The Neon Show

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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 training data and human intelligence at scale. Instead of remaining just a talent marketplace, he made a bet that most unicorn CEOs never make. He built a second business on top of the first and leaned back into his AI research roots.

Jonathan has a clear view of what needs to happen before we get to super intelligence. The four keys to unlocking AGI: coding, reasoning, tool use, and multimodality. He believes we solve for those four, and AI can do almost anything a human can do in front of a computer. 

If you are excited about where the AGI race is heading this episode is for you

00:00 - Trailer
01:06 - What Turing does
05:55 - Why OpenAI reached out to Turing
8:28 - How GPT-3 became ChatGPT
17:54 - How ImageNet breakthrough changed the world
21:12 - The largest provider of coding data to AI labs
24:34 - Four keys to super intelligence
28:45 - Every human will run multiple companies in 10 years
32:27 - Can agents have self-improvement loops?
34:36 - The future of software engineering
36:26 - Agents should create, humans should steer
39:46 - Is the line between products and services companies blurring?
40:42 - How an agent can handle hiring end-to-end
43:36 - Every human can now write software
45:22 - Will workflow SaaS disappear?
47:46 - No fine-tuning vs fine-tuning camps
51:49 - A case study in compute constraints
57:06 - Why the world needs so much compute
1:01:26 - Where Jonathan would invest today
1:03:16 - Where cybersecurity is heading
1:08:31 - How the world will look in 10 years
-------------
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 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 doesn't go rogue. It just makes 12 hours of wrong decisions: rejecting insurance claims, issuing credit cards, or drilling in the wrong location. 
As more business decisions are delegated to AI systems, companies will need far greater visibility into what is happening across their data infrastructure.

Shashank also shares the decisions that led to VNDLY's acquisition, the advice he'd give founders evaluating acquisition offers today, and why a Michael Jordan analogy continues to motivate him as a second-time founder.

If you're building enterprise software, selling to large companies, or trying to figure out whether experience is an asset or a liability in the AI era, this episode is for you.

0:00 - Trailer
01:00 - How Shashank became a second-time founder
07:20 - Where Pantomath sits in the data stack
10:55 - How a broken Tableau report turns mission-critical with AI
12:55 - Who Pantomath sells to
15:35 - Solving for a problem that doesn't exist yet
19:03 - How have founder expectations changed today?
20:31 - Series B companies pre- and post-AI
21:26 - The Michael Jordan example
23:57 - How a repeat founder chooses investors
25:10 - What value Snowflake adds as a strategic investor
27:05 - Data is not an open category today
28:34 - The astounding Databricks outcome
29:08 - The reality of the $100 million ARR number
31:48 - Will non-human workers 100x in the next few years?
36:00 - How to protect data in motion
37:26 - How comfortable are we giving full access to agents?
39:47 - Where is automation fastest today?
42:09 - Why entrepreneurs tend to like uncertainty
43:28 - Why Shashank chose to be a founder
45:48 - A customer-driven $510M acquisition
48:32 - Employees vs contractors in any organization
51:22 - Building from Ohio vs the Bay Area
53:14 - Learnings from selling to enterprises
56:31 - How Shashank raised from Tier 1 US VCs
59:19 - Heads down or network as a founder?
1:02:47 - First-time vs second-time founder edge in AI
1:06:22 - Hiring as a repeat founder
1:08:08 - How enterprise sales has changed
1:10:52 - How do you sell for a problem that isn't visible today?
1:12:58 - Best piece of advice
1:16:27 - The only advice for a founder considering M&A
1:21:06 - Position yourself to be capable of taking risks
1:24:51 - What matters to an enterprise buyer?

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

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.

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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 infrastructure opportunity of the next decade.Vamshi explains what actually goes into the cost of a token, why AI is simultaneously getting cheaper and more expensive, and why the inference market alone could reach $1.3 trillion by 2030. 

If you're building in AI or someone who wants a clear mental model of where this industry is headed, this conversation is for you. 

00:00 - Trailer
0:45 - How an AI researcher thinks after 20 years
05:53 - Where enterprise AI adoption is headed
08:35 - Drawing parallels between cloud and AI
11:20 - If building is cheap, what's valuable?
13:37 - Can computing get cheaper?
16:41 - What is inference, really?
22:22 - Why coding and customer support got eaten first?
26:48 - Which technologies are overvalued and undervalued?
29:56 - An accidental entrepreneur's journey
33:15 - Why is healthcare slow to adopt technology?
38:59 - Landing Walmart as a customer
42:36 - Should founders build in services if product isn't visible?
43:47 - Is Palantir a product company or a services company?
44:15 - How to win as a forward-deployed company
46:23 - What it takes to land large enterprise customers
49:20 - Building sales muscles as a technical founder

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

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

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 journey was anything but easy. Six years of R&D. Investors who didn't understand the problem. Customers who weren't convinced. And a motor technology that engineers had known about for over 200 years but never successfully commercialized at scale.

Today, Chara is shipping hundreds of motors, signing major customers, and finding itself at the center of a global geopolitical shift. Bhaktha explains how software became the breakthrough that made rare-earth-free motors practical and what it takes to build a deep tech company long before the market believes the problem exists.

If you are interested in building deep tech for the world, this episode is for you.

0:00 - Trailer
01:10 - When China bans rare earth exports
04:15 - How today’s rare earth shortage is like 1970s oil embargo
05:26 - Are rare earths really rare?
07:23 - Why China has a monopoly
11:43 - 3 reasons why Chara was founded
15:11 - How Chara made a 200-year-old technology practical
16:45 - How software protects deep tech startups
18:53 - The conviction to build deep tech in 2016
21:52 - Why electricity is still the biggest opportunity
26:59 - 4+1 technologies every country should possess
28:17 - The story of 6 years in R&D
33:16 - The response from early customers
36:10 - How China’s ban changed Chara’s journey
39:30 - Why Growth-stage fundraising for DeepTech is Hard
44:28 - What India needs to win in deep tech
52:53 - 3 things needed for a deep tech startup
55:10 - Why the wealthy should invest in deep tech
58:00 - Where Chara is today
01:03:47 - Why Intel lost the race it was winning

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

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/
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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 the world focused on how AI would help engineers write software faster, he became obsessed with a different question: What happens when companies are flooded with AI-generated code that no single engineer fully understands?

With PlayerZero, Animesh is building toward what he calls self-healing software: systems that behave less like static machines and more like living organisms with their own immune systems.

At the center of that vision are “Context Graphs” which captures the "institutional memory" of a company: the deep knowledge held by a senior engineer who has spent years understanding how complex software breaks, the failure modes it develops, and the decisions behind fixing it.

If you are building software today and wondering how reliability, debugging, and ownership will work when machines write most of the code, this episode is for you.

0:00 — Trailer
0:45 — Building Self-Healing Code
2:03 — First Exposure to LLMs Through GPT-2
3:45 — What Is PlayerZero?
5:42 — Institutional Memory of a Senior Engineer
7:10 — How Context Is Built
10:06 — The Viral “Context Graph” Piece
16:24 — The Outcome PlayerZero Delivers
19:59 — When the Agent Tells the Human What to Do
23:43 — Who Is PlayerZero Selling To?
26:56 — Why Software Should Be Treated Like Biology
28:54 — The PlayerZero Customer Pitch
30:37 — Can Software Really Have an Immune System?
35:15 — How Animesh Chose His Investors
36:55 — What’s Next for PlayerZero?

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

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