Events @LightspeedIndia | Previously Growth @Spendflo. I tweet about SaaS, early-stage marketing, productivity & the art of unlearning.
Bangalore
Joined March 2016
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This is a really interesting thread. I've personally experimented with this a couple of times but really struggled to make it stick.
Here are some of the things that didn't work for me:
Nitya Baskar retweeted
This Independence Day 🇮🇳, I asked, "What will the next century of young Indians look like?"
$0.01 Drone Deliveries. UAVs that never land. Groceries in under 10 minutes.
Meet The 22nd Century Indian. A Documentary on a New India.
Nitya Baskar retweeted
The most critical bottleneck in AI infrastructure right now isn't energy, chips, or software. It's heat, and no amount of better plumbing can reach the place where it forms.
Today, Lightspeed is partnering with Akash Ramdas (@Akash__Ramdas) and Advaith Sridhar (@advaith_sridhar), co-founders of Discovered Materials (@discoveredmat), who are solving exactly this. We are leading their $9M seed round, joined by Y Combinator (@ycombinator) and angels including Paul Graham (@paulg), Gokul Rajaram (@gokulr), and Thariq Shihipar (@trq212).
The numbers behind the problem: Hopper ran 700W on one die. Blackwell runs ~1.2kW on two. Parts on the roadmap are headed past 4kW. And cooling doesn't scale linearly; double the heat and you need roughly 11x the cooling work. Beyond that, better pumps don't help. The constraint is the material itself.
Akash and Advaith have worked this problem from both ends: in Stanford's materials labs, deep in the atomic physics of heat, and building verifiers and harnesses at frontier AI startups.
They are building Discovered Materials to accelerate materials discovery and the lab-to-fab timeline. Its engine proposes 2,000+ candidate crystal structures a day, scores each for thermal performance in minutes, runs physics simulations on a shortlist, and synthesizes what survives, compressing quarters of materials R&D into days. They start with thermal interface materials and the destination is inside the fab itself, in a semiconductor market headed well past $1.5T.
Hemant Mohapatra (@MohapatraHemant) and Abhiram Tarimala (@AbhiramTarimala) lay out the full thesis, from the reticle limit to the cooling-power law to why the verifier is the moat, in our latest Substack post: lsip.substack.com/p/partneri…
Welcome to the Lightspeed family, Advaith and Akash.
Nitya Baskar retweeted
Bangalore, let's watch a movie together.
10th August.
RSVP Link below.
w/ @anmolm_ @LightspeedIndia
Nitya Baskar retweeted
We hosted a panel last evening at @LightspeedIndia here in Bangalore with Ashwin Rajeeva, cofounder, @acceldataio; Ayush Garg, cofounder, @PortkeyAI and Ashish Gupta, MD India, @rubrikInc on what it takes to build world-class AI infrastructure products for the world from India. It was a lovely breezy evening on the rooftop with over 100 founders choosing to spend time with us.
Rubrik went public in 2024 in the US and counts some of the largest banks, telcos, etc in the US and globally as their customers. Portkey got acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2026, three years after founding. Acceldata is a leading data management company with Fortune 50 customers in the US, including some of the largest banks, pharmacos, telcos etc. All are or were Lightspeed portfolio companies, backed by Lightspeed from the seed stage onwards.
🧵on what we learnt that could be actionable for founders building in this layer:
Nitya Baskar retweeted
AI is reshaping how services are built, delivered, and scaled and India is becoming one of the most interesting places to watch this shift unfold.
Two models are emerging: AI products taking on work traditionally done by services firms, and forward-deployed engineering teams helping enterprises move from pilots to measurable outcomes.
Join us on July 30 in Bengaluru as we explore the evolving AI-led services landscape with:
→ Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed
→ Rohil Bagga, Investor, Lightspeed
→ Karthik K., VP of AI Implementations, Rocketlane
→ Kishan P., CMO, Pepper
If you’re building in this space, we’d love to have you in the room with us. RSVP here: luma.com/AI-services
@dkhare @BaggaRohil @KishanPanpalia @Pepper_Content @RocketlaneHQ
Nitya Baskar retweeted
We brought together an incredible community of AI researchers, engineers, product leaders, and founders for the inaugural edition of Inside Emergent: Architecting Frontier Agents, hosted in partnership with @LightspeedIndia
From deep dives into production-ready agent architectures to conversations around memory, evaluation, reliability, orchestration, and user trust, the evening was packed with practical insights from teams building AI systems at scale.
Thank you to our speakers, panelists, and everyone who made the discussions so engaging. We're excited to keep building spaces where the AI community can learn from one another and share what's working in production.
@mukundjha @madhavjha @SriramRajamani @ManishGuptaMG1 @MohapatraHemant
Nitya Baskar retweeted
breezy sundowners + BLR’s best engineering & product leaders in one room + the best cocktails in town + spicy MCP takes & zero awkward silences
come through for the next one 🥂
Nitya Baskar retweeted
our quarterly quiz is back on july 9. please come hang with @ishaanpreet and me and bring your friends too
there shall be mauj, masti, snacks and prizes! [rsvp link in next tweet]
Not one to do this, but when a service provider is this bad, you’ve got to name and shame.
For anyone looking for an example of how *not* to handle customer service, look no further than @1mgOfficial.
The automated chat repeatedly promises that an agent has been assigned and will call back within 24 hours. That callback never comes.
After digging around for a customer support number, we finally managed to speak to someone - only to be told to send an email for resolution.
We ordered medicines through the app, but it appears the store has an incorrect phone number on file. As a result, our paid orders either get marked as delivered without ever being handed over, or remain “in transit” for 2+ weeks.
Nitya Baskar retweeted
We keep meeting founders who are 19, 20, maybe 21-- and they're already thinking at a level most people never reach.
They're not building side projects. they're solving real problems in AI, robotics, climate, space, biotech, energy, defense.
and people still tell them they're "too young" or "too early."
India Ascends 2026 by @LightspeedIndia is built for exactly this.
if you're under 25 and building hard tech, apply.
$100K+ in credits. top teams can raise $200K–$3M in funding.
deadline: jan 21 - india-ascends.com
powered by: @devfolio | community: @localhosthq
Nitya Baskar retweeted
I think India is done building only pragmatic “safe” companies. We need a lot more crazy ones. We’ll have grander failures and grander successes. Already seeing the ambition among early 20s founders. Glad to see the support system and capital following!
There is something magical and pure about young founders building crazy stuff during college/right after it. You’re truly blue eyed then. Think anything is possible. And it is.
Today's a special day for @LightspeedIndia. Introducing INDIA ASCENDS'2026, a program purpose-built for India's youngest (>25yo), boldest, cohort of world shapers & change makers. If you are one of them, put your headphones on, turn to volume to max, click on the video, and read on :)
Building something is hard but building something the world has never seen before is nigh impossible. There is this concept of not just building a kingdom, but building a kingdom at the edge of a precipice -- founders who want to go all the way to the edge of what’s possible, beyond which there is no land, there is no road, the compass stops working, and they look into the abyss, and say ‘yes, this is for me, this will be my life’s work’. These are the rarest of birds that take the plunge and know they’d fall before they fly, but when they fly, oh how glorious do they look.
We @lightspeedindia have been fortunate to partner with several of these founders. We met @PixxelSpace when the founders @awaisahmedna @kshitijgokul were just 22yo. We backed @Airbound_Aero when @TheRealNamzoo was just 17. We’ve backed many others doing their life’s work at absolute cutting edge of what’s possible - @Arun_Vinayak_S of @ExponentEnergy, @pratykumar & @vivekrag of @SarvamAI @devdutdalal & @XaviLaguarta at @MittiLabs and more. Beyond our portfolio, there is some amazing founders doing their life’s work - @PawanKChandana @SkyrootA , @sohamsankaran @PopVaxIndia , @khushhhi_ @AsperaAero, @nagokul @CynLr00, @adrnschm @sarlaaviation, @deepigoyal @lataerospace & @temple, @Manu_J_Nair @EtherealXTech & many more.
We need more of these founders coming out of India. Not just that, we need to fill gap that exists in this market which is in backing really young (<25yo) founders who are tinkering in school or college labs, or spending their weekends building, experimenting and failing fast, and are truly building globally competitive and de novo tech that, if it works, can have huge consequences in the world. To that end, we are proud to launch INDIA ASCENDS'2026 -- our flagship yearly program for the most cracked young builders in the country doing incredible cutting-edge research in robotics, quantum, space, energy, AI, bio or more.
