Neon Fund has been investing in AI first startups from 2020. One of the first investments that we made was InFeedo in March 2020. We led the seed round of InFeedo, post which they went to YC. Back then AI was hardly the buzzword. InFeedo is one of the first B2B SaaS companies from India to reimagine core workflows using AI from the ground up. They built how AI can help employees in an organisation with mental health. AI powered People experience platform that employees love.
Our second investment in a core AI startup happened in late 2021 when we invested in the seed round. SpotDraft reimagined workflows for Contract Lifecycle Management for General Counsels using AI. AI helped GC create and redline the contract, saving them manpower, and allowing them to focus on important work rather than just proofreading the contracts.
Among our portfolio of 55 B2B SaaS companies, we have 20 companies reimagining workflows in their respective horizontals and verticals.
Some more examples
Astra Security – Penetration Testing
Atomicwork – ITSM
CloudSek – Dark Web Security, identifying threats on Dark Web using AI
GTMBuddy – Sales Enablement
At present for any new software implementation at an enterprise, there is a huge learning curve. And implementation of any new system breaks the previous existing system. So the cost of adopting a new software at an enterprise is at least 3X of what is paid to the software vendor.
The Neon team believes that AI would play a major role in reducing the cost of migrations as well reducing the time taken for employees. Rather than employees adopting software, software would be adopting an employee style of working.
As software becomes more intelligent, employees would have to spend less time writing the data in the software. Data would be captured from your existing tools like email and slack to feed into your CRM. I imagine we are not far away from the day we see a CRM which requires zero data entry from your side.
Siddhartha Ahluwalia
I am Managing Partner at Neon Fund, B2B SaaS Fund investing in pre seed and seed stage B2B SaaS companies built by Indian founders and building for US Market. I am also host of Neon Show podcast, which I & Nansi started in 2018, one of the most listened podcast in the Indian Startup Ecosystem. I started Adddodoc, B2B SaaS CRM for Pediatricians in 2012, which got acquired by Sheroes in 2017. In 2019 I worked for VC firm Prime Ventures and in 2020 I worked for Amazon Web Services as the Head of SaaS Ecosystem for India for Startup BD India team My skills are starting companies from 0-1, and Go to Market in the US for B2B SaaS startups from 0 to $10M ARR is my forte. We are the only few VC funds globally that are practitioners of GTM ourselves.
