Full Name

Naveen Rao

Job Title

VP of AI

Company

Databricks

Speaker Bio

Naveen Rao is VP of AI at Databricks, with a unique background bridging neuroscience and computing. He earned his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from Brown University after a 10-year stint in industry as a hardware and software architect. After completing his Ph.D., he founded Nervana Systems in 2014, the first hardware startup for modern deep learning. Nervana was acquired by Intel Corporation in 2016 and Naveen became Intel's Head of AI and led their new AI division. After a 3.5 year stint at Intel, he saw that the cost and difficulty of training neural networks was going to be a bottleneck for broad AI adoption. In 2021 he co-founded MosaicML, which enabled organizations to develop state-of-the-art large AI models with their own data in the most cost-efficient way possible. Following Databricks' acquisition of MosaicML in 2023, Naveen continues driving AI capabilities for enterprise applications as Databricks’ Head of AI.