Meet Sharad Sanghi who built India’s first data center, he spent 25 years building Netmagic, India’s largest data center company. He came to India in 1995, worked at VSNL as the country was discovering the internet, and built a company focused on internet for businesses.

Now he is building Neysa, an AI cloud startup, which recently raised $50M to help businesses adopt AI, all from India.

With Neysa businesses can use AI without writing a lot of code or use five different tools to run it. And do everything—train models, test them, deploy them, and monitor them—in one single dashboard.

Sharad has a lot of perspective to share—as someone who was at the forefront while India adopted the internet, and now, the AI wave.

If you're building in AI, part of an enterprise exploring AI, or simply thinking about where India is in the AI race—this episode is for you.

0:00 – Trailer

02:00 – How Neysa makes AI easy & cheap?

04:37 – From datacentre to AI

06:54 – 1200 GPUs & 15 Clients

07:24 – Selling internet to Businesses

12:03 – Why India Needs Local AI Clouds

13:20 – How Neysa Plans to Stand Out

15:14 – Is Scaling a Hyperscaler Easy?

19:26 – Can India Shift from IT to AI?

26:40 – AI in Large Enterprises vs Mid-Market

27:51 – AI Revolution vs Cloud in 2006

31:06 – What’s the Moat for AI Startups?

33:08 – Is Private Data the Real AI Goldmine?

35:59 – Why Product & GTM Matter Early On

38:06 – Why Scaling must come before Demand

42:12 – OpenAI’s edge on Deepseek?

44:52 – How should enterprises navigate AI?

46:32 – Did Only NVIDIA Predict the AI Boom?

48:17 – Founder 1.0 V/S 2.0

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Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journeys from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys.

Hence was born The Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes.

We welcome you to our journey to understand what goes behind building a super successful company. Every episode is done with a very selfish motive, that I and Nansi should come out as a better entrepreneur and professional after absorbing the learnings.

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Check us out on:

Website: https://neon.fund/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/

Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/

Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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