A London-based startup called Recursive Superintelligence has raised at least $500 million in a funding round led by GV (Google's venture capital arm, formerly Google Ventures), with Nvidia also participating. The pre-money valuation was $4 billion, and the round was reportedly oversubscribed—it could ultimately close at $1 billion.
https://twitter.com/FT/status/2045842784033059114
Here's the kicker: the company was only registered in London late last year, has about 20 employees, and hasn't even officially launched yet.
The all-star founding team
The founders are a who's-who of AI research talent poached from the biggest labs. Richard Socher was previously chief scientist at Salesforce. Tim Rocktäschel is an AI professor at University College London and was until recently a principal scientist at DeepMind, where he worked on the Genie interactive world model. Josh Tobin, Jeff Clune, and Tim Shi hail from OpenAI, with other team members coming from Google and Meta.
The holy grail: AI that teaches itself
The company's goal is to build AI systems that can continuously improve themselves without human intervention. Today's large language models are essentially frozen once training is complete; to make them better, engineers have to gather new data and run another training cycle. Self-improvement means the model generates its own data and updates its own parameters, cutting humans out of the loop entirely.
This has been a long-term goal in AI research, but there's no public evidence yet that such a system can run stably over the long term. It's the kind of moonshot that attracts massive funding—and massive skepticism.
The AI funding frenzy continues
This comes during a historic peak for startup funding. In the first quarter of this year, global startup investment hit $300 billion, with OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo taking the lion's share, according to Crunchbase data. Recursive is part of a recent wave of new AI labs spinning out from OpenAI, Google, and Meta, joining others like Thinking Machines Lab, Safe Superintelligence, Ineffable Intelligence, and Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. This surge in activity mirrors the broader trend highlighted in the latest Forbes AI 50 list, where newcomers are beginning to challenge the dominance of established giants.