The co-founders of startup Ricursive Intelligence seemed destined to be co-founders.<\/p>\n
Anna Goldie, CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, are so well-known in the AI community that they were among those AI engineers who \u201cgot those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us,\u201d Goldie told TechCrunch, chuckling. (They didn\u2019t take the offers.) The pair worked at Google Brain together and were early employees at Anthropic.<\/p>\n
They earned acclaim at Google by creating the Alpha Chip \u2014 an AI tool that could generate solid chip layouts in hours \u2014 a process that normally takes human designers a year or more. The tool helped design three generations of Google\u2019s Tensor Processing Units.<\/p>\n
That pedigree explains why, just four months after launching Ricursive, they last month announced a $300 million Series A round<\/a> at a $4 billion valuation led by Lightspeed, just a couple of months after raising a $35 million seed round led by Sequoia.<\/p>\n Ricursive is building AI tools that design chips, not the chips themselves. That makes them fundamentally different from nearly every other AI chip startup: they\u2019re not a wannabe Nvidia competitor. In fact, Nvidia is an investor. The GPU giant, along with AMD, Intel, and every other chip maker, are the startup\u2019s target customers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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\u2019re using AI to do that,\u201d Mirhoseini told TechCrunch.\u00a0<\/p>\n Their paths first crossed at Stanford, where Goldie earned her PhD as Mirhoseini taught computer science classes. Since then, their careers have been in lockstep. \u201cWe 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,\u201d Goldie recounted.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA During their time at Google, the colleagues were so close they even worked out together, both enjoying circuit training. The pun wasn\u2019t lost on Jeff Dean, the famed Google engineer who was their collaborator. He nicknamed their Alpha Chip project \u201cchip circuit training\u201d \u2014 a play on their shared workout routine. Internally, the pair also got a nickname: A&A.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Alpha Chip earned them industry notice, but it also attracted controversy. In 2022, one of their colleagues at Google was fired, Wired reported<\/a>, after he spent years trying to discredit A&A and their chip work, even though that work was used to help produce some of Google\u2019s most important, bet-the-business AI chips<\/a>.<\/p>\n Their Alpha Chip project at Google Brain proved the concept that would become Ricursive \u2014 using AI to dramatically accelerate chip design.<\/p>\n Designing chips is hard<\/p>\n The issue is, computer chips have millions to billions of logic gate components integrated on their silicon wafer. Human designers can spend a year or more placing those components on the chip to ensure performance, good power utilization and any other design needs. Digitally determining the placement of such infinitesimally small components with precision is, as you might expect, hard.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alpha Chip \u201ccould generate a very high-quality layout in, like, six hours. And the cool thing about this approach was that it actually learns from experience,\u201d Goldie said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The premise of their AI chip design work is to use \u201ca reward signal\u201d that rates how good the design is. The agent then takes that rating to \u201cupdate the parameters of its deep neural network to get better,\u201d Goldie said. After completing thousands of designs, the agent got really good. It also got faster as it learned, the founders say.<\/p>\n Ricursive\u2019s platform will take the concept further. The AI chip designer they are building will \u201clearn across different chips,\u201d Goldie said. So each chip it designs should help it become a better designer for every next chip. <\/p>\n Ricursive\u2019s platform also makes use of LLMs and will handle everything from component placement through design verification. Any company that makes electronics and needs chips is their target customer.<\/p>\n If their platform proves itself, as it seems likely to do, Ricursive could play a role in the moonshot goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Indeed, their ultimate vision is designing AI chips, meaning the AI will essentially design its own computer brains.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cChips are the fuel for AI,\u201d Goldie said. \u201cI think by building more powerful chips, that\u2019s the best way to advance that frontier.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Mirhoseini adds that the lengthy chip-design process is constraining how quickly AI can advance. \u201cWe think we can also enable this fast co-evolution of the models and the chips that basically power them,\u201d she said. So AI can grow smarter faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n If the thought of AI designing its own brains at ever increasing speeds brings visions of Skynet and the Terminator to mind, the founders point out that there\u2019s a more positive, immediate and, they think, more likely benefit: hardware efficiency.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n