Recursive Intelligence raises $300M in funding to accelerate AI-driven chip design.

Recursive Intelligence Inc., a startup founded by former Google researchers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, has raised $300 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation. The Series A round was led by Lightspeed venture capital, joined by Nvidia Corp.'s NVentures, DST Global, Felicis Ventures and several others. The company was launched less than two months before this funding announcement.

The founders created AlphaChip in 2020, an AI system that Google uses to speed up internal chip projects. The software helped Google engineers accelerate the development of several TPU accelerators. Recursive now plans to train AI models with a similar purpose: speeding up the development of AI accelerators. Currently, designing a cutting-edge data center processor can take several years, but AlphaChip can design some semiconductor components in under six hours.

Chip design involves extraordinary complexity. The most advanced processors on the market include well over 100 billion transistors, and engineers must determine where each transistor should be placed on the host chip, how it should be connected to the other transistors and how much power it should receive. There are trillions of potential combinations, which makes it difficult to find the best design. Beyond performance, processors must stay below certain heat, power consumption and surface area thresholds, and chip projects usually have a long list of more granular requirements—for example, engineers may wish to limit a processor's wirelength, the aggregate length of the tiny networking wires that link together its circuits. Reducing a chip's wirelength lowers power consumption and helps decrease the occurrence of manufacturing errors.

AI can speed up development by quickly evaluating a large number of potential chip layouts, work that would be time-consuming to perform manually. Recursive will use the proceeds from its Series A round to hire more engineers and researchers and to upgrade the infrastructure it uses to train AI models.

The company faces competition from established chip design software providers such as Synopsys Inc. and Cadence Design Systems Inc., both of which provide AI features that automate manual aspects of the chip development process. The market may become even more crowded over time. Last year, OpenAI Group PBC revealed that it's using its large language models to design a custom AI chip, and Anthropic PBC's Cloud Claude is also capable of automating certain electrical engineering tasks.