Uber’s CTO is speaking at StrictlyVC SF — here’s why that matters

StrictlyVC San Francisco just got a lot more interesting. 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 want to clear your calendar.

The event was already stacking up well — TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC series has a solid track record of pulling in serious operators, not just figureheads. But adding Uber’s CTO to the mix changes the conversation. Neppalli Naga is the guy responsible for keeping Uber’s sprawling infrastructure running across ride-hailing, Uber Eats, freight, and everything else. That’s not a small job.

What I’m most curious about is the stated topic: operating at scale in the age of AI. We hear a lot about AI in abstract terms — models, benchmarks, hype cycles. But Uber is one of those rare companies where AI isn’t a side project; it’s baked into the core product. Surge pricing, route optimization, ETA predictions, driver matching — all of it relies on machine learning models running in real time across millions of trips daily.

The “scale” part is what separates Uber from most companies talking about AI. It’s one thing to run a model on a laptop or in a demo. It’s another to serve predictions to tens of millions of users while dealing with latency constraints, cost pressures, and the chaos of real-world traffic data. Neppalli Naga has been at Uber since 2016, rising through the engineering ranks, so he’s seen this evolution firsthand.

I also appreciate that StrictlyVC events tend to be more intimate than the typical tech conference circus. The venue — Sentro Filipino Cultural Center — is a deliberate choice. It’s not a massive convention hall. The format encourages actual conversation, not just stage time. If you’re in the Bay Area and working on anything infrastructure-related, this is probably worth your afternoon.

Will Neppalli Naga drop any bombshells about Uber’s AI strategy? Hard to say. Uber has been relatively quiet about its internal AI work compared to, say, Google or Meta. But that might be the point — sometimes the most interesting conversations are about the boring, hard parts of making AI work at scale, not the flashy demos.

Either way, the lineup is now strong enough that I’d be surprised if tickets don’t go fast. If you’re building anything in the AI infrastructure space, or just want to hear how one of the most operationally complex companies on the planet handles the AI shift, this is the session to watch.