Ep. 314 How I Raised It with Naveen Verma of EnCharge AI
episode
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
44 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 13 days ago
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What does EnCharge AI’s energy‑efficient AI chip technology do?
So we uh build chips to do very energy efficient AI inference. Um the reason we exist as a company is because
we had a major breakthrough. Hi guys, welcome to the How Erasive Podcast, the show where we get an inside look at how real entrepreneurs and VCs raise capital for their businesses. I'm your host, Nathan Beckard, and today's episode is with Naveen Verma of NCharge AI. NCHE makes an energy efficient AI chip. In addition to being CEO, Naveen is a professor at Princeton, and so we go into details about the transition from academia and research to leading a startup to a hundred million dollars Series B. Very impressive. If you're tuning into this podcast to learn how to raise capital for your business, be sure to check out foundersuite.com if you're a startup or fundingstack.com if you're a VC or advisor.
Both platforms will give you access to an awesome collection of tools for raising capital, including a massive investor database, a new Get Intro tool to get warm introductions to those investors. A CRM to manage your raise, a virtual data room to run due diligence, plus pitch deck hosting, investor updates, email tools, and much more. Last but not least, if you enjoyed this conversation and think someone else would do, please share it with them and hit that subscribe button to get all our latest episodes. Thank you, and I sit back and enjoy this chat with Naveen.
Welcome to How I Raised It. The podcast that goes behind the scenes with entrepreneurs who've raised capital. We uncover the tips, tricks, and techniques they use to get investors to write a check. Strap in and turn it off.
Hi, welcome to another episode of How I Raised It, produced by foundersweet.com and fundingstack dot com. Today I have Naveen Verma of En Charge AI coming to us from Santa Clara, California. How's your day going?
Going very well. I'm looking forward to chatting with you,
Nathan. Wonderful. So we're gonna get a little bit technical today in And talking about your business, uh let's just start off with what do you guys do?
So we uh build chips to do very energy efficient AI inference. Um the reason we exist as a company is because we had a major breakthrough um from fundamental research. I've been a professor at Princeton University um since 2009 and and I've focused on kind of what the next approaches, next generation approaches to computing are gonna be. Um it's nice and fun in research to be able to try and do a lot of things, many of which most often don't work, but every now and then things do work and and sometimes in a big way. And we had what we thought was a pretty major breakthrough quite a few years ago in 2017. And we felt like that could really change the way that compute should be done and can be done for AI.
And that through a period of further research in the university over about six years and then ultimately spin Getting the company out in 22 is has kind of led to us finding uh the opportunity for what we do, which is build these very efficient chips to do um AI computations, hopefully on devices that are are close to people, that have data that is close to and intimate to people and things like that.
Let's let's go into the backstory a little bit more. I think that's always interesting and I don't know if it was a single, you know, light bulb aha moment or a very evolutionary, you know, trial and error grind over many years, but maybe talk about Getting to the The breakthrough. Uh, how did you achieve it? And to the extent, you know, someone like me who doesn't really understand I'm a business guy, I'm a finance guy. Explain it what the breakthrough is. Yeah, go for it.
Sure. You know, I think fundamental research, you know, sometimes people think about it as, you know, you're trying a bunch of things and, you know, magically one day an apple falls on your head and now you have discovered this thing out of the blue. Um and I think it can be that way. It can be many different things, uh, or you know, it can go in many different ways. Um, but I think it can often be a pretty systematic process as well.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does EnCharge AI’s energy‑efficient AI chip technology do?
0:00–6:23
2
How did Naveen Verma’s 2017 research breakthrough lead to a new chip architecture?
6:23–12:04
3
Why did Naveen decide to spin out a startup from his Princeton lab?
12:04–17:32
4
What were the key steps and challenges in raising EnCharge’s Series A round?
17:32–22:58
5
When and why did EnCharge decide to raise a $100 M Series B round?
22:58–29:11
6
How did EnCharge choose Tiger Global and strategic investors like Samsung and Constellation?
29:11–35:06
7
What advice does Naveen give to professors and researchers wanting to launch a startup?
35:06–40:35
8
What does Naveen see as the biggest remaining challenge in moving from research to a CEO role?
40:35–44:36
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
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