouts. This wasn’t just a theoretical paper; AlphaChip was actually used to design Google’s powerful Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).
The industry took notice. According to TechCrunch, the reason VCs were lining up around the block wasn’t just the idea, but the team. Everyone in the AI world reportedly tried to hire them. Instead of joining another giant, they struck out on their own. Now, backed by heavyweights like Sequoia, DST Global, and even Nvidia’s NVentures, they are scaling that vision. As CEO Anna Goldie put it, their mission is to "radically accelerate chip design and, ultimately, to use AI to design its own silicon substrate."
Why is AI-designed hardware the new gold rush?
You might be asking: why do we need AI to design chips? Can’t humans just keep doing it? The problem is complexity. As AI models get smarter, they require exponentially more powerful hardware. Designing these chips by hand is becoming slower and incredibly expensive. It is a classic bottleneck.
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