Alex Kiam is the founder and CEO of Neon, the app that pays you to talk on the phone.

Alex grew up in New York City and from an early age was fascinated with how to derive value from data. In college, he started a personal trading account that significantly outperformed market indices. He used “alternative data,” including poll numbers, Twitter likes, and even soccer tournament schedules, to predict and profitably trade on events like Brexit, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and various quarterly earnings reports.

He started his career as a hedge fund quant at Eminence Capital, a $7 billion fund based in New York City. At Eminence, Alex continued to focus on ways to leverage alternative data to make more accurate investment decisions.

After attending business school, Alex led special projects at Protege, an AI training data vendor, where he gained firsthand exposure to how training data is sourced, evaluated, and used across the AI ecosystem. While Protege did not work with conversational audio, the role gave Alex a broad view into the growing importance of high-quality data for model development.

At the same time, Alex had been thinking independently about conversational data, an idea he began developing prior to and during business school, as voice-based interfaces and AI systems became more prevalent. He observed that across the industry, many companies profit from people’s data without meaningful transparency, consent, or compensation. Believing there was an opportunity to build a more consumer-aligned model, he left Protege to found Neon.

Neon is built on the idea that users should explicitly opt in, understand how their data is used, and be paid for it, creating a system that puts consumers at the center of the AI data economy.

Since launching in September, Neon has experienced historic viral growth, becoming the #2 free app on the App Store within 10 days of launch and growing to over half a million users. Neon recently raised a $25M hybrid seed led by Lightspeed (equity) and Upper90 (credit), with participation from Upfront Ventures and numerous others, following a pre-seed led by Upfront. Neon has secured contracts with top AI labs and has expanded to a team of 14.

Alex received an AB in Applied Math from Harvard, an MPhil in Economics from Oxford, and an MBA from Stanford. He is a lifelong Jets fan.