Recursive raises $650M Series A at $4.65B led by GV and Greycroft

The company, formally Recursive Superintelligence, came out of stealth on May 13. Nvidia and AMD Ventures took part alongside the two lead investors. The Financial Times had put the raise above $500 million in April, and the final figure came in higher at $650 million. Founded in 2025, it is run by Richard Socher, formerly of Salesforce, and Tim Rocktäschel, formerly of Google DeepMind. Other founders come from OpenAI, Meta AI and Uber AI. It has more than 25 staff across San Francisco and London. Its roadmap starts with a system meant to automate AI research itself, followed by a "Level 1" autonomous training system. A public launch was targeted for mid-2026, and part of the money goes toward large-scale compute. The pitch is that the next gains come from automating the research process, not from simply scaling models. Rivals building self-improving systems now face a lab with a large war chest and strategic chip-vendor backing. For founders, the signal is about who funds compute. Chipmakers are investing in labs that will buy their hardware, which can make compute access part of a financing package. A team of about 25 raising at this scale also shows that investors still price senior research pedigree above headcount or revenue.