Ricursive Intelligence Raises $300 Million Series A at $4 Billion Valuation to Accelerate AI-Driven Semiconductor Design

Lightspeed Venture Partners leads round less than two months after the company's launch, alongside DST Global, NVentures, Radical, Felicis, 49 Palms, Sequoia, and others.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier AI lab founded by the co-creators of AlphaChip, today announced a $300 million Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a $4 billion post-money valuation. The round follows Ricursive's public launch less than two months earlier and includes participation from DST Global, NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, Radical AI, and Sequoia Capital.

Ricursive Intelligence was founded by Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, whose pioneering work on AlphaChip was instrumental in establishing AI-driven chip design and has since been adopted across four generations of TPU and deployed by external semiconductor companies. Ricursive is building a next-generation platform that closes the recursive feedback loop between AI models and the chips that power them, addressing what has become the primary bottleneck to AI progress: the slow, capital-intensive process of semiconductor design.

The new funding will be used to scale Ricursive's world-class research and engineering team and significantly expand its compute infrastructure, enabling faster iteration across the full semiconductor design stack.

"The pace of AI progress is dictated by hardware," said Dr. Anna Goldie, co-founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence. "Ricursive's mission is to radically accelerate chip design, and ultimately to use AI to design its own silicon substrate. This funding will allow us to grow our world-class team and build the infrastructure necessary to meet this challenge." 

"To advance the state of the art in AI, we must operate at the Pareto frontier of intelligence and computational efficiency," said Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, co-founder and CTO of Ricursive Intelligence. "Ricursive is building toward a future where rapid AI and hardware co-evolution becomes reality, unlocking significant gains in performance and energy efficiency. Together with our exceptional team, we are excited to drive this paradigm shift."

Ricursive's rapid follow-on financing reflects strong conviction from both AI and semiconductor industry leaders in the company's world-class team, technical approach, and long-term vision.

"Ricursive is addressing what may be the most critical bottleneck facing the AI industry today: the gap between AI advancement and semiconductor capability," said Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "Anna and Azalia pioneered a new approach to chip design with AlphaChip. At Ricursive, they're building a full-stack platform that creates a continuous improvement cycle between AI models and the hardware that powers them. The caliber of the founding team, the ambition of what they're building, combined with the technical progress they've already achieved, made this a clear investment for us. We're thrilled to be partnering with Ricursive Intelligence."

Since its launch, Ricursive has attracted top-tier researchers and engineers across AI, systems, and silicon design from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Apple, and Cadence, positioning the company as a foundational player at the intersection of artificial intelligence and compute infrastructure.

About Ricursive Intelligence 
Ricursive Intelligence is a frontier AI lab building the compute foundation for the next generation of AI. Founded by Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, the scientists who pioneered AI for chip design and co-created AlphaChip, Ricursive Intelligence applies AI and distributed computing to drastically compress semiconductor development timelines. The company's platform creates a recursive self-improvement cycle where AI designs silicon that powers the next generation of AI. By removing the hardware bottleneck that has held back AI progress, Ricursive Intelligence is forging a path toward artificial superintelligence and unlocking a Cambrian explosion of custom chips. Visit ricursive.com to learn more.

About Lightspeed: 
Lightspeed is a global, multi-stage, venture capital firm managing over $40B in assets. Since its founding in 2000, Lightspeed has been the first investor and an early backer of some of the most innovative companies in the world including Abridge, Anthropic, Castelion, Glean, Mistral, Navan, Netskope, Rubrik, Snap, Wiz, and more. Visit lsvp.com to learn more.

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SOURCE Ricursive Intelligence