Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga joins StrictlyVC SF — and that lineup is getting serious

StrictlyVC San Francisco just got a serious injection of engineering heft. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga is joining the speaker lineup for the April 30 event at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center, and honestly, this is the kind of addition that makes you sit up and take notice.

The event, which kicks off TechCrunch’s 2026 events calendar, already had a strong roster. But adding someone who runs engineering for a platform juggling millions of rides, deliveries, and freight shipments every day? That’s a different league. Neppalli Naga is expected to talk about operating at scale in the age of AI — a topic that sounds buzzwordy until you realize Uber is basically a distributed systems stress test on steroids.

I’ve seen plenty of CTOs give generic talks about “scaling for AI.” Neppalli Naga is not that. He came to Uber from Microsoft, where he led Azure’s infrastructure and AI platform teams. Before that, he spent years at Amazon building out AWS services. The guy has literally written the book on massive-scale infrastructure, even if the book is actually just a stack of internal postmortems and performance reviews.

What I’m hoping he digs into: the real trade-offs Uber faces when deploying AI models in production. Not the fluffy “we use AI to predict demand” stuff, but the gritty details — how do you serve a real-time inference pipeline across a global fleet of drivers without burning through your cloud budget? How do you balance latency against model accuracy when a rider is waiting on a curb? And what happens when your AI makes a bad call at 3 AM on a Saturday?

StrictlyVC has historically leaned toward the venture capital crowd, but this year’s lineup suggests a shift toward the technical decision-makers who actually build the stuff VCs fund. That’s a smart move. The event is on April 30 at the Sentro Filipino Cultural Center in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area and care about how AI actually works at planetary scale — not just how it’s pitched on a slide deck — this is worth your time.