Unconventional AI Inc., a chip startup led by former Intel Corp. executive Naveen Rao, launched today with a massive $475 million in seed funding.

Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz led the investment. They were joined by more than a half-dozen other backers including Jeff Bezos and Rao, who contributed $10 million. The deal valued Unconventional AI at $4.5 billion.

Rao (pictured, second from the left), is the former corporate vice president of Intel’s artificial intelligence platforms group. He joined the chipmaker after it acquired Nervana Systems Inc., an AI processor startup he co-founded in 2014,  for more than $400 million. Rao later launched another startup called MosaicML Inc. that was bought by Databricks Inc. in 2023 for $1.4 billion.

Unconventional AI’s minimalist website hints that it’s working on AI processors modeled after biological neurons. “Neurons use their inherent physical properties to build intelligence; we are building silicon circuits that demonstrate similar non-linear dynamics to build a new substrate for intelligence,” reads the company’s launch blog post. “By building the right isomorphism for intelligence, we’ll unlock efficiency gains.”

Intel, where Rao worked until 2020, has also developed AI chips that mimic biological neurons to boost processing efficiency. The company refers to those devices as neuromorphic processors. Unlike a conventional chip, they lack a clock, a component that sets the pace at which calculations are carried out.

Chips that include a clock move electricity between their circuits even when they’re not actively carrying out calculations. Intel’s neuromorphic processors, in contrast, deactivate circuits that aren’t actively used. According to the chip giant, that arrangement can significantly reduce power consumption.

A job posting on Unconventional AI’s website states that it hopes to build an AI accelerator with 1,000 times better efficiency than current silicon. The listing reveals that the accelerator will be based on a system-on-chip, or SoC, design. A SoC is a processor that places several different types of compute modules on a single die.

Unconventional AI’s job posting reveals that one of its SoC’s modules will be a central processing unit. AI applications use CPUs to perform preliminary processing tasks such as organizing raw sensory data into a form that lends itself better to analysis. Subsequent processing steps are carried out by circuits optimized to perform linear algebra calculations. Those are the mathematical operations that virtually all AI models, including large language models, use to crunch data.

According to the job listing, Unconventional AI’s SoC will include modules based on third-party intellectual property. The chip will also feature mixed-signal circuits, which are typically used for tasks such as processing sensory data. A separate job posting states that the company is seeking an engineer familiar with emerging nonvolatile memory technologies such as RRAM.

Nonvolatile memory retains the data that it holds when it’s powered off. One of the most widely used technologies that falls into that category is flash storage. RRAM is an alternative to flash that can provide better performance in some cases, but also has certain technical shortcomings. Those limitations have so far prevented it from gaining widespread traction in data centers.

Unconventional AI’s website indicates that it plans to develop not only chips but also AI models capable of running on them. It will co-design the hardware and software, an engineering approach that makes it possible to extensively optimize software for a given processor.

“The goal is biology-scale energy efficiency,” Lightspeed investors Guru Chahal, Ravi Mhatre and Bucky Moore wrote in a blog post. “By finding the right isomorphism for intelligence, they aim to unlock efficiency gains far beyond what’s possible by iterating on conventional architectures.”

Photo: Lightspeed