Ricursive Intelligence Inc., a startup that plans to use artificial intelligence to speed up chip development, has raised $300 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation.

Lightspeed led the Series A investment. Recursive disclosed in its funding announcement today that the venture capital firm was joined by Nvidia Corp.’s NVentures, DST Global, Felicis Ventures and several others.

The raise comes less than two months after Ricursive was launched by former Google LLC researchers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini. In 2020, the duo co-created AlphaChip, an AI system that the search giant uses to speed up internal chip projects. The software helped Google engineers accelerate the development of several TPU accelerators.

Ricursive plans to train AI models with a similar purpose as AlphaChip: speeding up the development of AI accelerators. Currently, designing a cutting-edge data center processor can take several years. AlphaChip can design some semiconductor components in under six hours.

The most advanced processors on the market include well over 100 billion transistors. 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.

AI can speed up development by quickly evaluating a large number of potential chip layouts. Doing so manually is time-consuming partly because chip performance is not the only factor that engineers must consider. Processors must stay below certain heat, power consumption and surface area thresholds.

Chip projects usually also 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.

Ricursive will use the proceeds from its Series A round to hire more engineers and researchers. Additionally, it will upgrade the infrastructure that 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 companies provide AI features that automate manual aspects of the chip development process. Those features can also speed up subsequent engineering tasks such as testing a newly created design for manufacturability issues.

The AI-powered chip design software market could 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. Anthropic PBC’s Cloud Claude is also capable of automating certain electrical engineering tasks.

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