Is Your Startup Model Proof? Vijay Krishnan Turing Founder & CTO On What Startups Should Build to Win

What if the company quietly making OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta's models smarter was founded in India?Turing is one of the companies shaping how AI is advancing. It started in 2018 as a talent platform that found the top 1% of the world's engineers, became a unicorn in 2021, and then made a bet almost nobody understood at the time. In early 2022, long before ChatGPT existed, Turing began helping OpenAI improve its models by feeding human expertise directly into training. Today its network of more than four million vetted engineers and domain experts powers the post-training and evaluation work behind the frontier labs, and the company crossed roughly 300 million dollars in revenue while staying profitable, at a 2.2 billion dollar valuation.Vijay Krishnan is the co-founder and CTO. He was an NLP researcher at Stanford back when almost no one believed that predicting the next word could ever turn into reasoning, and he explains why running a modern model company without human-in-the-loop data is like entering a race with three tyres instead of four. He walks through how a model is actually taught to use software like Salesforce, why coding became the beachhead for every lab, and what changed for Turing the moment Scale AI was absorbed into Meta.The conversation then turns to the question every founder is now asked in the room. What is your moat against Claude? Vijay's answer is to go deeper than the frontier labs can reach, into the outcome you own and the context that lives inside an enterprise.If you are excited about how AI actually gets built, who really trains the models, and how to build a company that survives the labs, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer02:20 - The Indian company quietly behind OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic04:50 - How Turing went from a talent platform to a unicorn to an AI research partner08:20 - The bet nobody understood11:50 - Why a model company without human data is "racing on three tyres"15:50 - Why coding became the beachhead for every frontier lab19:50 - What changed for Turing the day Meta bought Scale AI23:50 - "What is your moat against Claude?"29:50 - Will AI create more lawyers, not fewer?34:50 - The teams where engineers haven't written code in six months39:50 - 16% of the Philippines' GDP is under threat from AI?43:50 - How you actually teach a model to use Salesforce49:50 - How robots are taught real-world work54:50 - Why million-dollar researcher packages are breaking startup hiring59:50 - The one kind of AI company that gets stronger as the models improve1:04:50 - Product vs. services, and the trap that quietly kills AI startups-------------India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.What is Neon Fund?We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect with Siddhartha on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7-------------This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.Send us Fan Mail