Naveen Rao

Founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, an AI compute startup focused on biology-scale energy efficiency and a new substrate for intelligence. He previously co-founded MosaicML, acquired by Databricks, and Nervana Systems, acquired by Intel, where he later led AI products. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Brown University and a BSEE from Duke University.

AI Scaling Faces an Energy Wall Without Physics-First Hardware

At AI Ascent 2026, Unconventional AI founder and CEO Naveen Rao argued that the current AI compute stack is approaching an energy wall because it is built on an 80-year-old digital computing model poorly suited to intelligence. Rao’s case is that GPUs and matrix math cannot close the efficiency gap with biological brains fast enough, and that AI hardware must instead be rebuilt around physical dynamics, time-domain computation, and architectures that blur memory and processing. He presented Unconventional AI’s coupled-oscillator chip prototype as an attempt to move compute closer to the thermodynamic limits of intelligence per watt.

Sequoia CapitalMay 7, 20266 min read