Our program applications open today and we’ll select 12-15 of the best, boldest ideas that we think has the potential to shape the future. We’ll bring them all to BLR for a 2-day program. Each participant will get ~$100K in support from our partners @AnthropicAI @GroqInc , @googlecloud @awscloud and we’ll also select 3-4 winners who will get venture funded to build their dream starting from $200K all the way to $3M and almost $500K of non-dilutive credits & grants from our partners. We look forward to seeing the boldest ideas you've been working on. Link to apply in the first comment:
Nitya Baskar retweeted
Go go go India x AI!!!
Today's a special day for @LightspeedIndia. Introducing INDIA ASCENDS'2026, a program purpose-built for India's youngest (>25yo), boldest, cohort of world shapers & change makers. If you are one of them, put your headphones on, turn to volume to max, click on the video, and read on :)
Building something is hard but building something the world has never seen before is nigh impossible. There is this concept of not just building a kingdom, but building a kingdom at the edge of a precipice -- founders who want to go all the way to the edge of what’s possible, beyond which there is no land, there is no road, the compass stops working, and they look into the abyss, and say ‘yes, this is for me, this will be my life’s work’. These are the rarest of birds that take the plunge and know they’d fall before they fly, but when they fly, oh how glorious do they look.
We @lightspeedindia have been fortunate to partner with several of these founders. We met @PixxelSpace when the founders @awaisahmedna @kshitijgokul were just 22yo. We backed @Airbound_Aero when @TheRealNamzoo was just 17. We’ve backed many others doing their life’s work at absolute cutting edge of what’s possible - @Arun_Vinayak_S of @ExponentEnergy, @pratykumar & @vivekrag of @SarvamAI @devdutdalal & @XaviLaguarta at @MittiLabs and more. Beyond our portfolio, there is some amazing founders doing their life’s work - @PawanKChandana @SkyrootA , @sohamsankaran @PopVaxIndia , @khushhhi_ @AsperaAero, @nagokul @CynLr00, @adrnschm @sarlaaviation, @deepigoyal @lataerospace & @temple, @Manu_J_Nair @EtherealXTech & many more.
We need more of these founders coming out of India. Not just that, we need to fill gap that exists in this market which is in backing really young (<25yo) founders who are tinkering in school or college labs, or spending their weekends building, experimenting and failing fast, and are truly building globally competitive and de novo tech that, if it works, can have huge consequences in the world. To that end, we are proud to launch INDIA ASCENDS'2026 -- our flagship yearly program for the most cracked young builders in the country doing incredible cutting-edge research in robotics, quantum, space, energy, AI, bio or more.
Our program applications open today and we’ll select 12-15 of the best, boldest ideas that we think has the potential to shape the future. We’ll bring them all to BLR for a 2-day program. Each participant will get ~$100K in support from our partners @AnthropicAI @GroqInc , @googlecloud @awscloud and we’ll also select 3-4 winners who will get venture funded to build their dream starting from $200K all the way to $3M and almost $500K of non-dilutive credits & grants from our partners. We look forward to seeing the boldest ideas you've been working on. Link to apply in the first comment:
Nitya Baskar retweeted
I love this! Well done @MohapatraHemant @LightspeedIndia 👏
Can I also apply for allocations in these amazing startups? Asking for a friend.
Today's a special day for @LightspeedIndia. Introducing INDIA ASCENDS'2026, a program purpose-built for India's youngest (>25yo), boldest, cohort of world shapers & change makers. If you are one of them, put your headphones on, turn to volume to max, click on the video, and read on :)
Building something is hard but building something the world has never seen before is nigh impossible. There is this concept of not just building a kingdom, but building a kingdom at the edge of a precipice -- founders who want to go all the way to the edge of what’s possible, beyond which there is no land, there is no road, the compass stops working, and they look into the abyss, and say ‘yes, this is for me, this will be my life’s work’. These are the rarest of birds that take the plunge and know they’d fall before they fly, but when they fly, oh how glorious do they look.
We @lightspeedindia have been fortunate to partner with several of these founders. We met @PixxelSpace when the founders @awaisahmedna @kshitijgokul were just 22yo. We backed @Airbound_Aero when @TheRealNamzoo was just 17. We’ve backed many others doing their life’s work at absolute cutting edge of what’s possible - @Arun_Vinayak_S of @ExponentEnergy, @pratykumar & @vivekrag of @SarvamAI @devdutdalal & @XaviLaguarta at @MittiLabs and more. Beyond our portfolio, there is some amazing founders doing their life’s work - @PawanKChandana @SkyrootA , @sohamsankaran @PopVaxIndia , @khushhhi_ @AsperaAero, @nagokul @CynLr00, @adrnschm @sarlaaviation, @deepigoyal @lataerospace & @temple, @Manu_J_Nair @EtherealXTech & many more.
