MosaicML founder takes another swing at AI chips (techfundingnews.com)

Naveen Rao, the serial AI entrepreneur behind MosaicML and Nervana, has launched a new startup, Unconventional, Inc., with the lofty aim of building a “new substrate for intelligence” that achieves “brain-scale efficiency.” The company is reportedly raising a $1 billion round at a $5 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Lightspeed, Lux Capital and possibly Databricks; Rao says he’s already secured “hundreds of millions” and will raise the remainder in tranches while starting engineering work immediately. Technically, Unconventional plans an end-to-end intelligence platform combining custom silicon and purpose-built server infrastructure — a hardware-software co-design approach intended to deliver orders-of-magnitude energy and compute efficiency closer to biological brains. If successful, it would directly challenge incumbents (NVIDIA, chip fabs and hyperscalers) by offering chips and systems optimized for large-model training and inference, potentially lowering operational cost and environmental footprint for AI at scale. The ambition is high and capital-intensive, and timelines/architectural trade-offs remain unknown, but Rao’s acquisition track record and strategic funding signal strong industry confidence that this could reshape the AI compute stack.