Brain-inspired AI startup Unconventional AI has raised $475 million in its seed funding round, with a company valuation of $4.5 billion.

The startup was founded just two months ago.

The funding round was led by Andreesen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, while other investors include Lux Capital, DCVC, and Jeff Bezos, per a report from Bloomberg. Unconventional's CEO - Naveen Rao, formerly of Databricks - also contributed $10m of his own funds to the round.

According to CEO Rao, this is the first portion of an expected larger funding round that could raise up to $1bn.

While the seed round valued the company at $4.5bn, TechCrunch previously reported that Unconventional AI was seeking a $5bn valuation for the $1bn raise.

Unconventional AI is looking to power AI using "brain-inspired" computing - also known as neuromorphic computing. According to Rao, it is also looking at using analog compute, as opposed to the digital chips typically used today.

Rao told Bloomberg: “The next several years are going to be about trying out a number of ideas and prototypes and coming up with the exact paradigm of what we believe will scale most efficiently and cost effectively.”

Rao also spoke to The Register this week, during which he explained the company's USP in greater detail.

"AI is intrinsically linked to hardware, and hardware is intrinsically linked to power. We can't scale beyond a certain number of inferences per unit time because of the energy problem. We can't produce that much more energy in the next 10 years," Rao told the publication. He later added: "Natural learning systems never used numerics. They didn't simulate the dynamics of learning. They use the intrinsic physics of whatever substrate they're on to build a learning system. We believe we can recapitulate that behavior in silicon."

Rao declined to share the exact solution Unconventional is pursuing, but confirmed that it would be an analog chip fabbed in silicon.

CEO Rao previously founded and sold MosaicML and Nervana Systems to Databricks for $1.3bn in 2023 and Intel Corp for $350m in 2016, respectively. Unconventional AI founders also include Michael Carbin, Sara Archour, and MeeLan Lee.

Several neuromorphic-compute startups have popped up over the years, with SpiNNcloud notably deploying several neuromorphic supercomputing systems - including one at Leipzig University in July 2025 that comprised 656,640 cores and simulated 650 million neurons for AI and HPC workloads.

Rain AI is another startup looking at the technology and is developing neuromorphic chips.

Intel also has a neuromorphic system dubbed Hala Point, which launched in 2024 and claims to have 1.15 billion neurons.

This year alone has seen an Australian startup - Cortical Labs - launching a neuromorphic supercomputer, and the UK announced a center dedicated to researching and developing the technology in May.

Despite growing interest in the area, the technology has yet to truly take hold, with the majority of supercomputers and AI systems opting for more traditional architectures.