Blue Earth Summit

For years, businesses have been built on documents, decks, spreadsheets, scattered processes and institutional knowledge living in people’s heads. It works, until it doesn’t.

For Neal Mann, founder of NOAN, that problem became impossible to ignore.

After a career spanning journalism, media innovation, corporate transformation and global consulting, Neal had seen behind the curtain of some of the world’s biggest organisations. From News Corp and The Wall Street Journal to working with global brands including Google, Expedia, Booking.com and Microsoft, one pattern kept showing up: companies may look polished from the outside, but internally, many are operating from fragmented, outdated and disconnected systems.

NOAN was built to solve that.

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From Transformation to Reinvention

Before founding NOAN, Neal spent nearly a decade leading transformation work for global companies. His focus was on future products, membership, subscription models, content strategy and operational change.

That experience gave him a rare view across entire organisations, from sales and operations to legal, compliance, product and content. What he saw was a structural problem: businesses were not built around a single source of truth.

Teams used different documents. Departments worked from different assumptions. Sales decks were out of date. Strategy lived in PDFs. Knowledge was scattered across Slack, Notion, emails and CRM systems.

For AI, that is a serious problem.

As Neal puts it, AI is now capable enough to radically change how companies operate. But if the underlying business context is messy, AI simply amplifies the mess.

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What NOAN is Building

NOAN is creating the infrastructure layer for humans and AI to work together from one shared source of truth.

Instead of companies relying on static documents, NOAN helps teams rebuild their business knowledge as structured, live “blocks” of context. These might include brand positioning, pricing, workflows, product information, investor materials, sales processes or operational knowledge.

That context can then be used by humans and AI agents alike.

The result is a business that does not just use AI on top of old systems, but is rebuilt to be AI-native at its core.

Neal describes the future simply: every company becomes an API.

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Why Context is the new Competitive Advantage

The central idea behind NOAN is that context is becoming one of the most valuable layers in business.

Models will change. AI tools will improve. Costs will fall. But the companies that own, structure and control their own context will have the advantage.

That matters for everything from marketing and sales to hiring, compliance, due diligence and investor relations.

For founders, it means being able to create accurate content, onboard team members faster, reduce knowledge loss and make sure everyone is working from the same facts.

For investors and banks, it opens up a different way of assessing companies. Instead of relying on static documents and spreadsheets, a company could grant controlled access to live business context, allowing investors to interrogate the facts directly.

In Neal’s view, this could transform due diligence, lending and the wider flow of capital into growing businesses.

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Built for Founders Scaling with AI

While NOAN’s long-term opportunity stretches into enterprise, banking and global business infrastructure, the company’s current focus is clear: non-technical founders who are raising capital and scaling.

These are founders asking a different set of questions. Do they need a traditional CRM? Do they need disconnected sales, marketing and content tools? Or can they build their company around one intelligent, structured operating layer from day one?

NOAN is already being used by founders across the Blue Earth Ventures community, as well as businesses across the US, UK, Europe, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Australia, New Zealand and South America.

Some users are running multiple team members through the platform. Others are using it to build entirely new businesses, including one founder who used NOAN to identify and launch a spin-off subscription model from her existing company.

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Traction and the Road Ahead

NOAN has already raised a $1.1 million pre-seed round from American and European angels, including exited founders and senior operators.

The company is now generating around $130,000 ARR, growing 10–20% month on month, with some users spending up to six and a half hours a day on the platform.

NOAN is now raising a $4 million seed round to scale its team, accelerate growth and take the product further into the market, particularly in the US.

For Neal, the timing feels right. A year ago, many businesses were still experimenting with ChatGPT on the side. Now, more founders and investors are beginning to understand the real issue: AI does not just need prompts. It needs context.

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A New Foundation for Business

The bigger vision behind NOAN is not simply to make companies more efficient. It is to change what a company is built on.

Not PDFs. Not static documents. Not scattered processes.

A living, structured, verifiable source of truth that humans and AI can use together.

For Blue Earth, that vision is deeply aligned with the wider shift taking place across the founder ecosystem: better tools, smarter infrastructure and new models of growth that help ambitious companies move faster without adding unnecessary complexity.

As Neal says, the future company will not just use AI.

It will be built for it.