In an interview with TimesTech, Sarthak Hooda, Founder & CEO of Neon Cloud, spoke with about how the company is reshaping cloud computing in India. He highlighted Neon Cloud’s vision of delivering enterprise-grade reliability with startup agility, eliminating vendor lock-in, ensuring regulatory compliance, and enabling AI-powered innovation. Sarthak outlined how Neon Cloud empowers developers, startups, and SMBs with performance, security, and affordability while driving India’s sovereign digital future.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: Neon Cloud was built with a vision to combine enterprise-grade reliability with startup agility. Could you tell us how this philosophy translates into real-world benefits for developers, startups, and SMBs?
Sarthak: Our vision at Neon Cloud is and always has been to expand upon the performance of an enterprise-level platform along with the speed that exists in a startup first culture. We create real value for developers, startups and SMBs in fundamentally three ways, that are faster time-to-build, frictionless scale and easier-to-manage. Our open, API-first architecture enables developers to spin-up infrastructure, deploy code and integrate workloads in minutes, while ensuring the uptime, security protocols, and performance reliability expected by large enterprises. Startups and SMBs benefit from a pay-as-you-grow model, eliminating heavy capex or over-provisioning, while still accessing the same level of security, support and performance as bigger players. The agility of our platform also means we ship features and updates rapidly, enabling innovation velocity and allowing customers to respond quickly to shifting market conditions. In effect, Neon Cloud gives smaller teams the confidence and firepower of enterprise-class infrastructure without the complexity.
TimesTech: One of Neon Cloud’s key differentiators is the elimination of vendor lock-in. How does this approach give businesses more flexibility & control as compared to traditional cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure?
Sarthak: Vendor lock-in is still one of the major challenges for scaling businesses, and for innovating businesses. Neon Cloud is purpose-built to eliminate vendor lock-in. In contrast to traditional hyperscalers – e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure – where customers are locked into proprietary tooling, services, or pricing models, we provide businesses portability for workloads in and out of our infrastructure without having to rewrite applications or workflows. Nevertheless, we also use open standards, deploy container-based infrastructure and multi-cloud friendly orchestration to provide customers with the freedom that comes with running mission critical workloads on Neon while having autonomy at the same time over their data, applications and future roadmap. Due to this, organizations can choose the most sensible combination of on-premises, edge, or cloud environments that best suits every workload, and is free of the commercial or technical restrictions of a single vendor. This effectively preserves long-term autonomy and negotiations power.
TimesTech: Cost optimization is a major priority for businesses today. How does Neon Cloud deliver up to 60% cost savings without compromising on the performance, security or scalability?
Sarthak: Neon Cloud has been architected from the ground up to deliver enterprise grade performance at a highly optimised cost structure. We offer up to 60 per cent savings primarily by eliminating over-provisioned infrastructure and by offering granular, pay-as-you-consume pricing aligned to actual workload usage. Our use of open-source components and efficient resource pooling also drives down operational overheads. Importantly, these cost benefits do not come at the expense of performance, scalability or security. We offer highly performant VMs, GPUs, and hybrid architectures that scale on demand, with 24×7 SOC, data encryption, and compliance frameworks built in from day one. This empowers startups and SMEs to use high-quality cloud infrastructure that, until now, has been available only to corporates without burning through their budgets on pricing premiums, driven by lock-in, or hidden costs, typically designed by multi-national hyperscalers.
TimesTech: Security and compliance are most crucial for cloud adoption. Could you elaborate on Neon Cloud’s built-in safeguards-such as 24/7 SOC protection, local data residency and enterprise-grade reliability and how they address India’s regulatory needs?
Sarthak: Security and compliance are the key foundation of Neon Cloud’s infrastructure architecture, not bolt-on features. We operate a 24×7 Security Operations Centre (SOC) around-the-clock with continuous threat detection, incident response provision, and on-going vulnerability monitoring to enable enterprise grade risk mitigation. Our cloud enables total local data residency so that a complete customer workload is processed and stored within India’s sovereign borders, which greatly aids compliance in sensitive sectors such as BFSI, healthcare, government and telecom. Embedded encryption, audit logging and access controls provide assurance that customer workloads are applicable under India’s jurisdiction-based regulations such as CERT-In advisories, RBI guidelines, the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, and sector-specific frameworks. For global clients operating in India, our practices are also aligned with international standards including GDPR guidelines. By building compliance and security into the platform, we are enabling the move to the cloud without needing to integrate and deploy disparate third-party tooling or processes and simplify operational complexity while maintaining trust.
TimesTech: You are also working on an AI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) integrating Cloud GPUs for AI and ML workloads. What opportunities do you see in this space and how will Neon Cloud position itself at the forefront of the AI revolution?
Sarthak: AI workloads are evolving rapidly, and we see a massive opportunity in delivering high-performance, cost-efficient GPU-powered environments to run training, inference and MLOps pipelines. Our new AI PaaS will provide enterprises, startups and research labs on-demand access to Cloud GPUs, integrated data pipelines, collaborative development capabilities and optimised environments for large AI models all on one platform. As enterprises are racing to build and deploy domain-specific AI solutions, the ability to tap into a reliable, India-based GPU cloud capacity becomes a strategic differentiator. Neon Cloud aims to democratize AI compute, such that the equality for the experiment will be maintained along with data-residency and performance at scale. We feel this will not only position Neon Cloud at the forefront of India’s AI ecosystem but will enable Indian enterprises who actually want to build, scale and monetise AI solutions, in a highly regulated environment .
TimesTech: Looking ahead, what’s your long-term vision for Neon Cloud in shaping the future of cloud computing in India and how do you plan to pivot your offerings to meet the evolving business needs?
Sarthak: Our focus is to become the most trusted, sovereign and innovation-ready cloud Infrastructure Company in India. We see Neon Cloud evolving into the backbone of digital-first business across sectors powering everything from edge analytics and autonomous platforms to national-scale AI deployments. We intend to continually expand our product suite into high-performance compute, AI-first cloud GPU services, industry specific cloud stacks (BFSI, healthcare, public sector etc.) and managed hybrid multi-cloud solutions. We will deepen our edge footprint via regional micro-data centres to cater to latency-sensitive and real-time use cases across logistics, manufacturing and IoT. At its most fundamental level, our ambition is to provide Indian businesses with a future-proof, scalable and fully compliant alternative to global hyperscalers which enables them to innovate faster, grow smarter, and retain ownership of their data and destiny.
