A London AI firm has emerged from stealth with a mammoth £480 million funding round which values it around £3.5 billion.
Recursive Superintelligence, founded in 2025, is a team of former research leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Salesforce AI and Uber AI.
The secretive company, which has no associated members on LinkedIn, confirmed the funding deal on the social media platform. It said the round was led by GV (Google Ventures) and Greycroft, with major participation from AMD Ventures and NVIDIA.
It aims to create AI that conducts experiments on how to safely improve itself via an open-ended process of automated scientific discovery. “This will likely be the fastest path to superintelligence,” it stated.
“The excitement for what we are building has been incredible. The playbook we create will soon allow us to revolutionise every scientific discipline.
“The potential benefits for humanity of safely creating such an advance cannot be overstated.
“Throughout, we will prioritise safety. We must make sure the system helps humanity flourish by maximising the benefits while reducing risks.”
Recursive, which also has an office in San Francisco, has a team of more than 25 people which it says are “pioneers in many areas that are critical to creating recursive self-improvement”.
“We have helped lead major advances in open-ended algorithms, quality diversity algorithms, AI-generating algorithms, self-improving coding agents, automated red teaming and capability discovery, prompt engineering and automations of it, generating learning challenges and environments, foundational world models, deep learning in NLP, vision transformers, retrieval-augmented generation, and AI scientists,” it said.
“Human intelligence was created by the open-ended processes of Darwinian and cultural evolution. Both processes grow an archive of interestingly different discoveries, and each innovation builds on those that came before.
“These processes invented bodies, sight, simple reflexes, then reasoning, language, and science. They’ve taken us from the first replicating molecule to the moon. They have no ceiling and keep innovating forever.
“The science of AI involves the same open-ended process of innovation. So far, these discoveries have been produced by human scientists.
“But a clear trend in machine learning is that, as we get more compute and more data, hand-designed methods are replaced by AI-driven processes.”