AI chip design company Ricursive Intelligence has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round, resulting in a $4 billion valuation for the company.

The round was led by Lightspeed and also saw participation from DST Global, Felicis Ventures, 49 Palms Ventures, Radical AI, Sequoia Capital, and NVentures – Nvidia’s venture capital arm.

Established late last year by former Google DeepMind AlphaChip founders Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini, the company is developing a platform that aims to close the “recursive feedback loop between AI models and the chips that power them” and address the “capital-intensive process of semiconductor design” that Ricursive says has become a primary bottleneck.

The startup has said the new funding will be used to scale up its research and engineering teams, and “significantly” expand its compute infrastructure to support faster semiconductor design across the entire stack.

"The pace of AI progress is dictated by hardware," said Goldie, co-founder and CEO of Ricursive. "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."

Mirhoseini, the company’s co-founder and CTO, added: "To advance the state of the art in AI, we must operate at the Pareto frontier of intelligence and computational efficiency. 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."