Ricursive Intelligence, an intriguing deep tech startup co-founded by Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, just raised a mind-boggling $300 million in Series A funding. This investment has raised the company’s valuation to a jaw-dropping $4 billion. This new achievement comes a mere four months after the company closed their important initial $35 million seed round, which is the largest such round, led by Sequoia. Lightspeed led the Series A round, a critical step for the fledgling company. Such funding provides the most direct position for them to make transformative chip design happen.
Ricursive officially went live even as Goldie and Mirhoseini were departing Anthropic. Unlike semiconductor firms that design and fabricate chips, the firm specializes in building artificial intelligence tools that augment chip design. This innovative effort is designed to leverage large language models (LLMs) to expedite the traditionally complex and time-intensive chip-design process. This step has been one of the largest hurdles in moving artificial intelligence innovations forward.
Prior to joining NRDC, Goldie earned a PhD from Stanford. She and Mirhoseini, who was a former computer science teacher at the same university, initially encountered each other when they were both at Stanford. Together, their shared experiences at Google Brain and Anthropic have anchored Ricursive’s ambitious long-term vision.
The Ricursive platform itself is a single, unified design environment that supports all stages of chip design, from placing components on a chip to verifying a design’s integrity. Mirhoseini’s aim with this tool is to increase productivity in the chip design process. It further increases flexibility for making a greater variety of custom and classic chip varieties.
“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.” – Anna Goldie
This ambitious project is rooted in deep faith. To be truly impactful, future AI breakthroughs require a foundation of powerful, efficient, and flexible chip designs. Goldie emphasizes this perspective, stating:
“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
The founders make the bold assertion that their AI-based tool has already demonstrated its value. It has already made significant contributions to the design of three generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units. This experience provides the foundation for their confidence in Ricursive’s potential to shake up the industry. As Mirhoseini notes, the current chip-design process is restrictive and hinders rapid AI development:
“I think by building more powerful chips, that’s the best way to advance that frontier.” – Anna Goldie
Ricursive leverages artificial intelligence to disrupt and accelerate the chip design process. They dream of a future where models and chips co-evolve, dramatically improving paradigm-shifting performance metrics.
“The lengthy chip-design process is constraining how quickly AI can advance.” – Azalia Mirhoseini
Goldie highlights the potential for dramatic improvements in efficiency through their innovative technology:
“We think we can also enable this fast co-evolution of the models and the chips that basically power them.” – Azalia Mirhoseini
Ricursive has taken on its initial development efforts as a platform. It has given rise to tremendous optimism that it will contribute to a breakthrough on artificial general intelligence (AGI). Their founders are confident that their AI-driven approach will deliver the transformative solutions needed to overcome the limitations of chip design today.
“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
Goldie recounts the unexpected attention they received during their previous roles:
Reflecting on their journey and the challenges ahead, Goldie recounts the unexpected attention they received during their previous roles:
“We got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us.” – Anna Goldie