Founded by early Facebook investor Ali Partovi, Neo has made big bets on founders of hotshot AI startups Pika and Anysphere, the company behind coding tool Cursor. With $320 million in new funding, it’s aiming to cement its status as the Ivy League of startup boot camps.
Before creating Cursor, the wildly popular AI coding tool, Michael Truell was an 18-year-old MIT student, growing restless during his first taste of corporate life as an intern at Google. It was 2019, the summer after his freshman year, and Truell was sitting at the cafe of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, with Ali Partovi, who was recruiting for his vaunted Neo Scholars program, aimed at finding tech’s future crème de la crème while they’re still in college.
Partovi, an early investor in Facebook, Airbnb and Dropbox, chatted with Truell about AI research and startup life. Then he gave the student a handwritten coding test — an easy task for Truell, who finished it in record time. After the meeting, Partovi got out his dossier and scrawled a circle with a star inside of it next to Truell’s picture: the investor’s shorthand indicating he was so impressed that he’d invest in any project Truell pursued.
Truell would become a Neo Scholar, and three years later, Partovi would become the first-ever investor in his startup Anysphere, maker of Cursor. The company, which reportedly took just a year to reach $100 million in annualized revenue (and has since then doubled it), is among the fastest growing startups of all time.
“Ali basically backed us when it was just the idea. We hadn’t really done anything else yet,” Truell told Forbes. “He’s not afraid to spend time with and really bet on people before they’re very proven.”
Partovi’s dossier on Michael Truell, who would go on to create the popular AI coding tool Cursor.
Courtesy Ali Partovi
That’s the conceit behind Neo: to identify exceptional talent before anyone else, mentor and connect them with Silicon Valley elite, then invest in the companies they start. “So many people overlook young people,” Ali told Forbes. “It’s remarkable how much of the greatest work in the history of humanity was done by people in their early 20s.”
Neo was founded in 2017 with its scholars program, which selects 30 members each year, giving them access to workshops, networking events and recruitment connections at big tech companies. Similar to the Thiel Fellowship, the program founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that doles out $100,000 grants to entrepreneurs to forgo college, Neo Scholars can also elect to take time off school to work on a project. But Neo’s version, which comes with a $20,000 grant, is optional and only lasts one semester — designed to be a much less intense commitment than skipping school entirely.
In 2022, Neo added its own accelerator, aimed at nurturing around 20 fledgling startups a year, sending them to a three-week retreat in the Oregon mountains. With more than 4,000 applications for just 50 slots in its Scholars and Accelerator programs, the firm is more selective than Harvard and Yale. On Wednesday, Neo announced a new $320 million fund, which will go to accelerator, seed and late-stage investments. A chunk of the money will also go to the grants offered to Neo Scholars who opt to take a semester off.
Since its inception eight years ago, Neo has quietly built a reputation for nurturing some of tech’s brightest young stars. Besides Truell and his cofounder Aman Sanger, the program has spawned founders from some of the buzziest startups in AI, including Demi Guo, CEO of the generative AI video company Pika and Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, and Walden Yan, CTO of AI coding startup Cognition. Companies that have gone through its boot camp accelerator include Caldera, a blockchain startup backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Moment, a fixed income investment venture backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
A Neo Scholars event with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sequoia partner Alfred Lin.
Courtesy Ali Partovi
That high concentration of talent has made VCs take notice, said Kristina Shen, a partner at Chemistry Ventures, who was previously at Andreessen Horowitz. “Neo is probably the biggest signal” that a startup is worth taking seriously, she said. “People look at Neo, Prod [another accelerator], YC as these signals, but by far, I think Ali has done the best job in terms of getting the highest velocity builders a lot younger.”
Behind the scenes, Neo has three partners: Partovi, Suzanne Xie, a former business lead at payments giant Stripe and a serial startup founder, and Emily Cohen, head of the Neo Accelerator and a former McKinsey consultant. Neo also has a dedicated slate of “mentors,” which include Notion CTO Fuzzy Khosrowshahi and Cognition President Russell Kaplan, who advise Neo members and hold office hours. They are part-time and are compensated in carried interest, a percentage of the fund’s profits. In the last six months, the company has also organized intimate events with tech A-listers, including former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Alfred Lin, Sequoia partner and No. 1 investor on the Forbes Midas List.
The firm has attracted a murderer’s row of investors, including Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt and Sandberg. “The networks he builds, it’s like nothing anyone has ever seen,” Sandberg said of Partovi.
As Neo has ascended, Partovi has not been afraid to call out the competition. In 2023, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan beefed with Partovi on X, after Partovi claimed at an event that Neo’s accelerator companies have a better ratio of mentors than Y Combinator’s. The claim ruffled Tan: “Neo likes to parade their part time spekers [sic] as ‘mentors’ but will they be there 5 years in when you need office hours or help?” he wrote, calling out Partovi for “slander” in a string of posts. (YC has 12 full-time partners, including himself, Tan pointed out.)
“Neo is the highly selective program for top technical teams that Y Combinator once was. It’s more similar to what Y Combinator was in the first place.”
Partovi told Forbes he credits Y Combinator as being “one of the best ideas of the 21st century,” incubating companies like Airbnb and Dropbox — investments that helped make him his fortune. But the storied Silicon Valley institution isn’t what it used to be, he said. “Neo is the highly selective program for top technical teams that Y Combinator once was,” Partovi said. “It’s more similar to what Y Combinator was in the first place.”
He pointed to a 2020 interview with then-CEO of Y Combinator Michael Seibel, who said the accelerator wasn’t aiming to build “another ivory tower.” “I’m hoping YC resembles a large and successful state university system as opposed to an Ivy League network,” Seibel said at the time.
“If they no longer saw themselves as an Ivy League institution, we saw a window to create one,” Partovi says now.
Y Combinator and Tan did not reply to a request for comment. But when asked about Seibel’s statement last year, Tan rejected the idea. “This isn’t McDonald’s. This is actually The French Laundry,” he told Forbes at the time.
Cohen, the Neo partner, says the boutique nature of the program is by design. “Part of what’s so special about the Neo community is that it is this small, tight knit, incredibly technical group of people,” she said, sitting in the Neo office in downtown San Francisco, which was previously Anthropic’s headquarters. “We don’t want to arbitrarily increase that.”
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang at a Neo event.
Courtesy Ali Partovi
Neo’s seed investments, including Kalshi, a Polymarket rival for betting on real world events, and Bluesky, the popular alternative to X, appreciate the personalized attention as well. In the days before the U.S. election last year, Kalshi was strapped for cash as users flocked to bet on the contest’s outcome. To help the company through it, Partovi wired over $12 million (more than $5 million from Neo, and $7 million from himself personally) without set deal terms, CEO Tarek Mansour posted on X at the time, before deleting it shortly after. He declined to comment on the funding, but spoke more broadly about the Neo relationship. “Ali has always been our first line of defense whenever we’ve needed something,” he told Forbes. “This is whether things are going really well, or things are going less well.”
Partovi and his twin brother Hadi grew up in Tehran, Iran, during the 1979 revolution. The son of a physics professor, education was a major emphasis in their household, and he learned to code at age 9. “It was an escape from the terror of Iran,” he said. “The real world was filled with chaos and uncertainty, and the world of computer programming was filled with order and predictability.”
The Partovis moved to the U.S. in 1984, and the twins enrolled at Harvard six years later, where they first met Lin. After college, Partovi co-founded LinkExchange, an early internet advertising company, with his classmate Tony Hsieh, the late entrepreneur who would go on to found Zappos. Lin joined as CFO. The twin brothers later founded iLike, a music discovery site that sold to MySpace in 2009, and Code.org, a nonprofit aimed at teaching computer programming to kindergartners through 12th graders, in 2012.
“He wanted to show people a way to leave college and go work in technology,” Lin said of Neo, noting that Silicon Valley wasn’t a popular career destination when they were in college. Lin sits on the board of Kalshi, an investment he made after a Neo introduction.
“It’s not like I’m going through this meat grinder that is designed to turn me into the average, optimal founder.”
For Neo’s founders, one of the big benefits of the program is the access it provides to tech bigwigs. That was one of the surprises for Michelle Lim, a Yale grad who raised her first check from Neo her startup Flint, which makes a web-based platform for AI agents. “I was eating dessert next to John Collison, then Schrep walked by,” she said, recalling a recent event, referring to the co-founder of Stripe and Michael Schroepfer, former CTO of Facebook, respectively.
But Neo’s focus isn’t just on founders. It also tries to help members with job connections at big companies. OpenAI’s new-grad program for junior engineers, which hires entry-level staff, made all its product hires last year from Neo, Shyamal Anadkat, who works in applied AI at OpenAI and does startup relations for the company, told Forbes. “The people they find are not just technically great,” he said. “But they think differently about the world, and they want to build something.”
For Neo Scholars, the allure is having the freedom to explore passions in a way that is less rigid than college, said Harry Sanders, a 20-year-old student at the University of Michigan, who took the semester off to work on a startup developing AI for mathematical reasoning. “The question is, how do you take a really big swing and do it in an environment where, if you miss, that’s okay,” said Sanders. “It’s not like I’m going through this meat grinder that is designed to turn me into the average, optimal founder.”
Meanwhile at Anysphere, Truell has tried to evoke Neo’s ethos when building out his own team. “The ability to both recognize and take talent really seriously has been something that we’ve tried to borrow a ton at our company,” he said. The startup looks for very experienced talent, but also tries to take chances on younger people who are less proven. “An important component of our hiring is spotting people who are just excellent and are really early-career.”