From Start-Up to Grown-Up #99 Naveen Verma — From Princeton Professor to Venture-Backed CEO, Fundraising Without a Network, and Leading Firmly and Empathetically
Aug 25, 2025
Naveen Verma, a Princeton professor and CEO of EnCharge AI, shares his journey from academia to entrepreneurship. He discusses rethinking energy-efficient AI computing and the limitations of traditional models. Naveen emphasizes the importance of co-founder alignment over titles and how failure shaped his empathetic leadership style. He also explores fundraising strategies as a professor-turned-founder and the significance of building a culture through actions. This conversation provides invaluable insights for anyone curious about merging research with real-world applications.
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AI Stresses Fundamental Compute Limits
- AI workloads stress fundamental limits of computing because of huge data movement and operation counts.
- EnCharge targets energy as the core scarce resource by redesigning compute physics with in-memory architectures.
Six Years Of Lab Incubation
- Naveen's lab pursued analog in-memory computing and hit a breakthrough around 2017 that made the approach robust and scalable.
- He then spent six years incubating the technology in academia before spinning out the company in 2022.
Use Incubation To De-Risk Deep Tech
- When a technology is very new, use academic incubation to give yourself time to fail and iterate.
- Avoid spinning out too early if investor pressure would force premature, risky productization.
