Recursive Intelligence raises $300M Series A at $4B for AI-designed chips

Ricursive announced the round on Jan. 26, 2026. That was less than two months after its Dec. 2, 2025 debut, when it disclosed a $35 million seed led by Sequoia at a $750 million valuation. Lightspeed led the Series A. DST Global, Nvidia's NVentures, Felicis, 49 Palms, Radical and Sequoia also took part. The company plans to hire more researchers and engineers and expand the compute it uses to train its models.

Founders Anna Goldie (CEO) and Azalia Mirhoseini (CTO) co-created AlphaChip at Google. That reinforcement learning method for chip layout has reportedly been used across four generations of Google's TPUs. Ricursive is pitching a broader system that designs chips end to end and feeds improvements back into the models. It faces incumbents Synopsys and Cadence, which already sell AI features that automate parts of chip development.

For AI founders, the round shows investors will pay a steep premium for teams that attack the hardware bottleneck, not just the model layer. If automated design shortens chip cycles, custom silicon could become realistic for smaller players. Nvidia's venture arm on the cap table is worth noting. The coverage reviewed does not say when customers can use the product.