Naveen Rao, former head of AI at Databricks, has raised $475 million in seed capital for his new startup, Unconventional AI, at a valuation of $4.5 billion.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC. The funding is the first installment toward the round’s goal of up to $1 billion, Rao told Bloomberg.
TechCrunch first reported in October that Unconventional AI was seeking this huge funding for Rao’s new startup, but the final valuation was slightly lower than the $5 billion that sources said he was seeking. If he ends up raising $1 billion, we’ll see how that affects the value of his company.
Unconventional AI is starting to build new energy-efficient AI computers. Rao previously wrote in X magazine that his goal was to make computers “as efficient as biology.”
Databricks acquired Rao’s previous startup, MosaicML, in 2023 for $1.3 billion. Prior to MosaicML, Mr. Rao co-founded the machine learning platform Nervana Systems. The platform was reportedly acquired by Intel in 2016 for more than $400 million.
