Meet Ali Partovi, man who bet on young talent and backed Cursor and Kalshi; his $150 million Neo fund reached $1.2 billion in value by the end of 2025

Ali Partovi is a Silicon Valley investor. He has built a venture capital business around a simple idea. It is focused on identifying talented people early and helping them build successful businesses. Neo delivered similar strong results due to this approach. Its $150 million fund from 2021 reached a value of about $1.18 billion by the end of 2025.

The fund had backed around 80 startups. The list includes Anysphere, which is the company behind AI coding tool Cursor. Similarly, it also invested in Kalshi, which is a prediction market platform.

Wall Street Journal reported that Neo's second fund was worth about 6.5 times its invested capital on a net basis.

Who is Ali Partovi?

Partovi is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He founded Neo in 2017. He had earlier invested in technology companies, which included Facebook and Dropbox.

Neo also runs a college programme called Neo Scholars. It identifies students with strong technical skills and helps them connect with startups.

In 2021, it raised $150 million for its second fund. Neo planned to invest between $500,000 and $1.5 million in around 80 companies over four years, reported Forbes.

Notably, Neo's investment approach is simple. It focuses on technical ability and relationships with founders, sometimes before they launch a business.

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Michael Truell and Aman Sanger are the co-founders of Cursor. They joined Neo's college programme in 2020. This later led Cursor's first institutional funding round in 2022.

Cursor is developed by Anysphere and it helps software developers write and edit code using artificial intelligence (AI). It gained attention as businesses and developers looked for ways to use AI in software development.

Neo has also backed Kalshi. It is a platform that allows users to trade on the outcomes of future events.

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Neo's investment portfolio

Neo's first fund, which raised $82.4 million in 2018, was valued at $778 million at the end of 2025, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Investments in Cursor and Kalshi played a big role in performance. Neo's combined initial investment of $4 million in the two companies was worth about $1.4 billion by the end of the first quarter of 2026.