Socher's Recursive raises $650M for self-improving AI push

Recursive Superintelligence has fewer than 30 employees and no released product. It has raised $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation from GV, Greycroft, Nvidia and AMD Ventures.

The New York Times's Cade Metz groups the company with a small bench of labs now building AI systems designed to rewrite and improve themselves. Recursive was co-founded by Richard Socher, formerly of Salesforce, alongside Tim Rocktäschel, Jeff Clune, Josh Tobin and Tim Shi, drawn from OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, Uber AI and Salesforce.

'Our main focus is to build truly recursive, self-improving superintelligence at scale,' Socher told TechCrunch when the round was announced, saying 'the entire process of ideation, implementation, and validation of research ideas would be automatic.'

The other flag on the map is Inherent, a London lab that emerged from stealth in May with a $50 million seed co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures. Its co-founders Tantum Collins, Edward Hughes and Louis Kirsch came out of DeepMind. The lab has since released Faraday, an agent it says beat Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 at replicating published research on Inherent's own Replica benchmark, while running on Qwen 3.6, a 27-billion-parameter open model.

Recursive's raise landed with no published technical benchmarks or peer-reviewed results disclosed. Our prior coverage tracked the round in May.