Ali Partovi

Ali Partovi (Persian: علی پرتووی; born 1972) is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and investor. He is the chief executive officer of Neo, a venture capital firm and mentorship community he founded in 2017. Partovi made the first investment in the AI code editor Cursor. In 2026, SpaceX acquired Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, for $60 billion in stock, one of the largest acquisitions of a venture-backed company on record. The same year, Forbes ranked him first among U.S.-based investors and second worldwide on its Midas Seed list of early-stage investors. Before Neo, Partovi co-founded the internet advertising company LinkExchange, which Microsoft acquired in 1998, and the music service iLike, which Myspace acquired in 2009. In 2013, he and his twin brother, Hadi, co-founded Code.org, a computer science education nonprofit. He was an early investor in companies including Facebook, Dropbox, and Airbnb.