Tech
How Ricursive Intelligence raised $335M at a $4B valuation in 4 months
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.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
During their time at Google, the colleagues were so close they even worked out together, both enjoying circuit training. The pun wasn’t lost on Jeff Dean, the famed Google engineer who was their collaborator. He nicknamed their Alpha Chip project “chip circuit training” — a play on their shared workout routine. Internally, the pair also got a nickname: A&A.
The Alpha Chip earned them industry notice, but it also attracted controversy. In 2022, one of their colleagues at Google was fired, Wired reported, after he spent years trying to discredit A&A and their chip work, even though that work was used to help produce some of Google’s most important, bet-the-business AI chips.
Their Alpha Chip project at Google Brain proved the concept that would become Ricursive — using AI to dramatically accelerate chip design.
Designing chips is hard
The issue is, computer chips have millions to billions of logic gate components integrated on their silicon wafer. Human designers can spend a year or more placing those components on the chip to ensure performance, good power utilization and any other design needs. Digitally determining the placement of such infinitesimally small components with precision is, as you might expect, hard.
Alpha Chip “could generate a very high-quality layout in, like, six hours. And the cool thing about this approach was that it actually learns from experience,” Goldie said.
The premise of their AI chip design work is to use “a reward signal” that rates how good the design is. The agent then takes that rating to “update the parameters of its deep neural network to get better,” Goldie said. After completing thousands of designs, the agent got really good. It also got faster as it learned, the founders say.
Ricursive’s platform will take the concept further. The AI chip designer they are building will “learn across different chips,” Goldie said. So each chip it designs should help it become a better designer for every next chip.
Ricursive’s platform also makes use of LLMs and will handle everything from component placement through design verification. Any company that makes electronics and needs chips is their target customer.
If their platform proves itself, as it seems likely to do, Ricursive could play a role in the moonshot goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Indeed, their ultimate vision is designing AI chips, meaning the AI will essentially design its own computer brains.
“Chips are the fuel for AI,” Goldie said. “I think by building more powerful chips, that’s the best way to advance that frontier.”
Mirhoseini adds that the lengthy chip-design process is constraining how quickly AI can advance. “We think we can also enable this fast co-evolution of the models and the chips that basically power them,” she said. So AI can grow smarter faster.
If the thought of AI designing its own brains at ever increasing speeds brings visions of Skynet and the Terminator to mind, the founders point out that there’s a more positive, immediate and, they think, more likely benefit: hardware efficiency.
When AI Labs can design far more efficient chips (and, eventually all the underlying hardware), their growth won’t have to consume so much of the world’s resources.
“We could design a computer architecture that’s uniquely suited to that model, and we could achieve almost a 10x improvement in performance per total cost of ownership,” Goldie said.
While the young startup won’t name its early customers, the founders say that they’ve heard from every big chip making name you can imagine. Unsurprisingly, they have their pick of their first development partners, too.
Tech
Snapchat launches creator subscriptions in the US
Social network Snapchat announced today it’s launching creator subscriptions in alpha with select people in the U.S. starting on February 23. The company noted that users will be able to buy subscriptions to creators, including Jeremiah Brown, Harry Jowsey, and Skai Jackson. This will allow users to unlock exclusive content while creating monetization opportunities for creators.
Creators can set their own monthly prices for subscription within the app, while Snap will recommend different tiers to them. The subscription will unlock subscriber-only content, priority replies to a creator’s public Stories, and ad-free consumption for that creator’s Stories.
Snap noted that this is a new way for creators to earn more money besides the existing programs.
“Expanding on existing monetization offerings like the Unified Monetization Program and the Snap Star Collab Studio, Creator Subscriptions introduce a premium layer of connection directly into how Snapchatters already engage with creators across Stories, Chat, and replies,” the company said in the blog post.
Snapchat reached 946 million daily active users, according to the company’s Q4 2025 results. The platform noted during its earnings that the number of U.S.-based users posting to Spotlight grew over 47% year-over-year. The company also spun out hardware to a new entity called Specs last month.
The company added that it plans to expand the program to Snap Stars in Canada, the U.K., and France in the coming weeks.
Rival company Meta also allows creators to offer subscriptions on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which gives users access to exclusive content and badges.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
Tech
Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to back its cloud ambitions
Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI app deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.
Mistral has been primarily known for developing large language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025, it had announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering which it now hopes Koyeb will accelerate.
Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure — a concept known as serverless. This approach gained relevance as AI grew more demanding, also inspiring the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.
Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users deploy models from Mistral and others. In a blog post, Koyeb said its platform will continue operating. But its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on clients’ own hardware (on premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and help scale AI inference — the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses — according to a press release from Mistral.
As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), are set to join the engineering team of Mistral, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to transition into a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the coming months.
“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has been ramping up its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to U.S. infrastructure.
Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date, including a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC firm Serena, whose principal Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the firm, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she told TechCrunch.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
In part thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to its focus on helping enterprises unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will be focused on enterprise clients going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier.
Mistral didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal, and it is unknown whether other acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is hiring for infrastructure and other roles, pitching the company to prospective employees as an organization that is “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”
Tech
Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic has released a new version of its midsized Sonnet model, keeping pace with the company’s four-month update cycle. In a post announcing the new model, Anthropic emphasized improvements in coding, instruction-following, and computer use.
Sonnet 4.6 will be the default model for Free and Pro plan users.
The beta release of Sonnet 4.6 will include a context window of 1 million tokens, twice the size of the largest window previously available for Sonnet. Anthropic described the new context window as “enough to hold entire codebases, lengthy contracts, or dozens of research papers in a single request.”
The release comes just two weeks after the launch of Opus 4.6, with an updated Haiku model likely to follow in the coming weeks.
The launch comes with a new set of record benchmark scores, including OS World for computer use and SWE-Bench for software engineering. But perhaps the most impressive is its 60.4% score on ARC-AGI-2, meant to measure skills specific to human intelligence. The score puts Sonnet 4.6 above most comparable models, although it still trails models like Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Deep Think, and one refined version of GPT 5.2.
NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for February 18, 2026
Yale head coach Tony Reno steps down, cites health concerns
