Early-stage venture capital fund Neon has added another executive to its mix by appointing Gagan Josan as general partner.
The appointment comes a few months after the Bengaluru-based firm launched the fund with a target corpus of $25 million (Rs 207.7 crore).
“His entrepreneurship and go-to-market experience and expertise will be a value addition to our portfolio founders, while we continue to deliver results for our investors,” said Siddhartha Ahluwalia, managing partner.
Prior to joining Neon, Josan founded Nittio Learn, an enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) company in the learning management space which was later acquired by Whatfix in 2021 or an undisclosed sum in a cash and equity transaction.
Post the acquisition, Josan served as head of sales - industry solutions at Whatfix, wherein he was responsible for scaling the business in the US and Europe. Before his entrepreneurial stint, Josan also worked in product leadership roles at Amazon and Nokia Networks.
“I was pulled towards Neon by their approach toward early-stage investments - not only working with the best SaaS startups across the country but going above and beyond to help accelerate their journey to $10 million annual revenue run rate (ARR),” said Josan, while commenting on his appointment.
Neon was floated as a business-to-business (B2B) SaaS-focused early-stage fund by Ahluwalia and Nansi Mishra who founded the 100x Entrepreneur podcast.
The fund aims to invest in B2B SaaS startups, helping them go beyond more than $10 million in annual revenue run rate within five years along with helping them with go-to-market expertise.
The fund’s limited partners (LP) mix includes Blume Founders Fund, Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners, and founders like Pallav Nadhani of Fusion Charts, Varun Shoor of Kayako, Paras Chopra of Wingify, Kiran Darisi, who previously worked with Freshworks, and Kshitij Jain of Mobolt.
Ahluwalia and Mishra started the 100x Entrepreneur podcast in 2018 interviewing founders and investors. It rebranded to ‘Neon’ in 2023.
The new fund follows the firm’s 100x Entrepreneur’s $10-million fund, which was launched in 2020. According to its website, the firm has made about 35 early-stage bets to date.
Companies like the virtual summit platform Airmeet, influencer management platform Affable.ai, employee benefits platform Plum, and sales software provider ElevateHQ among others are part of its portfolio.
