The Neon Show

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 infrastructure layer for a world run by autonomous AI agents.

In this episode Avinash explains why he believes open-weight models will win, why LLMs will become commodities, why Python will become a serious problem for data-centers as millions of agents come online, why...

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 infrastructure has massive GPU cluster systems. If even one GPU fails the whole training workload fails. You can't have 100,000 employees managing 100,000 GPUs. But LLMs are not the right solution for managing the infrastructure.

Kandan and Randolph have spent decades operating large-scale...

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 episode we have Prukalpa, Founder of Atlan. Atlan started solving this problem back in 2020, long before it became the hottest category. And today it counts 20% of the Fortune 500 as customers with an 85% competitive win rate.

Prukalpa explains how context for agents requires knowl...

“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 enterprises as customers.

Nikhil Gupta, Founder & CEO of ArmorCode, shares why he studied 7,000 security companies before starting up, why 3 early customers can be the "kiss of death" for startups, why customers don’t always tell founders the truth, why developers hate security tools and why...

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 urgency that surprises everyone but you.

In this episode, Tanay Tandon, Co-Founder & CEO, Commure explains why US healthcare is a massive but inefficient market, which pays ~$500B in administrative “work tax,” and how language models and agentic software can automate much of that work, make heal...

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 founder journey, he is helping brands become visible to AI.

In this episode, Phalgun shares why he chose to build an AI company, how Bodhium Labs helps brands influence LLMs, why lazy marketing is dead and why AI...

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 large-scale building looks like at tech giants like Meta and Cohesity.

In this episode, we discuss why a founder's fearlessness and ambition will define the destiny of the company far more than technical skills. Krishna...

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 forever very fast.

In this episode, Swapnil, Founder & CEO of Observe AI candidly shares what it takes to rebuild a company after you have already built it, why changing people and culture are harder than changing the product, why today's AI winners could disappear...

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 evaluation, and obsession with every layer of the stack. 

We also discuss why existing AI benchmarks are not very helpful, why latency is voice AI’s biggest enemy, and why maintaining context across long conversations is one of the hardest unsolved problems.

Apart fro...

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 understood at the time. 

In early 2022, long before ChatGPT existed, Turing began helping OpenAI improve its models by feeding human expertise directly into training. Today its network of more than four million vetted engineers and domain experts powers the post-training and e...

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, managing around ₹50,000 crore for more than 1,100 wealthy families. The firm acts as a personal CFO for a family's entire wealth, doing for a household what a finance chief does for a company.

He built it the hard way. He left a senior banking career at D...

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, and Solvvy, one of the first conversational AI companies, was bought by Zoom in 2022. He then spent two and a half years heading AI products at Zoom, sitting beside founder Eric Yuan as the company raced Microsoft into the AI era.

...

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 AirGap Networks selling to Zscaler to earlier winners like Marketo and MobileIron. Its portfolio today runs from Tekion in automotive retail to Atomicwork in IT service management, Krisp in voice AI, and Synthpop in healthcare.

Arun Penmetsa is a Partner at the firm. He...

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 category. Today, pre-seed is what some of the world's most ambitious startups raise as their very first institutional capital.

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...

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. And is now the largest consumer robotics company shipping in the United States.

Navneet Dalal (a computer-vision pioneer who co-invented HOG) and Mehul Nariyawala met building Flutter, a gesture-recognition app that became #1 in 72 countries and was acquired by Google, where...

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 bi...

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...

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 a...

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.<...

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...

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...

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 unicorn status in 2021. Then, in 2022, as the foundation model race accelerated, OpenAI approached Turing to provide coding data for ChatGPT.

Jonathan recognised that frontier AI labs faced an enormous bottleneck: high-quality...

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 their future on AI agents.

We discuss why data quality is becoming one of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI. 

An AI agent fed bad data for 12 hours d...

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 models become cheaper and more abundant? 

And try to answer this by looking at how inference spend v/s compute spend is shifting, and why inference may become the biggest i...

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, it was validation of a bet he had made 6 years earlier.

After exiting Ezetap, Bhaktha founded Chara Tech to create electric motors that don't need rare earth magnets at all. The...

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 was only half the problem. Maintaining it was the real battle.

Years later at Stanford, he witnessed the birth of GPT-2 and Codex, the very foundation of GitHub Copilot. While much of th...

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 that most teams underestimate. The winners in AI are not just shipping faster. They are building systems that behave predictably, improve continuously, and earn user trust over time. As traditional monitoring breaks down in...

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 what he calls the “Discontinuity Thesis.”

At PernixData, that discontinuity was the shift from hard disks to flash storage. The company scaled to $25 million in revenue befo...

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 what he calls the “Discontinuity Thesis.”

At PernixData, that discontinuity was the shift from hard disks to flash storage. The company scaled to $25 million in revenue befo...

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 sourced and invested early in companies across Enterprise AI, including two unicorns, Phenom and Reify Health, with Reify reaching around a $4B valuation and Phenom crossing $1B.

Over 40...

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 million consumers and 100,000+ stores worldwide.

We explore the internal culture at Capillary that has not only retained 20% of its core team for over a decade but has also served as a launchpad for 5...

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 break. We are moving from a web of discovery to an outcome-driven internet, where agents care only about the destination, not the journey.

As...

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 explore why traditional ERP systems like NetSuite or Dynamics fail construction companies, how Merlin is rethinking enterprise software for builders, and why AI may finally make it possible to coordinate the massive complexity behind...

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 call from a CIO birthed their entire enterprise motion.

Throughout his career, Manish has joined companies that already showed early product–market fit in large markets, allowing him to spend a decade helpin...

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 million. Ashmeet runs Engineering Capital as a solo GP and the fund has been oversubscribed since Fund One.

Ashmeet says that the most common way technical founders fail...

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 applications and the models, whether that’s GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini.

With 24,000 companies routing their AI through Portkey, Rohit sits on ground-level data on how AI is actually being us...

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 read every label, check multiple reviews, or wonder if the top result is there because a brand paid for it. FirstClub is trying to sol...

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 compressing them to run on vehicle hardware in real time. That's where he first saw what small models could do: a hundredth of the size, almost no loss in accuracy.

...

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 not store the reasoning, the exception, or the past decisions that shaped the outcome. Ashu argues that this missing layer is the biggest opportunity in enterprise AI righ...

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 the market sits at the intersection of real estate, healthcare, and hospitality, most sales still depend on manual follow-ups and scattered tools.

Budy builds digital workers for sales teams: AI te...