Building for tomorrow? DM us! @kumarharsha2212 @bsomaia @rahultaneja @dkhare @MohapatraHemant @PinnLawjindakul @romitme @BaggaRohil @ishaanpreet @ShreyamDesai @jainanuvrat @TejasJ1210 @PriyalMotw89880 @AbhiramTarimala @pHequals7 @vivekgambhir @ytechdata @kaluwi

Congratulations to Sarvam (@SarvamAI) on the first close of their Series B, and a warm welcome to HCLTech (@hcltech) and Bessemer Venture Partners India (@BessemerVPIndia), who join us in this journey with the conviction that has defined Sarvam from day one: that India should build and own its AI stack. In under three years, the team has turned that idea into working infrastructure: → Frontier models trained from scratch in India that hold their own against far larger systems → Speech models transcribing over half a million hours of audio a month in real Indian conditions → Voice agents already live, from banking and insurance to government and defence, reaching Indians at population scale| This is what sovereign AI looks like, and the team is just getting started. Here's Vivek on why sovereign AI matters, and why India can't afford to import its intelligence anymore. Once again, congratulations to Vivek (@vivekrag), Pratyush (@pratykumar), and the team. @MohapatraHemant

On the eve of Sarvam’s $300M series B, I was reflecting on our journey together @LightspeedIndia since leading the seed round (and subsequently the series A) many moons ago and was reminded of one of my favorite hindi poems by Shiv Mangal Singh Suman: जिस-जिस से पथ पर स्नेह मिला, उस-उस राही को धन्यवाद। To each and every fellow traveler who showed me warmth along the way, my gratitude. So on behalf of the @SarvamAI team, I wanted to say thank you to the believers, but also the naysayers for keeping us grounded. Thank you to those who gave us feedback, but also to those that doubted the potential - you stoked the fire. Thank you to the irrational optimists, but also the eternal pessimists - you pushed us to run harder. I’ve seen @pratykumar & @vivekrag take all it, absorb it, reflect on it, and get back to the war-room day after day with this amazing team. The early days were much, much harder, but that is the character of the most inspiring founders - they run towards the edge and risk a fall because there is a small chance they will fly. And oh, what a flight that will be. What if it all worked out? What if we win? I wake up with that hope every day with Sarvam. And yes, I know hope is not a strategy, but what is the joy in what we, as investors, do, if we cannot dream alongside our founders. This fundraise is just one more step towards what will be increasingly inevitable to all - that India can, and India will, and Sarvam will be one of the most consequential AI companies in the world. And I hope India has 10 more Sarvams in the coming decade.

When we backed Vedant Gupte (@VedantGupte), Aryan Jain, Siddharth Thakkar (@SiddharthT61847), and the team at Trackk (@Trackkofficial), they had a vision for a platform built for a new generation of investors. Intuitive. Accessible. Designed for the way Gen Z thinks, learns, and takes action. Today, that vision comes to life. Trackk is live. Don’t miss their launch video officially kicking off the Gen Z investment era! @kumarharsha2212 @romitme @madhavchadha_

Here's the Lightspeed India Monthly Round-Up for May 2026! 🔔 Follow us for the latest news, events, and updates.

Congratulations @mukundjha, @madhavjha, and the whole team at @emergentlabs. We’ve watched the team evolve from an idea into a platform trusted by millions today, at a pace that is hard to match. Excited to back you in this journey!

Grateful to have had @LightspeedIndia and @MohapatraHemant as our backers since before space or deep tech was cool.

Looking forward to the discussion with @harshilmathur and @snowmaker. For AI/ consumer / finserv / media companies in the US that want to enable payments from customers in India, @Razorpay is a great way to improve monetization.

Excited to continue our partnership with Exponent Energy (@ExponentEnergy) and Arun Vinayak (@Arun_Vinayak_S) as they close their latest round, co-led by 360 ONE Asset (@360ONEAsset) and TDK Ventures (@TDKVentures), with participation from Hitachi Ventures and existing backers. In over five years, Exponent has moved from proving that 15-minute rapid charging works reliably to building the full infrastructure stack: batteries, charging networks, and now financing through Exponent One. Backed by an 84% jump in revenue in FY25, that evolution reflects both technical depth and a sharp read on what commercial EV adoption actually requires in India. Harsha Kumar (@kumarharsha2212), Partner at Lightspeed India, said: "Exponent started with commercial three-wheelers and have steadily expanded into LCVs, passenger three-wheelers, and now buses. That breadth on a single fast-charging platform is hard to pull off." More about it in the news: business-standard.com/compan…

The next generation of category-defining companies won't be built for one market. They'll be built for the world. The opportunity is bigger than ever, but so is the complexity. Lightspeed and Razorpay (@Razorpay) are bringing together founders, investors, and operators who've built, backed, and scaled some of the most consequential companies across the US, India, and Southeast Asia for a conversation on what it actually takes to scale globally from Day 1. Hear from Jared Friedman (@snowmaker), Managing Director & GP at Y Combinator (@ycombinator), Dev Khare (@dkhare), Partner at Lightspeed, and Harshil Mathur (@harshilmathur), CEO & Co-founder at Razorpay, in conversation with Vishnu Acharya (@vishnuacharya94), Head of Strategy at Razorpay. June 18 | San Francisco RSVP Here: luma.com/rh6gnm7g @JainAnuvrat

PE and VC investment in Asia Pacific space-tech has crossed USD 5.9bn since 2016, with 2026 already on course to surpass full-year record set in 2024. At Lightspeed India, we've been early believers in the sector, backing ambitious companies like Pixxel (@PixxelSpace), which was recently selected to build India's first privately led national Earth Observation satellite system. In conversation with Vivian Li (@vivianqingqing) of ION Analytics (@IONAnalytics), Hemant Mohapatra (@MohapatraHemant) shared his view on where the opportunity is headed: "Next year will be a lot about expanding into our Indian ecosystem, both across satellite building and data." Read Hemant's views on how space-tech is unfolding in India alongside broader insights on the record surge in private capital into Asia-Pacific space-tech: ionanalytics.com/insights/me…

Kalam Labs was called upon by Hon’ble Defence Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh for a discussion on our recent Near Space deployments.

The SG Founder Breakfast is back! Lightspeed and @OpenAI are bringing together some of Singapore's best founders, operators, and community builders for a morning of fresh coffee, warm croissants, and even warmer conversations. Seats are limited - apply soon. RSVP: luma.com/SGFounderBreakfast @MohapatraHemant @dkhare @PinnLawjindakul @kaluwi

The playbook for going global from India has changed. The infrastructure is better, the networks are denser, and US investors are paying attention in ways they weren't five years ago. The hard questions remain: when to make the move, how to break into US customer networks as an outsider, what catches you off guard operationally and more. On June 17, Lightspeed and @aspireappglobal are bringing together founders who've made the leap for an exclusive, honest evening on what the journey actually looks like. If you're building with global ambitions, this is the conversation you wouldn't want to miss! RSVP here: luma.com/m08umos6 @JainAnuvrat @Andrea_Aspire

150 researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Mistral, Stripe, and more - all in one room for the @SarvamAI story. Last Thursday, we hosted 𝘈𝘯 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘚𝘢𝘳𝘷𝘢𝘮 𝘈𝘐 in San Francisco. @pratykumar joined @MohapatraHemant and @dkhare for a conversation on building sovereign AI out of India, scaling compute, and expanding into the Bay Area to work alongside the people doing this at frontier scale. Grateful to everyone who showed up and made the conversation worth having, see you at the next one! @abhabhakoo @JainAnuvrat @ishaanpreet @PriyalMotw89880 @ravirajjain @BaggaRohil @SeekingN0rth @sidsangwan

50 million new investors will enter the Indian public markets in the next decade. Are today's platforms built for them? @romitme, in an interaction with @AyantiBera of the @FinancialXpress, shared that the existing players in the broking industry are not directly catering to their needs. The next wave of investors will need handholding, education, and a platform that feels built for them, not legacy. Lightspeed has backed @Trackkofficial, which is bridging this gap by going beyond market access to help first-time investors discover and understand investment opportunities. Read the full story by Ayanti in the Financial Express on why VC firms are supporting this new generation of brokerages built for India's next wave of investors. financialexpress.com/busines… @VedantGupte

AI has changed the way work happens in engineering, legal, and customer support and made those functions 10x more productive. But revenue teams have not seen the same impact, yet. Today, our portfolio company, Rattle, is announcing the launch of Von (& their pivot) to bring true AI to revenue teams. @saheelaggarwal & @apoorvaverma2, founders of Von, describe existing revenue tech as horseless carriages and Von is their version of a car. What is Von? It is the intelligence layer over the entire GTM tech stack — the brain, orchestration and execution layer, all in one. It handles 80% of all RevOps operational work, freeing teams to focus on strategy and the backlog that is years long. To the CRO, VP Sales, and frontline teams who are always stuck in that backlog, Von feels like having their own VP of RevOps — one that understands the business and is available 24/7. Von users describe it as “3x’ing team capacity”, “too good to be true till you try it”, and “addictive.” Check them out at vonlabs.ai