A new AI startup founded by two well known engineers has raised $335M in just 4 months, reaching a $4B valuation. Ricursive Intelligence was launched by Anna Goldie, CEO and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, who previously worked together at Google Brain and were early employees at Anthropic. Goldie said they were among AI engineers who “got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us,” but they chose not to accept. Last month, Ricursive announced a $300M Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, just months after raising a $35M seed round led by Sequoia Capital.
The founders first crossed paths at Stanford University and later built their careers in sync. “We started at Google Brain on the same day. We left Google Brain on the same day. We joined Anthropic on the same day. We left Anthropic on the same day. We rejoined Google on the same day and then we left Google again on the same day. Then we started this company together on the same day,” Goldie said. At Google, they created Alpha Chip, an AI system that designed chip layouts in about 6 hours, compared to the 1 year or more it can take human engineers. The tool helped design 3 generations of Google Tensor Processing Units. Their work gained attention and also controversy in 2022 after a colleague tried to discredit the project.
Ricursive is building AI tools to design chips, not manufacture them. This sets it apart from many AI chip startups. It is not competing with Nvidia and in fact Nvidia is an investor. Other major chip makers such as AMD and Intel are potential customers. “We want to enable any chip, like a custom chip or a more traditional chip, any kind of chip, to be built in an automated and very accelerated way. We’re using AI to do that,” Mirhoseini said. Their system uses reward signals to improve chip layouts and will learn across different chips, becoming smarter with each design. The platform will also use LLMs and manage tasks from component placement to design verification.
The founders believe faster chip design can accelerate AI progress. “Chips are the fuel for AI,” Goldie said. They argue that smarter chip design could even deliver nearly 10x improvement in performance per total cost of ownership. While they have not named customers, they say every major chip maker has shown interest. Their long term vision includes enabling AI systems to design better chips for future AI models, while also improving hardware efficiency and reducing resource consumption.
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