energy-efficient-ai
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Naveen Verma
Naveen Verma is the co-founder and CEO of EnCharge AI and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University. He spent roughly six years de-risking a single, stubborn idea - computing with electric charge stored in metal capacitors instead of noisy transistors - before spinning it out of his lab in 2022. The result is analog in-memory computing hardware that his company says runs AI inference at roughly 20 times less energy than a typical GPU, aimed squarely at putting powerful AI on laptops and edge devices rather than in power-hungry data centers. EnCharge has raised more than $144 million, including an oversubscribed $100M+ Series B led by Tiger Global in early 2025, and shipped its first commercial accelerator, the EN100.
Jad Tarifi
Jad Tarifi is the co-founder, CEO and Chief AI Scientist of Integral AI, a Tokyo- and Silicon Valley-based startup building energy-efficient, interactive world models aimed at scalable artificial general intelligence and embodied robotics. Before founding the company in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Google, where he founded and led the company's first generative AI team and worked on neocortex-inspired learning from limited data. Born and raised in Lebanon, he holds a PhD in computer science and AI from the University of Florida and an MS in quantum computing. In December 2025 he drew global attention - and skepticism - by claiming Integral AI had built the world's first AGI-capable model, TOWA. He is also the author of the four-volume 'Freedom Series' on AI and human potential.
Mitesh Agrawal
Mitesh Agrawal is the CEO of Positron AI, a Reno-based AI inference hardware startup that has raised $305M and achieved unicorn status in under 34 months. A co-founder and long-time COO of Lambda Labs - where he helped grow revenues from $500K to ~$500M - Agrawal brought his front-row view of GPU limitations to Positron, a company building purpose-built silicon (the Atlas system, and next-gen Asimov chip) that delivers 3x the performance of Nvidia GPUs at one-third the power. Backed by Arm, Qatar Investment Authority, Jump Trading, and others, Positron is building America's first at-scale AI inference silicon company.