The co-founders of startup Ricursive Intelligence seemed destined to be co-founders.
Anna Goldie, CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, are so well-known in the AI community that they were among those AI engineers who “got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us,” Goldie told TechCrunch, chuckling. (They didn’t take the offers.) The pair worked at Google Brain together and were early employees at Anthropic.
They earned acclaim at Google by creating the Alpha Chip — an AI tool that could generate solid chip layouts in hours — a process that normally takes human designers a year or more. The tool helped design three generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units.
That pedigree explains why, just four months after launching Ricursive, they last month announced a $300 million Series A round at a $4 billion valuation led by Lightspeed, just a couple of months after raising a $35 million seed round led by Sequoia.
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’re 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’s target customers.
“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,” Mirhoseini told TechCrunch.
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. “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,” Goldie recounted.
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