At Neon Ventures, we invest in a very specific type of company—one that’s designed for speed, scalability, and significant return potential. In this article, we’ll break down our investment thesis, explain the criteria we use to evaluate startups, and show you why our portfolio is built for long-term success.

The Neon Thesis

We specialize in launching and backing AI-powered SaaS startups. Our ventures typically fall into two categories:

• B2B SaaS products that solve real operational pain points—often automating workflows in marketing, HR, finance, or product development.

• B2C SaaS platforms with high-retention use cases in wellness, productivity, creator tools, and personalization.

All ventures we back have passed our internal market validation process and are designed to be capital-efficient from day one.

Why AI and SaaS?

We believe these two elements are foundational to modern venture-scale opportunities:

• AI as a leverage layer – Our startups use proprietary or embedded AI to deliver 10x better outcomes or radically reduce time and cost for users.

• SaaS as a model – Predictable revenue, high margins, and defensible customer relationships make SaaS ideal for compounding growth.

Together, this creates businesses that are not just exciting—they’re investable.

How We Select Startups

Before any venture is matched with a founder or funded:

1. We validate the market pain through real user interviews, competitor analysis, and traction simulations.

2. We build the MVP in-house using our 80+ person studio team.

3. We only spin out the top performers—less than 30% of concepts make it past this point.

This means every investment opportunity coming out of Neon has:

• A shipped product

• Paying users

• A full-time founder and team

• A go-to-market strategy in motion

The Result for Investors

Rather than betting on unproven ideas, Neon investors back real companies with early momentum. You don’t have to sort through pitch decks or gamble on unknowns. Every startup in our network has already cleared the riskiest early-stage hurdles.

If you're looking to invest in pre-seed ventures with dramatically reduced risk and asymmetric upside, Neon startups offer exactly that.