Get Naveen Rao on Dwarkesh Podcast

Naveen Rao just raised a staggering $475 million seed round at a $4.5 billion valuation for Unconventional AI, a new company building energy‑efficient computers for AI, which could unclog today’s biggest bottleneck, power and scaling. Coming on Dwarkesh now would give listeners a front row seat to how he plans to push past GPU limits with analog and bio‑inspired approaches, a pivot that could reshape model training economics in 2026.

Rao also has the receipts, he sold MosaicML to Databricks for $1.3 billion and recently left as Databricks’ head of AI to tackle this harder problem with fresh backing from a16z, Lightspeed, and even Jeff Bezos. It appears he has not been on the Dwarkesh Podcast before, according to the show’s episode list, so this would be a timely first.

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