AI chip startup Recursive hits $4B valuation two months after launch

Recursive Intelligence, a startup building AI systems to design and modify AI chips, has raised $300 million in a $4 billion valuation. The company said on Monday the cycle was led and Lightspeed.

Recursive says the machine will be able to make its own silicon part and speed up the evolution of the AI ​​chip. Wash and repeat to get to AGI, the founders say.

The Series A comes just two months after the company was founded and seeded by Sequoia. It has raised $335 million, said the New York Times.

Recursive was founded by former CEO of Google researchers Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini. Their work on a reinforcement learning approach to chip design, called AlphaChipit has been used in four generations of Google’s TPU chip, the developers say.

DST Global, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures and Radical AI also invested.

Recursive should not be confused with the same name called Startup Recursive, which is said to have been founded by the famous neural network researcher Richard Socher. Recursive is also in talks to raise the giant for $4 billion, Bloomberg said last week. And it’s also working on a self-improving AI system.

And these two aren’t the only startups working on the concept. As TechCrunch previously reportedNaveen Rao’s new AI tools startup, called Unconventional AI, is also working in the field of intelligence. In December it raised $475 million in seed funding at a cost of $4.5 billion led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC.