The Neon Show

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...

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 2...

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 inve...

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...

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 buil...

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 singl...

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 thesis that talent matching is a trillion-dollar problem. Turing reached un...

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 of Pantomath, a data operations center for enterprises that are betting...

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 hood of the AI boom. We discuss a simple question: Who wins when...

China processes nearly 90% of the world's rare earths. Rare earths are hidden inside everything from EVs and smartphones to fighter jets, making them one of the most critical materials powering the modern economy. When China restricted rare earth exports in April 2025, the world saw the huge risk of depending on a supply chain controlled by a single country. For Bhaktha Keshavachar, however,...

Will your software soon be a living organism with its own immune system? Animesh Koratana, founder of PlayerZero, started his software career long before he founded the company. Growing up in Atlanta, he spent his childhood inside his father’s software business, watching engineers sitting through the unglamorous work of QA and keeping systems alive after launch. He saw early that writing software...

85% of AI teams will hit a serious production failure this year. The only thing separating them from the 15% who don't? Evals. After nearly two decades of building AI systems at Microsoft, Facebook, and Dropbox, Ameya Bhatawdekar is now Field CTO at Braintrust, the AI observability platform used by Airtable, Notion, Stripe, Dropbox, Vercel, Cloudflare, Lovable, and Replit. We discuss a shift...

What does it take to build a company that industry giants want to buy? Poojan Kumar built and exited two enterprise infrastructure companies, PernixData to Nutanix and Clumio to Commvault. He began his career at Oracle, where he wrote the original code for Exadata and helped scale it into a billion-dollar product line. But his real founder journey began when he left the corporate world to chase wh...

Healthcare has never moved this fast. Pharma giants are no longer just buying software. They are writing $50 million checks for access to a single foundational model. Systems of record are being replaced, and the shift is unfolding fastest in a place most people did not expect: healthcare. Vignesh Kumar, Partner at Sierra Ventures, has spent 13 years at the center of this enterprise shift. He has...

Are recessions actually the best time to start your company?  Aneesh Reddy, the founder of Capillary Technologies, believes that economic downturns are the ultimate filter for identifying products that have a "right to exist”,which is only earned when a product solves a deep, non-negotiable pain point for the customer. This idea has shaped Capillary’s journey that led to a 4500 Crore IPO, 250...

From employee #16 to $1B ARR at Nutanix, then scaling ThoughtSpot to $150M ARR and a $4B+ valuation now building for a world where agents will drive the internet. Sudheesh Nair joins the Neon Show. The internet as we see it today was optimized around human strengths and weaknesses, using algorithms to monetize our greed and fear. But as agents take up more of the internet, that playbook starts to...

Can AI Rebuild the $1 Trillion Construction Industry? Construction is one of the largest industries in the world, yet most projects still run on Excel sheets, fragmented tools, and disconnected workflows. Sneha Kumari (Co-founder, Merlin) and Graham Blake (CPO, Merlin) break down why construction has remained one of the least digitized industries and why that is finally starting to change. We expl...

What if the biggest mistake you can make as a founder is signing Apple as your first customer? Manish Jindal spent 10 years at Cloudflare as employee #45, helping take the company from $10 million revenue to a $60 billion public company. Manish breaks down the Cloudflare playbook: why they intentionally said “no” to Fortune 500 companies early on to protect their product, and how a single phone ca...

What does it look like to run the same playbook across five venture funds? That is the bet Ashmeet Sidana has made at Engineering Capital. From Fund One to Fund Five, he has written the first check into founders solving problems with Technical insight. His portfolio includes Rubrik, now a public company, SignalFx which was acquired by Splunk for $1 billion, and CodeRabbit, last valued at $550 mill...

Over 1 Trillion AI tokens pass through Portkey every single day. Every AI product eventually runs into the same problem. The prototype works, but once it goes live the system has to manage multiple models, rising token costs, unpredictable latency, and infrastructure that was never built for AI workloads. That is the problem Rohit Agarwal is solving with Portkey, an AI gateway that sits between ap...

Is the best grocery platform one that decides what it WON’T sell? That is the bet Ayyappan is making with FirstClub. Fewer products. Stricter rules. While most quick commerce apps are trying to deliver orders faster, he is asking a different question. What if consumers need not “faster or cheaper”, but a retail platform where they can trust every item listed on it? A place where you do not have to...

Will smaller AI models win over large language models? Sudarshan Kamath grew up in Mumbai, taught himself AI before most Indian companies were even hiring for it, and bought the domain "smallest.ai" for $100 in 2022, two years before the company existed. Today, he runs Smallest AI, a startup focused on real time voice AI. He started with self-driving cars, training large models and compr...

What if AI can learn the “why” behind decision making of humans? Ashu Garg and Jaya Gupta recently wrote one of the most discussed articles on AI this year. Their idea drew public responses from Dharmesh Shah, Aaron Levie, and Arvind Jain. Enterprise software has always captured what happened. It records the order, the ticket, and the approval. But it has never captured why it happened. It does no...

Samay Kohli spent 12 years at GreyOrange, scaling it to over $100 million in revenue and a $3 billion valuation at its peak, making it one of the world’s largest warehouse robotics companies. Two years ago, he started again with Budy, this time in the US senior care industry. In this industry, decisions are emotional, sales cycles can run for years, and multiple stakeholders are involved. While th...

Do startup valuations today make sense? Umesh Padval, an early investor in Cohere, now valued at about $7 billion shares why Cohere stood out at the time of his investment. He shares what he saw early that made him believe this was not just another AI model company. Umesh is the Founding Managing Partner, Seligman Ventures and previously at Thomvest and Bessemer Venture Partners. He brings experie...