Ricursive Intelligence, a new breakout company in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), just announced an astounding $335 million in funding. This investment will help them grow their unique platform that focuses on designing chips vs manufacturing them. Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, both former Googlers, started Ricursive. They aim to change the chip design paradigm by applying AI development tools that automate challenge-rich workflows. The new $300 million round of funding more than doubled the company’s valuation to $4 billion in just four months. It included a $300 million Series A round, led by Lightspeed, and a $35 million seed round with Sequoia.
Ricursive’s platform is intended to bring chip design to the next level with the help of large language models (LLMs). This technology will guide every step of the design, from placement of functional blocks through verification of the design. The Alpha Chip project is perhaps Ricursive’s most ambitious experiment, showcasing its power to create a complex, high-quality layout from scratch in under six hours. This remarkable achievement speaks to the strength of their AI-powered approach.
Their founding duo, Goldie and Mirhoseini, are both heavyweights in the field on AI research. Both received their PhDs from Stanford University. They had worked together for many years before at Google, where they co-created three generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Their experience has already given them immense credibility within the AI community, enabling Ricursive to land high-profile development partners and collaborators.
“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,” – Azalia Mirhoseini
To that end, Ricursive’s generative platform is a quantum leap in the efficiency and quality of chip design. The AI agent on the platform is learning from its experiences. With every iterative cycle of a completed design, it continually recalibrates the parameters of its deep neural network to improve its own accuracy and efficiency. Harnessing this iterative learning process can quickly propel design quality leaps and bounds forward.
“The cool thing about this approach was that it actually learns from experience,” – Anna Goldie
In addition, the founders are very much on the cutting edge of improving the efficiency of that hardware. They intend to be the leading player in the race towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). As chip technology has been making incredible strides, Ricursive thinks that the future performance of chips themselves is crucial in pushing the technology behind AI forward.
“Chips are the fuel for AI. I think by building more powerful chips, that’s the best way to advance that frontier,” – Anna Goldie
Goldie and Mirhoseini’s radical act of exiting Anthropic on that day together is some of that magic. Their attention is now squarely on the pioneering work they’re doing at Ricursive. Their decision is a powerful signal of their commitment to leading the charge in reshaping the future of chip design through AI innovation.
“We could design a computer architecture that’s uniquely suited to that model, and we could achieve almost a 10x improvement in performance per total cost of ownership,” – Anna Goldie
With Ricursive’s innovative platform, the founders see a future where chips can get designed quickly and more efficiently. This short-path capability might accelerate the rapid co-evolution of models and chips that underlie complex AI systems.
“We think we can also enable this fast co-evolution of the models and the chips that basically power them,” – Azalia Mirhoseini
Ricursive Intelligence has moved quickly to develop its technology and attract investment. It is at the front of a big-wave transformation rocking the semiconductor design and manufacturing world. The Turing Space company uses a business and technological innovative strategy to speed up the chip design process. This strategy is intended to improve the overall narrative about artificial intelligence and its uses.