creators

Naveen Rao: CEO of Unconventional AI, MosaicML founder

Naveen Rao founded Nervana and MosaicML, led AI at Databricks until 2025, and is co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, which raised a $475m seed round.

Naveen Rao is an AI infrastructure entrepreneur who has founded three companies where hardware meets machine learning. He co-founded Nervana Systems, an early deep-learning hardware startup, which Intel acquired in August 2016 without disclosing terms; Rao then ran Intel's AI products group as VP and general manager until 2020. He went on to found MosaicML, a generative AI training platform, as co-founder and CEO; Databricks agreed to buy it in June 2023 for about $1.3 billion. Rao then led generative AI at Databricks, and left in September 2025. In December 2025 he launched Unconventional AI with Michael Carbin, Sara Achour and MeeLan Lee, to build silicon whose own physics does the computing instead of simulating a neural network on conventional chips. It announced $475 million in seed funding at a $4.5 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz with Sequoia, Lux Capital, DCVC, Future Ventures and Jeff Bezos taking part, and Rao investing $10 million himself. In June 2026 it published Un-0, an image generator built on coupled oscillators.

Specialization

AI hardware, computer architecture, model training infrastructure

Country

United States