San Diego-based startup Unconventional AI just revealed that it has achieved unicorn status faster than any other company in history.
On Dec. 8, the company announced that it has completed a seed funding round valued at US$475 million resulting in a post-money valuation of US$4.5 billion. Venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia and DCVC led the fundraising. Jeff Bezos was also a notable contributor.
Chief Executive Officer Naveen Rao is leading Unconventional AI. He contributed US$10 million out of pocket into the seed campaign.
Rao served as Vice President of AI at renowned software development company Databricks until September. Databricks acquired his previous LLM-training startup, MosaicML, in 2023 for US$1.3 billion.
Rao describes himself as a neuroscientist, AI perpetrator, processor architect, entrepreneur and investor who is passionate about building systems that enable synthetic intelligence to scale efficiently. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from Brown University.
“Congrats to Naveen and Unconventional AI for closing an epic seed round to develop a novel approach to the substrate of computation,” said Future Ventures and DFJ Growth co-founder Steve Jurvetson.
We're proud to announce @unconvAI a bit more publicly! We're in unprecedented times…AI has exponential demand but is limited by (linear) energy build-outs. At Unconventional we're aiming to use every watt more effectively; we're doing it by going to first principles on how to… https://t.co/s3bsSjuZDN
— Naveen Rao (@NaveenGRao) December 8, 2025
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Unconventional is targeting the AI power crisis
Rao’s company said this week that its goal is to achieve biology-scale energy efficiency with AI computing.
Unconventional has explained that demand for artificial intelligence is set to escalate at unprecedented rates and that this will cause computation to become constrained by the global energy supply within the next few years. The AI startup highlighted that this anticipated energy bottleneck for AI will require massive gains in computational efficiency to overcome.
“Developing this novel machine will be a complex undertaking, necessitating truly unconventional thinking,” the company stated. “This endeavour is as much an algorithmic and software challenge as one of novel hardware design.”
Unconventional AI is building next-generation computing hardware that draws inspiration from biology and physics to radically cut energy usage.
Instead of scaling traditional digital chips that hit hard power walls, the company is pursuing analogue circuits, novel semiconductor physics, and unconventional architectures that can deliver much more compute per watt. By doing so, Unconventional AI is aiming to keep AI’s exponential growth from being strangled by electricity limitations.
We’re co-leading the $475M seed round for Unconventional AI, a research lab tackling the moonshot of highly efficient AI-first chips. CEO Naveen Rao has sold two companies previously, and we’re excited to be partnering with him in his next endeavor. He joined a16z’s Matt… https://t.co/lBh2rXtYkc pic.twitter.com/9grXJkFUmj
— a16z (@a16z) December 8, 2025
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