The Compute 100: Naveen Rao, Co-founder & CEO of Unconventional AI

About this episode

Today's guest is Naveen Rao , co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI. Naveen has built two startups before Unconventional AI, both at critical inflection points in the AI market, often early to trends the world had yet to see. He founded Nervana, acquired by Intel for over $400M, then MosaicML, acquired by Databricks for $1.3B, after which he led AI at Databricks. Now he's after his magnum opus: chips inspired by the architecture of the brain that can run AI at a fraction of today's energy cost. As power becomes the defining constraint on scaling AI, Naveen's thesis is that biology-scale efficiency is the only path forward. Unconventional AI launched with nearly half a billion dollars at a…