What does it take to write the very first check into a company that has almost nothing to show yet, sometimes not even a finished idea?

Afore Capital helped invent the pre-seed category. When Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji started the firm ten years ago, "pre-seed" was almost a slight, a label for founders who couldn't raise a proper seed round. They set out to build the world's largest pre-seed fund anyway, closing $47 million on a $40 million target, and every fund since has closed above plan. Afore now runs more than $500 million across four funds, with top-quartile DPI on the first three. The idea has become so mainstream that when Sequoia launched its latest fund, it said, "I guess we're pre-seed investors too."

The real substance of the conversation is how Gaurav thinks. He is clear about what matters most in venture, and the order tends to surprise people. Being in the very best companies matters more than anything else, ownership comes after that, and the entry price that so many investors fixate on matters least, because fifty per cent of zero is still zero. He is also convinced that the genuine bottleneck is talent. There is a great deal of money in the world and very few people who can build something truly large, which is why at the earliest stage founders tend to choose their investors as much as investors choose them. You give a founder a million dollars with no collateral, and then you still have to convince them to take it. A pre-seed pitch, he says, is almost entirely storytelling with very little data behind it.

If you want to understand how the earliest checks actually get written, and what it really costs to say no, this episode is worth your time.

00:00 - Trailer
01:00 - From Dehradun to Google to starting Afore
02:08 - The Waterloo co-op that talked him out of every job
03:18 - Back when "pre-seed" was an insult
05:44 - When Sequoia said "I guess we're pre-seed investors too"
07:26 - Afore's three products, and the experiments that failed
09:01 - Hightouch was a travel company when they invested
11:02 - Goldcast: no visa, no money, funded anyway
12:07 - The through line is always the team
14:44 - The Ramp miss
17:24 - "Founders pick us more than we pick them"
18:45 - The constraint isn't capital, it's talent
22:24 - The Solana miss, when it was still Loom Protocol
24:46 - Ramp's Super Bowl ad, the buses, his wife's business
25:32 - What he looks for in founders
28:50 - Coachability, happy ears, and the Mom Test
31:28 - The biggest mistake: falling in love with the idea
35:04 - The three things that matter, and "50% of zero is still zero"
39:25 - "100% storytelling, 0% data"
41:25 - Investing in India, and the fear of being dumb capital
44:41 - "Sign the deal before Monday"
47:26 - One engineer now does the job of 20
51:43 - Raising from LPs, the undiscussed part of VC
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

How do you know whether an AI agent is doing its job or quietly failing in production?

Galileo is building the trust layer for AI. Its evaluation and observability platform is how enterprises measure whether the output of an LLM or an agent is good or bad.

Galileo started before "LLM" was even a word. When Atin showed his prototype to Stanford's Chris Ré, his own first question was "what is a language model?" Today its customers include Reddit, Airbnb, P&G, Comcast, and six of the Fortune 50.

Atin spent a decade in big tech before co-founding Galileo with Vikram Chatterji in early 2021. He worked on the knowledge graphs behind Siri at Apple, then became one of the leads and architects of Michelangelo, Uber's AI platform, that hosts thousands of models across pricing, ETA, and demand.

That Uber experience taught him the lesson the whole company is built on; that in AI, observability and evaluation are the real bottleneck, and bad data is catastrophic.

As ChatGPT turned every AI output into something a user sees directly, the measurement problem went from academic to mission-critical. So Atin made a contrarian bet: instead of using giant LLMs to judge other LLMs, Galileo built Luna, small 1-3B parameter models that run evals at breakthrough latencies of 100 milliseconds and below.

If you are excited about how AI actually gets shipped, trusted, and controlled inside real enterprises, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
01:14 - From India to Apple, Uber, and Galileo
01:34 - Where the name "Galileo" came from
02:38 - Building Siri's early knowledge graphs at Apple
03:29 - Becoming an architect of Uber's Michelangelo
05:15 - Why every AI output is now mission-critical
06:45 - How Atin and Vikram zeroed in on Galileo
07:42 - "What is a language model?"
09:38 - Building the world's first feature store at Uber
11:27 - Language models and tokens, explained simply
14:19 - Where the observability insight came from
15:53 - Quantifying uncertainty and hallucinations
16:36 - The first customers and first use case
19:15 - How the product evolved from a data scientist tool
23:18 - Why ChatGPT changed everything for Galileo
23:57 - The enterprise AI adoption curve, 2021 to 2026
26:35 - Why they built the Luna model
28:32 - Turning LLM "writers" into "calculators"
28:51 - Attacking the latency problem
31:48 - Luna: the modeling and infrastructure innovation
33:09 - What evals are, and why they blew up
34:26 - The case for small language models
36:58 - What "general reasoning" really means
40:39 - AI usage is exploding — and why that matters
43:08 - Online vs offline: the "it worked on my machine" problem
44:33 - The evals flywheel and evals-driven development
46:56 - Galileo in a nutshell
47:39 - What real agents in production look like today
49:30 - A sales intelligence platform, powered by Galileo
50:47 - The agent control product
52:12 - Building GTM as a hardcore engineer from India
54:43 - Garbage in, garbage out: nailing the ICP
55:42 - How the pitch changed from customer 1 to 20
57:27 - Why Atin switched from CTO to CPO

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.

This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?

We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

Who is funding the students that India's banks won't touch?

Propelld is one of India's largest education-focused lenders, giving loans to roughly 1.5 lakh students every year — matching SBI — with a team a fraction of the size and no branch network. In a single financial year it now disburses more education loans than SBI did in six years of its history.

Victor started Propelld in 2016 with a thesis born out of a Milton Friedman paper: a good student should never have to walk away from a good opportunity just because they don't have the money. Propelld hit its stride by going exactly where traditional lenders refuse to — 70% of its borrowers come from tier-3 cities, a segment banks treat as too risky.

Instead of chasing the safe 1% of students at IITs and IIMs, Victor made a bet most lenders never make. He built the ability to underwrite the end-use itself — a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses that measures employability and real ROI. The result: NPAs held at ~1%, roughly one-tenth of what banks see the moment they step outside tier-1.

Victor has a clear view of where lending goes next. In a post-LLM world, risk, distribution, and fulfillment get radically more efficient — one person already drives ₹50 crore of disbursal a year, and OPEX is projected to fall toward 2% at ₹6,000 crore AUM. His ranking never changes: NPAs first, unit economics second, growth third.

If you are excited about how AI is rebuilding lending — and who gets to dream bigger because of it — this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
00:50 - The two numbers that tell Propelld's story
01:55 - Why 70% of borrowers come from tier-3 cities
02:21 - How NPAs stay at 1%
02:52 - Why education is a great asset class
04:04 - Building a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses
05:31 - End-use control: why an education loan isn't a personal loan
06:27 - Why banks only lend to IITs and IIMs
08:36 - Measuring employability to underwrite the end-use
10:23 - 10 years at the intersection of fintech and edtech
11:46 - Why education financing is only ~5% penetrated
17:53 - Do India's graduate really not get a job?
21:12 - The 8% data point, and quantifying ROI
22:24 - The social mobility no one can price
25:39 - From IIT Madras and a global bank to building Propelld
27:41 - How the post-LLM world rewires lending
30:26 - How fast an institute gets onboarded and a loan disbursed
32:12 - Profitable at a ₹1 lakh ticket size
34:13 - The financials: doubling revenue, holding costs flat to FY30
37:19 - Lending as an ecosystem enabler, not just a loan
39:33 - The most valuable courses in a post-LLM world
41:40 - The bet on arts graduates as coding gets commoditized
43:32 - The Milton Friedman paper that started it all
46:53 - 100 investors, and the few who said yes
48:33 - Co-founding with school friends since class 6
50:24 - Settling disagreements over food and Hampi trips
51:31 - The most common mistake fintech founders make
52:51 - The one metric that ranks above everything: NPAs
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.

This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?

We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

Most founders build one unicorn. Naveen Tewari built two.

InMobi started with a simple bet: mobile would become the world's most important computing platform, and advertising could make it free for everyone. Every Indian VC said no.

Naveen flew to San Francisco on a maxed-out credit card and returned with a $7 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram. Later came a $200 million investment from Masayoshi Son. Overnight, InMobi became India's first unicorn. Then he did it again.

Glance, built quietly inside InMobi over three years, is now one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in the US, with more than 10 million monthly active users in the US.

The thesis behind both companies is the same. The world's most powerful technologies, first mobile and now AI, only reach masses when someone figures out how to pay for them. Naveen believes advertising is that mechanism, and that InMobi is uniquely positioned to subsidise AI access at population scale, just as it helped subsidise mobile a decade ago.

If you want to understand how one founder from India has quietly helped shape two technology eras, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
00:57 - Why Naveen became a founder
03:26 - How co-founders met and came together
11:33 - The pivot from mKhoj to InMobi
15:02 - Can AI be subsidised for mass consumption?
16:12 - Expanding globally before the US
18:29 - Which industries can delay entry to US market?
20:53 - What is Glance?
23:55 - Incubated within InMobi for 2 years
25:17 - What changes when you face failure in public?
29:10 - How the SoftBank round changed InMobi
32:53 - Maxing out credit cards to pay bills
38:18 - $7Million Kleiner Perkins & Ram Shriram round
43:07 - Hypergrowth journey: Series A to Series C
45:41 - $200 million funding from Masa
53:31 - Change of VC ecosystem in India
54:34 - How building for B2B differs from B2C
58:50 - How AI is changing InMobi and Glance
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.

This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?

We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

How do you get an inbound from OpenAI and Anthropic?

Goldcast is the video content platform behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Uber and Airbnb, before it was acquired by Cvent in a nearly $300 million deal earlier this year.
Palash Soni (Co-Founder and CEO, Goldcast) joins the Neon Show.

Goldcast entered one of the most overfunded categories in SaaS. Hopin alone had raised more than $1 billion. This is the story of the decisions that helped Goldcast survive the category and ultimately become one of the biggest MarTech acquisition stories of the last few years.

Enterprise customers are won long before they ever sign a contract. We trace that idea through Goldcast's journey, from landing Drift as its first marquee customer and reaching its first $1 million in ARR, to the relationships that quietly compounded over the years and eventually led to an inbound from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

We discuss how retention has always been MarTech's biggest challenge and why AI doesn't fundamentally change that. And why acquisition, not an IPO, is the most realistic outcome for most companies in the category.

This episode is about winning in a market everyone had written off, and the decisions that turned Goldcast into one of the few companies left standing.

00:00 - Trailer
00:36 - How Palash caught the startup bug
05:51 - Meeting the co-founders
08:50 - Fundraising has never been easy for Goldcast
10:36 - How we got a term sheet in 2 days
12:43 - We quit HBS and they became our first customer
18:47 - Customers told us our product looked ugly
19:50 - How Drift founder changed the course of Goldcast
21:44 - When competitors raised $250 million
23:31 - How Goldcast got high-profile angel investors
30:33 - The elevator pitch of Goldcast
31:06 - When companies in your space are crashing
32:36 - Was virtual events even a valid space after COVID?
43:15 - How Goldcast won OpenAI
44:38 - What led to the acquisition
53:33 - One thing Palash would change about the last 5 years
56:58 - Founders should define company values
58:48 - Why we had an unusually large post-sales team
01:01:09 - Retention in MarTech has always been subpar
01:04:36 - Is acquisition the only path for a MarTech company?
01:09:16 - How Goldcast got great logos
01:11:01 - How the three co-founders split roles
01:12:05 - If not acquisition, then what?
01:14:20 - How founders move to higher ACVs
01:16:21 - The ethos of the founding team
01:17:25 - The book that changed me
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

Who powers the cloud infrastructure behind NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery, Olympics, and the Super Bowl?

Amagi, built out of an office on Bannerghatta Road in Bengaluru. What started there grew into a company that went public at an $825 million valuation and today has a market cap of over $1.3 billion, earns 73% of its revenue from the US, and proved that world-class enterprise technology can be built in India and sold to the world.

Co-founders Srividhya Srinivasan and Baskar Subramanian take us back to the days after selling their first startup to a NASDAQ-listed chipmaker, when they landed on an idea almost nobody in India's broadcast industry believed in: regionalizing satellite TV ads.

That business grew to ₹180 crore in revenue. Then the founders made a bold call: "Enough of this hardware mess. We'll host only on the cloud." It meant shutting down an 8 year old profitable business to back a cloud platform that was barely making a few crores. That decision transformed Amagi into the company it is today.

18 years later, Amagi went public, as a strong example of building a truly global enterprise software company from India. But the IPO itself was far from an obvious decision. The founders share why going public was the right choice despite not needing capital.

This episode will tell you how category-defining companies are built.

00:00 - Trailer
01:00 - How three college kids became founders
04:55 - The startup idea validated by a palmist
07:10 - How founders split roles (w/o designations)
11:04 - What Amagi 2.0 does
14:29 - Bannerghatta Road runs Olympics for the US
15:54 - Only 10% of TV networks are on the cloud
16:50 - Why shut down a profitable business?
21:25 - Why one co-founder moved to the US
28:06 - Did Amagi really need the IPO?
31:10 - What is Amagi 2.0?
36:04 - Selling to the US: then vs. now
40:44 - How NBC signed with Amagi
43:56 - How intent is measured through contracts
46:58 - 5 major decisions that changed Amagi
52:08 - How AI is changing Amagi
57:45 - Being the CTO of a public company
1:02:57 - US vs India Market: US is fast to experiment
1:04:48 - Enterprises Need Human Touch
1:11:12 - Cloud and TV: No one Believed
1:13:34 - What will Happen to Hollywood

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Nansi on:
LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra
X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

Why did global VCs invest $60M into India's most operationally heavy marketplace problem?

The early bet was undoubtedly on the founder, Anjali Sardana.

A 23 year old biology graduate from Georgetown University who is today the solo founder of Pronto. The company founded on 2nd April 2024 is at a $200 Million valuation, just a year later and they are growing at god-speed. What began in a single hub in Sector 56, Gurgaon is today 22,000 bookings a day, 5,000+ professionals, and operations across India's biggest cities.

But Pronto was never just about convenience. It was built on a belief that India’s home services market is broken not just for customers, but even more so for workers. No income stability. No safety net. No formal identity in the system.

Not many individual investors write a $20M cheque. Lachy Groom did, alongside General Catalyst and Gladebrook. One year in, Pronto’s growth explains the conviction. This episode is the story of the chaos, the urgency and the belief behind one of India's fastest moving startups.

00:00 — Trailer
01:32 — What is Pronto?
03:16 — Hiring the first 30 pros in a single day
06:13 — Delivering uniforms in 48 hours
08:02 — Hustling to make the first payroll
09:23 — The first home office
11:28 — Why the customer app is only a nice-to-have
17:18 — How pros are trained
21:11 — How Gurgaon, Mumbai & Bangalore behave differently
29:17 — TAM expands based on ease of access
34:58 — Mission is bringing dignity to formal labour
42:27 — Pronto's 30-year vision
42:48 — How US investors see Indian startups
44:37 — How a ₹400 headhunter brought the first hire
47:05 — Final round interview for Pronto's chief of staff
49:29 — How Anjali hires missionaries
54:31 — One thing Anjali would always do as founder
58:29 — One thing she's most proud of
59:29 — One value Pronto would never compromise on
1:01:44 — A company with urgency as core value
1:03:55 — What needs to change in India for Pronto to succeed?
1:05:18 — How to build a win-win-win business
1:07:40 — Why was this problem not solved yet?
1:09:02 — If Pronto fails, what would be the reason?
1:10:05 — How Anjali spends a day as a solo founder
1:15:30 — One lesson learned the hard way

-------------

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

-------------

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund/
X: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Nansi on:
LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra
X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra

-------------

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail