Investor Profile: Neo

Neo is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm and mentorship community founded in 2017 by Ali Partovi, the Iranian-American entrepreneur known for early investments in Facebook, Airbnb, and Dropbox, and for co-founding the computer-science education nonprofit Code.org. Neo's founding insight is that tomorrow's best founders can be spotted while they are still in college — so it built a talent-scouting machine of fellowships, an accelerator, and a mentor network of top operators, and wrapped a venture fund around it.

Thesis and model

Neo describes itself as a diverse mentorship community, startup accelerator, and VC fund. Rather than waiting for traction, it identifies exceptional engineers and students early, mentors them for years, and funds what they start. The model has produced striking results: The Wall Street Journal reported that Neo's 2021 vintage $150 million second fund grew to $1.2 billion in marked value driven in large part by Neo's early bet on Cursor maker Anysphere. Partovi topped Forbes' US Midas Seed list in 2026. The firm says $100 million — about 45% of its capital deployed — has gone to women and underrepresented CEOs, and reports 51% gross IRR across its first two funds.

Sectors and stages

Neo invests at the earliest stages — student and pre-seed through seed — with a sharp focus on technical founders and AI. Its residency terms: accepted startups get $750K uncapped, with Neo taking participation rights up to 5% ownership in the next equity round, plus a profit share in the fund for each founder. Student teams get a $40K grant. Sectors skew toward developer tools, AI, and infrastructure, reflecting the firm's engineering-talent DNA.

Fund size

Neo's fundraising history is fully public: an $80 million first fund in 2018, $150 million for its second fund in 2021, $235 million across two new funds in 2023, and a $320 million fourth fund closed in April 2025. Forbes reported in 2025 that Neo had crossed $1 billion in assets under management. Its backers read like a Silicon Valley hall of fame — Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt, Henry Kravis, Joe Gebbia, Max Levchin, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, alongside institutional LPs including Cendana Capital, Horsley Bridge, and Sequoia Capital.

Notable portfolio

Neo was the first investor in Cursor (Anysphere), whose co-founder Michael Truell came through Neo's Scholars programme. Other notable early bets include prediction market Kalshi, Cognition AI, Replit, and MosaicML. Neo-funded student founders have also started companies like Caldera and Skiff, and hundreds of Neo Scholars now hold leadership roles at companies from Figma to Stripe.

Programmes and perks

• Neo Residency — a 3-month startup residency at Neo's San Francisco space with an all-expenses-paid bootcamp (winter in Texas, summer in Oregon), Demo Day, and bespoke VC introductions. Companies get $450K+ in cloud and AI perks from Azure, AWS, OpenAI, and more; student teams get $100K+.
• Neo Scholars — a fellowship for college students showing early technical promise: a $20,000 grant plus deep mentorship; roughly 30 selected per year, with alumni including the founders of Cursor, Chai Discovery, Applied Compute, and Flint.
• Neo Accelerator — 12–15 startups per cohort, two cohorts a year, each paired with roughly 30 mentor-operators; an AI track launched with OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023.