In May 2026, AI startup Recursive Superintelligence (RSI), co‑founded by former Meta FAIR research director Yuandong Tian, emerged from stealth and announced the completion of a Series A round exceeding $650 million, with a post‑money valuation of $4.65 billion. The round was co‑led by GV (Google’s venture arm) and Greycroft, with industry investors including NVIDIA and AMD Ventures participating. The company focuses on “recursive self‑improvement” (Recursive Self‑Improvement), aiming to enable AI systems to autonomously run experiments, improve their own code and algorithms, and achieve continuous evolution — a path viewed as one of the routes toward superintelligence.

Details: Top Scientist Lineup and Core Vision

RSI was founded by eight scientists from leading AI laboratories worldwide, with an initial team of fewer than 30 people. The CEO is Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce and founder of You.com. Co‑founders include Yuandong Tian (former Meta FAIR research director), Tim Rocktäschel (formerly at DeepMind), Alexey Dosovitskiy (one of the core authors of Vision Transformer), Josh Tobin (former OpenAI), Caiming Xiong (formerly Salesforce), Jeff Clune, Tim Shi and others. Team members’ backgrounds span OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, Salesforce and other institutions, representing very high talent density.

The company’s core contention is that the marginal returns of current large models driven by scale (more data, parameters and compute) are diminishing, and that a true breakthrough lies in making AI itself an “AI researcher” — capable of autonomously designing experiments, optimizing training processes, improving model architectures, and achieving open‑ended self‑evolution in a safe and controllable way. Yuandong Tian and others have long worked on reinforcement learning, model efficiency, neural network understanding and open‑source implementations (such as ELF OpenGo); their research backgrounds align closely with the company’s direction.

The financing came just months after the company’s founding and before any product launch, highlighting capital’s strong endorsement of this cutting‑edge approach. NVIDIA and AMD’s participation also signals long‑term confidence in the compute demand for related work.

Profiles of the Eight Co‑founders

1. Richard Socher (CEO)