MosaicML’s Naveen Rao on building an edge in AI infrastructure

MosaicML is the developer of open source infrastructure for training LLMs. The company was acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion in July 2023. and has gone from 0 to over $30M in revenue this year in just 6 months. In this episode, Sandhya Hegde and Wei Lien Dang chat with Naveen Rao, co-founder of MosaicML and now the head of Generative AI at Databricks Join us as we discuss: 00:00 Preview: Future of foundation model companies 2:16 How Naveen’s previous experiences led to MosaicML 7:29 The core insight behind the founding of MosaicML 9:52 MosaicML’s approach to building an end-to-end platform 12:09 Why MosaicML focused on open models and LLMs 14:25 Why most foundation model companies will fail 15:52 How MosaicML found early adopters 18:14 Early use cases for MosaicML’s product 21:27 Impact of early feedback on MosaicML’s product roadmap 25:21 Why Naveen decided to move ahead with the Databricks acquisition 31:44 How Naveen sees the AI ecosystem evolving 34:08 Regulation of AI and the importance of open source 41:15 Advice for founding building AI infrastructure Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures and leads investments in infrastructure software, security, and developer tool.  Wei was a co-founder of StackRox, a cloud-native security company prior to its acquisition by Red Hat. Naveen Rao is the co-founder of MosaicML (now a Databricks company) and currently the head of Generative AI at Databricks Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/. Further reading from Unusual Ventures: Starting an open source company Open source customer development