In Brief

Ricursive Intelligence, a startup building an AI system to design and automatically improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company said Monday the round was led by Lightspeed.

Ricursive says the system will be able to create its own silicon substrate layer and speed up AI chip improvements. Rinse and repeat to get to AGI, the founders say.

The Series A comes just two months since the company formally launched with a seed investment led by Sequoia. It has raised $335 million total, reports The New York Times.

Ricursive was founded by former Google researchers CEO Anna Goldie and CTO Azalia Mirhoseini. Their work on a novel reinforcement learning method for designing chip layouts, called AlphaChip, has been used in four generations of Google’s TPU chip, the startup says.

DST Global, Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, and Radical AI are also investors.

Ricursive is not to be confused with the similarly named startup Recursive, reportedly founded by well-known natural language processing neural networks researcher Richard Socher. That Recursive is also in talks to raise a giant round at a $4 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last week. And it is also working on AI systems that improve themselves.

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

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