How Ricursive Intelligence raised $335M at a $4B valuation in 4 months | TechCrunch

"The co-founders of startup Ricursive Intelligence seemed destined to be co-founders. Anna Goldie, CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, are so well-known in the AI community that they were among those AI engineers who "got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us," Goldie told TechCrunch, chuckling. (They didn't take the offers.) The pair worked at Google Brain together and were early employees at Anthropic."

"They earned acclaim at Google by creating the Alpha Chip - an AI tool that could generate solid chip layouts in hours - a process that normally takes human designers a year or more. The tool helped design three generations of Google's Tensor Processing Units. That pedigree explains why, just four months after launching Ricursive, they last month announced a $300 million Series A round at a $4 billion valuation led by Lightspeed, just a couple of months after raising a $35 million seed round led by Sequoia."

""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 told TechCrunch."

Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini co-founded Ricursive Intelligence after parallel careers at Google Brain and Anthropic. They developed the Alpha Chip at Google, an AI tool that generates chip layouts in hours, accelerating processes that normally take human designers a year and informing three generations of Google's Tensor Processing Units. Ricursive builds AI software to automate and accelerate chip design, targeting chip manufacturers rather than producing chips. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are target customers and investors. Ricursive raised a $35 million seed round led by Sequoia and a $300 million Series A led by Lightspeed at a $4 billion valuation.

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