Investors · new episode 23 Oct 2026
The Neon Show
Hosted by Siddhartha Ahluwalia
Indian founders and venture investors on building and funding companies there.
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Investors named as guests in the most episode titles on The Neon Show.
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- 400Ex-Meta VP: ChatGPT Is Just the Trailer for What’s Coming Next23 Oct 2026 · 1h 25mSovereign AIManohar PaluriYann LeCun▶
About this episode
Why would a top AI leader leave Meta at the peak of the AI boom? Manohar Paluri is the co-founder and CTO of Warp Sciences. Before that, he spent years at Meta, where he worked closely with Yann LeCun. He started his career as an intern, and his alma mater includes IIIT Hyderabad, SRI and Georgia Tech. In this episode…
- 399Burning $8M on Open Source, Hitting $100M ARR and the $250 Billion Market | Harjot, CodeRabbit15 Oct 2026 · 1h 2m▶
About this episode
We live in strange times where AI is turning every problem into a coding problem but no one is reading the code solving those problems. On this episode of the Neon show, we have Harjot, Co-Founder & CEO CodeRabbit. Harjot explains why they didn’t go after code generation, the infinite demand for software that is…
- 398How AWS, AngleList and Now AI Killed The Old VC Playbook | Nakul, Audacious9 Oct 2026 · 1h 26mNakul Mandan▶
About this episode
From a boutique industry of ~20 firms to today where there are specialised funds for every stage, geography and category, Venture Capital has changed radically. On this episode we have Nakul Mandan from Audacious Ventures. Nakul came to Silicon Valley at 28 expecting to be fired. He left Lightspeed in 2020, spent 14…
- 397Which SaaS Companies Will Survive Anthropic and OpenAI? | Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures1 Oct 2026 · 1h 10mTim Guleri▶
About this episode
Tim Guleri has spent 25 years in venture capital. Before that, he built companies with $3.8B in combined exits. And before that, he was a Punjabi guy selling Bibles door to door in the US. In this episode, we go deep into AI, venture capital, fundraising, SaaS, Silicon Valley and how great investors actually make…
- 396“Yes.” Building Claude Code for Marketing | Kashish, Hightouch25 Sept 2026 · 56 min▶
About this episode
Now, everyone’s talking about building AI harnesses and context layers. Kashish has been building these for years and Hightouch has now reached a stage where they are challenging giants like Adobe and Salesforce while crossing $100M in revenue. In this episode we discussed how and why LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini are…
- 395Anthropic, Sequoia Investor: 55x Returns in 18 Months, Is Anthropic Worth Trillions? | Vishal Verma22 Sept 2026 · 1h 6mCompoundKleiner Perkins▶
About this episode
How do investors(LPs) invest in investors(VCs) when the world is changing so fast? Vishal Verma has invested in 20+ VC(Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, General Catalyst) funds and has seen 4 market cycles. Vishal has spent decades investing in and alongside some of the biggest venture funds in Silicon Valley. In…
- 394Why OpenAI Has No Moat & LLM Prices Will Collapse | Avinash Lakshman, Weilliptic18 Sept 2026 · 1h 6mAvinash Lakshman▶
About this episode
What if we are looking at the wrong layer? Avinash helped build Dynamo at Amazon, created Cassandra at Facebook, two of the most widely used distributed systems in the industry. Later he founded Hedvig, which was acquired for $225M with a team of under 15 engineers. Now with Weilliptic he is building the…
- 393The Big Problem with GPUs and How To Solve It | Randolph and Kandan, MantisGrid AI15 Sept 2026 · 43 min▶
About this episode
We don't want the industry to fall apart, that's why we started this company. 6 months ago, everyone was talking about model deployment. Now everyone has moved on to agentic AI deployment and autonomous agent swarms. But all of this is running on an infrastructure that itself is not automated. And this underlying…
- 392Why The Next $100B AI Opportunity Is Context Engine| Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan10 Sept 2026 · 1h 9m▶
About this episode
Context has become one of the busiest categories in AI. Every CIO now wants context Engine. Every legacy data catalog and knowledge graph platform has started calling itslef a "context platform”. At the same time reports say that 60% of CEOs say they’ve got $0 benefit from AI. To understand the nuances, on this…
- 391The Unusual Strategy That Helps ArmorCode Grow 100% YOY | Nikhil Gupta8 Sept 2026 · 50 min▶
About this episode
“You have to take crazy risks” Nikhil Gupta got fired at 42, made his first VC pitch in 2000, got the idea for ArmorCode while buying toilet paper during the pandemic and received his first VC cheque in 2020. Today ArmorCode has raised $81M, grown 100% year-over-year, and counts some of the world's largest…
- 390Why Even a $100 Billion Company Wouldn't Be Big Enough | Tanay Tandon3 Sept 2026 · 1h 3m▶
About this episode
How do you fix a $5 Trillion Industry which wastes $500 Billion on mouse clicks every year? By not considering even a $100 Billion company a success. By hiring people who are heat-seeking missiles for pain. By questioning every default. By solving hard problems, then choosing even harder ones. By moving with an…
- 389The AI Moat Everyone is Ignoring | Phalgun Kompalli, Founder UpGrad and Bodhium Labs27 Aug 2026 · 50 min▶
About this episode
When brands can't figure out how LLMs are ranking them, what do they do? upGrad raised close to $800M, made year long online degrees mainstream in India when everyone said it wasn't possible, and in the process became a trusted brand in Indian education. Phalgun Kompalli is the co-founder of upGrad. Now, on his second…
- 388Anthropic & OpenAI Have Changed What Moving Fast Means | Krishna M, Elevation Capital22 Aug 2026 · 59 min▶
About this episode
When frontier labs can build everything, when moving fast doesn't mean what it used to, and when what was impossible can now be done in days, what do you build and how do you build it? Krishna M is an AI Partner at Elevation Capital. He has seen the 0-to-1 journey twice as a founder and has also experienced what…
- 387ChatGPT Killed My $50M ARR Business Overnight | Swapnil Jain Observe Al14 Aug 2026 · 1h 8mSwapnil JainSoftBank▶
About this episode
Observe AI raised $125M from SoftBank at an $850M valuation, went on to cross $50M ARR, and worked with some of the world's largest enterprises. But after 10 months everything changed. From a growth stage startup, Observe became an early stage startup, not because they did anything wrong, but because world changed…
- 386The Al Lab Founder Who Sees The Future First | Karan Goel, Founder & CEO of Cartesia7 Aug 2026 · 59 min▶
About this episode
Karan is the co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, an AI model lab building the next generation of real-time voice intelligence. In this episode, Karan explains what all goes into building an AI Lab company; from massive datasets to pre-training to post-training to inference engines, plus a heavy dose of relentless…
- 385Is Your Startup Model Proof? Vijay Krishnan Turing Founder & CTO On What Startups Should Build to Win31 Jul 2026 · 1h 19mVijay KrishnanGoogle▶
About this episode
What if the company quietly making OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta's models smarter was founded in India? Turing is one of the companies shaping how AI is advancing. It started in 2018 as a talent platform that found the top 1% of the world's engineers, became a unicorn in 2021, and then made a bet almost nobody…
- 384How 1% Stay Rich - What India's Richest Families Do With Their Money That 99% Don't | Rohit Sarin, Client Associates28 Jul 2026 · 54 minDeutsche Bank▶
About this episode
How do India's wealthiest families actually manage their money, and why does the man who looks after roughly ₹50,000 crore of it own zero stocks himself? Rohit Sarin is the co-founder of Client Associates, which he started in 2002 as India's first multi-family office and has grown into the largest in the country,…
- 383Why Even With Great Products AI Startups Lose with 3x Founder Mahesh Ram, ex-Zoom AI24 Jul 2026 · 1h 12mMahesh RamEric Yuan▶
About this episode
What does a founder learn from watching the CEO of a 32 billion dollar company make his biggest AI bets from the inside? Mahesh Ram has built and sold three companies. Thomson Reuters acquired his first, GlobalEnglish went to Pearson after teaching English to more than ten million people at companies like IBM and HP,…
- 382The #1 Mistake Killing B2B Startups | Arun Penmetsa, Storm Ventures21 Jul 2026 · 1h 17mArun PenmetsaStorm VenturesGoogle▶
About this episode
Can the biggest AI labs simply walk into any market and replace the software companies already sitting there? Storm Ventures has spent 26 years building an answer for B2B founders. The firm has made close to 200 investments, backed 11 unicorns, and produced some of the cleanest enterprise exits in Silicon Valley, from…
- 381Gaurav Jain on Building $500M Fund, Missing Ramp and Backing Irrational Founders17 Jul 2026 · 59 minGaurav JainAfore CapitalAnamitra Banerji▶
About this episode
Gaurav Jain has seen more than 10,000 startups, built the world's largest pre-seed fund, backed startups like Gamma, Hightouch and Goldcast and has missed Ramp(you can't be a great investor without having a great anti-portfolio :)) A decade ago, when Gaurav started Afore Capital, pre-seed wasn't even a recognized…
- 380And How Matic Sold 6000 Robots with Zero Marketing | Navneet Dalal & Mehul Nariyawala14 Jul 2026 · 1h 7mMehul NariyawalaNavneet DalalGoogle▶
About this episode
What does it actually take to build a robot that cleans your home when everyone before has failed? Matic is a home robot that sweeps and mops your floors, navigating entirely with cameras, no LIDAR. It shipped its first unit in 2024 and has since sold 6,000 units at ~2,000 a month, almost entirely by word of mouth.…
- 379How to Solve AI's Biggest Problem | Atin Sanyal, Galileo9 Jul 2026 · 1h 10m▶
About this episode
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…
- 378Beating SBI, 1% NPAs & India's Massive Loan Gap I Victor Senpaty Co-Founder Propelld7 Jul 2026 · 55 min▶
About this episode
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…
- 377Lessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses | Naveen Tewari3 Jul 2026 · 1h 3mNaveen TewariKleiner PerkinsRam Shriram▶
About this episode
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…
- 376How to Beat a Competitor With 100x Your Funding | Palash Soni, GoldCast Founder30 Jun 2026 · 1h 21m▶
About this episode
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…
- 375How 3 Friends From Coimbatore Ended Up Running American TV | The Untold Amagi Story26 Jun 2026 · 1h 23mWarner BrosBaskar Subramanian▶
About this episode
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…
- 374How A 23-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Disrupting India's On-Demand Labor Market | Anjali Sardana, Pronto23 Jun 2026 · 1h 8mLachy Groom▶
About this episode
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…
- 373Why Coding is the Fastest Path to AGI | Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth18 Jun 2026 · 1h 11mGoogle▶
About this episode
Who is teaching the world's most powerful AI models to think? Turing is one of the largest data partners to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. At a $2.2 billion valuation it has become one of the most important infrastructure layers in the AGI race. Jonathan Siddharth started Turing in 2018 with a…
- 372Questions Every Founder Must Answer Before Taking an Acquisition Offer | Shashank Saxena, VNDLY & Pantomath11 Jun 2026 · 1h 32mShashank SaxenaMichael Jordan▶
About this episode
Most AI failures won't come from a bad model. They'll come from bad data. Shashank Saxena spent most of his career on the buying side of enterprise technology before founding VNDLY which was acquired by Workday for $510 million. He then joined Sierra as a Managing Partner before going full time as Co-founder and CEO…
- 37194% CAGR: What the Inference Boom means for your AI costs | Vamshi Ambati9 Jun 2026 · 52 min▶
About this episode
Vamshi Ambati has spent more than two decades in AI, through the symbolic era, statistical era, and the neural wave we're experiencing today. A CMU PhD, founder of LatentStructure and Predera (which was acquired), now an investor at Virama Ventures, he's one of the sharper voices on what's actually happening under the…
Who the show talks about
Firms named in its episodes, and people named in descriptions: talked about, rather than on the show.
