TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Ricursive Intelligence founders on AI-designed chips

Ricursive Intelligence co-founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini will appear at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in a session titled “When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware.” The conference runs October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, with more than 200 sessions across six industry stages.

A startup teaching AI to design chips

Ricursive Intelligence is building AI systems that can design chips, learn from the process and improve the next design. Designing a single chip can take two to three years today, and the company wants to cut that cycle to weeks. Its tools are meant to cover the work from component placement to design verification, learning across different chips so experience with one project informs the next.

The founders describe a loop: AI helps design better hardware, better hardware supports more powerful AI, and those systems then help develop what comes next.

From AlphaChip to a $4 billion startup

Before founding Ricursive, Goldie and Mirhoseini co-led AlphaChip at Google, an AI system that generated chip layouts in hours rather than the far longer process human designers required. Their work helped design several generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units. The pair also co-founded Google’s ML for Systems team; both were early employees at Anthropic and senior staff research scientists at Google DeepMind.

Goldie is Ricursive’s founder and CEO and holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford; MIT Technology Review named her one of its 35 Innovators Under 35. Mirhoseini, founder and CTO, is an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford and founder of its Scaling Intelligence Lab. Ricursive launched in late 2025 and raised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation within four months, including a $300 million Series A. Nvidia is among its investors.

Why the hardware cycle matters

AI models have advanced rapidly, but the hardware they run on follows a much slower development cycle. Ricursive is betting that AI can narrow that gap, and that faster chip design opens the door to new architectures and more capable, efficient AI. Goldie and Mirhoseini will make the case on the Disrupt Stage, at an event expected to draw more than 10,000 founders, investors and operators, along with 250+ speakers and 300+ exhibiting startups.