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

Recursive Intelligence, a startup building AI systems to automatically design and improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company said there this round led by Lightspeed.

Recursive says the system will be able to create its own silicon substrate layers and speed up AI chip improvements. Rinse and repeat to get to AGI, the the founder said.

Series A is just two months since the company officially launched with a seed investment led by Sequoia. Having raised a total of $335 million, the New York Times reports.

Recursive was founded by former Google researcher CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini. His work on novel reinforcement learning methods for designing chip layouts, called AlphaChiphas been used in four generations of Google’s TPU chip, the startup said.

DST Global, NVIDIA venture capital NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures and Radical AI are also investors.

Recursive is not to be confused with the similarly named startup Recursive, which was reportedly founded by well-known natural language processing neural network researcher Richard Socher. Recursive is also in talks to raise a giant round worth $4 billion, Bloomberg reported last week. And also working on self-improving AI systems.

And these two are not the only new startups working on the concept. As TechCrunch previously reportedNaveen Rao’s new AI hardware startup, called Unconventional AI, is also working on smart substrates. In December it raised a seed round of $475 million at a value of $4.5 billion led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC.