Recursively self-improving AI to automate scientific discovery — starting with AI that improves AI
AI📍 San Francisco, CA & London, UKFounded 2025
Current Valuation
$4.7B
as of 2026-Q1
UNICORN
Recursive (Recursive Superintelligence) is an AI research lab building recursively self-improving AI via open-ended algorithms, focused first on 'AI that improves AI' before extending the playbook to other sciences. It emerged from stealth in January 2026 with a $650M round at a $4.65B post-money valuation, co-led by GV and Greycroft with participation from Nvidia and AMD Ventures. It has eight co-founders — publicly prominent among them CEO Richard Socher (former Salesforce chief scientist, You.com founder), Jeff Clune (founder of Uber AI Labs; DeepMind/OpenAI), and Tim Rocktäschel (UCL professor, ex-Google DeepMind) — and offices in San Francisco and London. In June 2026 it published state-of-the-art results from its automated research system on NanoChat, NanoGPT Speedrun, and NVIDIA's SOL-ExecBench.
Step-up compares disclosed post-money valuations. Round / post-money is a financing-size ratio, not an ownership or dilution estimate.
Funding History
Round
Amount
Date
Lead Investor
Post-Money
Seed (stealth emergence)
$650M
Jan 2026
GV & Greycroft
$4.7B
Vertical Intelligence — AI / ML
No verified Hugging Face organization found for Recursive — no attributable open-model footprint. Closed-weights labs are common; this is a distribution signal, not a capability judgment.
Checked huggingface.co as of 2026-08-19. Re-checked weekly.
Talent Signal
No public careers page or job board could be found for Recursive as of 2026-08-17. That itself is a datapoint: no open external hiring surface.
Checked the company site and major hosted job boards. Re-checked monthly.
Founders & Key People
Richard SocherJeff CluneTim Rocktäschel
Investors
GV · Greycroft · Nvidia · AMD Ventures
Products
Automated AI research system (recursive self-improvement engine)
Competitors
OpenAI · Anthropic · Google DeepMind · Safe Superintelligence · Sakana AI
AISuperintelligenceRecursive Self-ImprovementAI Research LabStealth Exit 2026
Private-company numbers are not real-time. Reflects publicly disclosed valuations from press releases, news reports, and tender offers as of 2026-Q1. Refreshed quarterly.