Azalia Mirhoseini is an Iranian-born AI researcher, Stanford professor, and co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence - a frontier AI lab valued at $4 billion that uses AI to design better chips, which in turn train stronger AI. Best known for AlphaChip, the deep reinforcement learning system that now designs Google's TPUs and has compressed chip floorplanning from months to hours, she also co-invented the Mixture-of-Experts architecture underpinning GPT, Claude, and Gemini. With 20,000+ citations and a $335M-funded startup launched in under four months, she is closing the recursive loop between artificial intelligence and the hardware it runs on.
On March 31, 2026, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history — $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anchored by Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), with continued participation from Microsoft and a sweeping syndicate of global institutions, the round dwarfs every prior private tech raise and cements OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup by a wide margin. The company is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, counting 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, and is widely expected to pursue an IPO.