For the most sought-after founders, the prestige of a top accelerator is increasingly weighed against giving up a significant ownership stake in their company.
Ali Partovi, the veteran investor and CEO of venture firm Neo, wants to offer the mentorship and community of one of the most elite accelerator programs — without forcing the best emerging tech leaders to hand over 7% or sometimes 10% of their company before they even get started.
Partovi, who is known for his early Facebook investments, Cursor and Kalshi, just introduced Neo Residencya new, competitively structured program that combines the company’s now four-year accelerator with a track for current students.
The terms offered by Neo Residency are so founder-friendly that they “are not even comparable to any other accelerator,” Partovi told TechCrunch.
For the cohort of 12 to 15 startups entering the program this summer, Neo will invest $750,000 through an uncapped SAFE — a contract that gives an investor future equity in exchange for money now, with no cap on the valuation used to calculate that stake. Unlike the fixed-rate deals typical of other accelerators, Neo won’t receive its equity capital until the company’s next official funding round, and even then, the reduction is tied to valuation. If a startup raises its next round at a $15 million valuation, Neo’s stake will be 5%, but if that valuation reaches $100 million, the company’s ownership drops to just 0.75%.
“We take the risk upfront, so this is extremely favorable for startups,” Partovi said.
In comparison, Y Combinator usually gets a flat 7% of the company for $125,000, with another $375,000 invested in an uncapped MFN — or most favored nation — SAFE, a clause that ensures early investors get terms at least as good as those given to later ones. Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program typically invests $500,000 in return for 10% of the seed through a SAFE note, and another $500,000 if the next round is raised within 18 months on whatever terms are agreed upon by the other investors.
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“We offer such a great deal that it’s suitable even for founders who wouldn’t even consider another accelerator,” Partovi said.
Lower equity costs are only part of Neo Residency’s appeal.
The founders will work for three months at Neo’s offices in San Francisco’s Jackson Square neighborhood, attend a two-week bootcamp in the mountains of Oregon, and be mentored by about 30 experienced operators, including Russell Kaplan, president of Cognition, and Fuzzy Khosrowshahi, CTO of Notion (and the creator Google Sheets and also Partovi’s uncle).
But the main advantage of the program is its prestige: Seed and Series A investors generally have a lot of respect for the founders chosen by Partovi.
“The one [accelerator] I like right now it’s very high-profile, and every founder I’ve met there is just wicked smart, it’s Neo,” said Wesley Chan, co-founder and CEO of FPV Ventures. he said on stage at the 2025 TechCrunch Disrupt.
Startups that have gone through the program include Moment, a fintech company that has grown 56 million dollars from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Anterior, a healthcare AI startup backed by NEA and Sequoia.
The Neo Residency will also select five to eight students—either individually or in small groups—who will receive a $40,000, no-strings-attached grant to take a semester to work on a project. While there’s no requirement that they drop out of school or start a formal company right away, Partovi said he hopes students will catch the business bug and, when they eventually start a startup, turn to Neo for funding.
Neo keeps the program small and elite: It will span its two annual cohorts of 20 teams each, made up of a mix of active startups and student projects.
Why does Neo offer such generous terms? “We have more confidence in our ability to attract and select future superstars than ever before,” Partovi said.
His track record shows that trust is well-founded. He famously met Cursor co-founder Michael Truell while Truell was still an MIT student and later wrote one of the first audits at the AI coding startup, now valued at nearly $30 billion.
