Unconventional AI
AI Chips & Accelerators
12open roles
$475Mlatest round · Seed · Dec 2025 · 11 mo ago
11backers · Greycroft, Andreessen Horowitz
Atruth index, 86 of 100
Overview
Unconventional AI is rethinking the foundations of compute to bring biology-scale energy efficiency to AI.
How Unconventional AI hires
Truth index
A 86/100
Ghost roles
0%
Stale roles
55%
Reposted roles
0%
Unconventional AI scores A on the Alion truth index (A is best, E worst), measured over 11 open roles re-checked against its own hiring board: 0% look like ghost listings, 55% have gone stale and 0% are the same role posted again. It measures how much of what this employer publishes turns into a real, finite search - not the employer as a workplace. How the index is computed
Funding and backers
Total raised
$475M
1 round on record
Latest round
$475M
Seed · Dec 2025 · 11 mo ago
Team
51-200
employees, estimated range
Hiring now
14
+4 posted in 30 days
Backers
11
Greycroft, Andreessen Horowitz
The money's age
Fresh money
11 months since the last round · and hiring
Momentum
71/100
hiring for its size, a new city, in the news, fresh money, rising traction
Last sign of life
this month
a posting or a news item
The story so fareach stage dated by its source: the company's releases, the press, registers, filings
Jun 25
On the Hacker News front page Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators · 191 points
Dec 11, 2025
Raised a round Seed $475M · YahooFinance
Dec 2025
Website went live first capture in the Wayback Machine
Tractionpublic signals, read monthly
Web presence
top 6%
of 133.2M domains by links, Common Crawl
Hacker News stories
2
best: 191 points
Funding rounds
| Round | Date | Amount | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | Dec 2025 | $475M | — | YahooFinance |
Backed byfrom the funds' portfolios and accelerator catalogs
Greycroft 
Andreessen Horowitz 
E14 Fund 
Felicis 
Lightspeed Venture Partners 
Sequoia Capital Investors in similar startupsfunds that back the companies most like this one
Similar startupsby what they do, their industry and backers
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Jobs
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Perl
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≈ $197k – $392k per year (Estimated) · In office · 5+ years exp · Bachelor's Degree · Mountain View
Python
C++
DeepSpeed
vLLM
PyTorch Lightning
Diffusion Models
SGLang
TRL
Transformers
PyTorch
LLM
Ray
Mixture of Experts
CUDA
Triton
Post-training
Megatron-LM
NCCL
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Verilog
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Python
Verilog
C++
MATLAB
Apply
Apply
Growth
Hiring Momentum
52/100
Stable
Open positions
14
4 opened / 0 closed in 30 days
Median time-to-fill
62 days
faster than 20% of the market
ATS activity
Every ~5 hours
Today
Hiring Dynamics
0%
Hiring Focus
The percentage next to each role is its share of the company's job openings over the last 90 days; the arrow shows the shift versus the previous period.
AI/ML
33% ▼
Hardware
33% ▲
HR
22% ▲
Product
11% ▲
Activity Timeline
New location: Palo Alto
Nov 2026
Added Slack to stack
Oct 2026
Added Synopsys IC Compiler II to stack
Oct 2026
Added Synopsys Fusion Compiler to stack
Oct 2026
Added Cadence Innovus to stack
Oct 2026
Added Perl to stack
Oct 2026
Financials
Total raised
$475M
Latest round
Seed
Funding rounds
1
Funding rounds
| Round | Announced | Amount | Valuation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2025 | $475M | $4.5B | Details |
Tech stack
Technologies named in job postings at Unconventional AI over the last 12 months, by layer, with the share of postings for each.
Technologies in use
65
Postings analysed
16
Stack modernity
77/100AI adopter
Languages
Python69%
Verilog31%
Perl19%
C++19%
Frameworks & libraries
LangChain19%
Next.js13%
React.js13%
UVM13%
Databases
Milvus6%
Pinecone6%
Weaviate6%
Cloud & platforms
Linux19%
Databricks19%
AWS19%
Azure19%
AI & ML
LLM25%
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Full Unconventional AI tech stack
65 technologies · by team · pay by technology · changes · similar stacks
Connections
List
Graph
Found in company registers, site code, DNS and hiring. Each connection shows how sure we are and the evidence, with its source and date.
Shared investors
DecibelVia a fund
PlaygroundVia a fund
Inspired CapitalVia a fund
Eniac VenturesVia a fund
Lux CapitalVia a fund
Click a company to open it. Dashed lines are likely connections. The second step of the network is part of the Pro plan.
Owner
Same company
Same group
Likely
News
Announcing the 2026 Unconventional Grant Winners
Unconventional AI was founded on a suspicion: that the dominant recipe for building capable AI systems, more parameters and more attention over ever longer contexts, is one path among several, and that the alternatives stay underexplored not because they
Read more
Report
Less is More: Scaling Dynamics with Sparsity
TL;DR - In the original Un-0 model architecture, the number of connections between oscillators - and trainable parameters - increases precipitously as the oscillator count grows since the oscillators are connected all-to-all. Such architectures are challe
Read more
Report
Smoothing the Triangle: Rethinking the Memory Stack for Unconventional AI
By now, it's no secret that 2026's hottest hardware component isn't the processor; it's the memory, as the skyrocketing prices and memory-company valuations make clear. Even consumer tech giants aren't immune to the squeeze. Just look at Apple's recent ha
Read more
Report
Speaking the Language of Physics: Introducing the First Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) for Dynamical System Hardware
Editor's Note: This post highlights foundational research on analog computing primitives accepted to ISCA 2026, conducted by Prof. Ang Li prior to joining Unconventional AI. At Unconventional AI, we are continuously exploring novel architectural paradigms
Read more
Report
Introducing Un-0: Generating Images with Coupled Oscillators
TL;DR. Executing deep neural networks on GPUs has dominated AI for a decade, but we think the next jump in energy efficiency demands a fundamentally different computer, one where physics does the computing. We built Un-0, an image generator powered by a s
Read more
Report
The Making of the unCFO: Building a Company in the Age of AI
A number of people have asked me recently: What is an unCFO? To be completely transparent, I never aspired to be a CFO. What has always driven me is solving hard problems and learning. That is why I studied engineering and, counterintuitively, became a ba
Read more
Report
System Modeling: The Substrate for Neural Co-Evolution
"Every Model is Wrong, But Some Are Useful" A few weeks ago, Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton had a very bad race. In modern F1, drivers don't actually get to spend that much time training on the physical track, and cars change so much from race
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Report
Machine Learning with Dynamics
Most things that exist in the physical world are never truly static. They change over time, over space, or both. These ever-changing systems are said to exhibit dynamics. If you bend your idea of what computation is, anything with interesting dynamics can
Read more
Report
Unconventional Grant: Final Call for Proposals
Tomorrow, May 15th, is the final day to submit pre-proposals for the Unconventional Grant. Over the past several weeks, we've received a wave of submissions that reinforce a core belief behind this program: there is no shortage of ambitious thinking in AI
Read more
Report
How to improve AI energy efficiency by 1000x
Unconventional AI's mission is to achieve a 1000x energy-efficiency advantage for generative AI (GenAI) inference over state-of-the-art AI models running on state-of-the-art conventional AI hardware, with a focus on datacenter use cases. The high-level ap
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Report
Show more news
Offices
Where the company hires and what each office is for
Cities
2
Hiring now
2
Countries
1
Busiest office
Mountain View
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Headquarters
Builds here
Office with open vacancies
Tap a pin for the office
Mountain View
United States
HQ
Mountain View
14 open roles 10 posted in 90 days 79% engineering 29% remote 50-200 est. staff
hires for Hardware, AI/ML, HR
Palo Alto
United States
Regional office
Palo Alto
2 open roles 2 posted in 90 days 50% remote 10-50 est. staff
hires for HR