A Call for 100x Ideas

Since NEA’s founding nearly five decades ago, we have always looked to partner with the most ambitious founders shaping the future of technology and healthcare. During this time, we’ve seen many technology waves – from the PC to internet and cloud to mobile – and been very fortunate to partner with incredible visionaries at the forefront of these shifts, backing generational companies, such as Salesforce, Workday, Robinhood, Cloudflare, Databricks, and many more.

Now we’ve entered an extraordinary era of AI-led innovation that’s redefining what’s possible.

The AI models we have today are significantly better than two years ago, the inference cost is 280x+ lower,¹ and breakout products in AI search, AI code automation and AI creative tooling have shown us that we indeed can and will create disruptive new applications with AI (e.g. Perplexity, Cursor, Synthesia, ElevenLabs, Lovable, and more).

Whatever you believe about the proximity of AGI or superintelligence, we have only begun to harvest the capabilities of existing AI models in terms of:

1. Reasoning and understanding

2. Generative voice, image, video, 3D

3. Agentic functionality

4. Idea to reality/production.

There's still so much more to do in productizing AI and building scalable, reliable agentic systems. At the same time, we know that the AI models of today may be the least powerful we’ll see in our lifetime.

What to build then becomes the central question: 

• What difficult problems can we solve?

• What new frontiers can we explore?

• How do we enhance the lives of billions of people? How do we change the fabric of our world for the better? 

• How do we think beyond the confines of ‘how do we solve this existing problem better than today’s solutions’ and start to think ‘how do we reenvision things entirely from a blank canvas?’

Everything is still up for grabs.

Even with the immense progress made in just over two years, we’re still early in the AI transformation. So while the startup battlefield feels crowded at times, we believe this is the perfect time to think big, not niche.

This is our call for 100x ideas.

We want to meet daring founders that have a differentiated take on the future. 

• Product vision that isn’t incrementally better but 100x better

• Intense customer and user obsession, know who you’re solving for

• Opinionated UI/UX design, brand and storytelling  

• Bold takes backed by technical insight on building agentic systems

• Passion for the problem space, is it your life’s work

We want to think beyond the incremental and beyond the now. We want to learn about your vision for the future. Don’t have a category you cleanly fit into? Don’t have an easy TAM calculation? No problem. We’re excited to hear how you’re seeing the future.

Here are a few directions and themes we’re interested in exploring:

Agentic Internet: infrastructure for new generative web where AI is the customer 

New UI/UX for Agents: Rethinking how we interact with AI and the world in the agentic era.

Voice-First Interfaces: Agents and applications for hands-free interaction by design.

On-Device Agents: Mobile AI that moves with you—intelligence on demand, anywhere.

AI Biz in a Box: Tools to launch and run lean, one-person AI-powered businesses.

24/7 Agentic Workforce: Agents handling ops—finance, HR, IT—so you focus on impact.

SaaS Disruptors: From static systems of record to intelligent systems of action.

Vibe Coding & Design: Anyone can easily build and launch custom software.

AI Entrepreneur: AI that finds problems, talks to users, and builds solutions itself.

Digital Human: RL platform that trains models to master any verifiable task.

AI Entertainment: Personalized, dynamic media—generated just for you.

Empathetic Friend: AI that listens, supports, and connects on a human level.

AI-Driven Serendipity: AI that guides you to meaningful IRL experiences.

AI for Science: AI researchers pushing breakthroughs 24/7.

Humanoid Robot: General-purpose robot with physical agency in the world.

Wild Cards: The frontier beyond imagination—what we haven’t thought of yet.

We’ve come a long way since the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, and we’re constantly pushing the boundaries (even planetary!) of what’s possible. We’re now excited by AI’s ability to take us to a whole new level and open up new dimensions. We’d love to be your partner in defining the major breakthroughs of the AI Revolution. If you’re building something 100x+, we would love to meet you!