We need more of these founders coming out of India. Not just that, we need to fill gap that exists in this market which is in backing really young (<25yo) founders who are tinkering in school or college labs, or spending their weekends building, experimenting and failing fast, and are truly building globally competitive and de novo tech that, if it works, can have huge consequences in the world. To that end, we are proud to launch INDIA ASCENDS'2026 -- our flagship yearly program for the most cracked young builders in the country doing incredible cutting-edge research in robotics, quantum, space, energy, AI, bio or more.
Our program applications open today and we’ll select 12-15 of the best, boldest ideas that we think has the potential to shape the future. We’ll bring them all to BLR for a 2-day program. Each participant will get ~$100K in support from our partners @AnthropicAI @GroqInc , @googlecloud @awscloud and we’ll also select 3-4 winners who will get venture funded to build their dream starting from $200K all the way to $3M and almost $500K of non-dilutive credits & grants from our partners. We look forward to seeing the boldest ideas you've been working on. Link to apply in the first comment:
Nitya Baskar retweeted
A dramatic change in the past decade has been the audacity of India's youngest founders, and the awe inspiring missions they've set out (and made a dent in).
We've backed companies ranging from drone makers to satellite launchers to jet engine manufactures and pet robots.
All founded by founders who were young, ambitious, and just the right amount of delusional.
If you're building something hard and important, apply for India Ascends - applications close 12 Jan.
Today's a special day for @LightspeedIndia. Introducing INDIA ASCENDS'2026, a program purpose-built for India's youngest (>25yo), boldest, cohort of world shapers & change makers. If you are one of them, put your headphones on, turn to volume to max, click on the video, and read on :)
Building something is hard but building something the world has never seen before is nigh impossible. There is this concept of not just building a kingdom, but building a kingdom at the edge of a precipice -- founders who want to go all the way to the edge of what’s possible, beyond which there is no land, there is no road, the compass stops working, and they look into the abyss, and say ‘yes, this is for me, this will be my life’s work’. These are the rarest of birds that take the plunge and know they’d fall before they fly, but when they fly, oh how glorious do they look.
We @lightspeedindia have been fortunate to partner with several of these founders. We met @PixxelSpace when the founders @awaisahmedna @kshitijgokul were just 22yo. We backed @Airbound_Aero when @TheRealNamzoo was just 17. We’ve backed many others doing their life’s work at absolute cutting edge of what’s possible - @Arun_Vinayak_S of @ExponentEnergy, @pratykumar & @vivekrag of @SarvamAI @devdutdalal & @XaviLaguarta at @MittiLabs and more. Beyond our portfolio, there is some amazing founders doing their life’s work - @PawanKChandana @SkyrootA , @sohamsankaran @PopVaxIndia , @khushhhi_ @AsperaAero, @nagokul @CynLr00, @adrnschm @sarlaaviation, @deepigoyal @lataerospace & @temple, @Manu_J_Nair @EtherealXTech & many more.
We need more of these founders coming out of India. Not just that, we need to fill gap that exists in this market which is in backing really young (<25yo) founders who are tinkering in school or college labs, or spending their weekends building, experimenting and failing fast, and are truly building globally competitive and de novo tech that, if it works, can have huge consequences in the world. To that end, we are proud to launch INDIA ASCENDS'2026 -- our flagship yearly program for the most cracked young builders in the country doing incredible cutting-edge research in robotics, quantum, space, energy, AI, bio or more.
Our program applications open today and we’ll select 12-15 of the best, boldest ideas that we think has the potential to shape the future. We’ll bring them all to BLR for a 2-day program. Each participant will get ~$100K in support from our partners @AnthropicAI @GroqInc , @googlecloud @awscloud and we’ll also select 3-4 winners who will get venture funded to build their dream starting from $200K all the way to $3M and almost $500K of non-dilutive credits & grants from our partners. We look forward to seeing the boldest ideas you've been working on. Link to apply in the first comment:
Nitya Baskar retweeted
A new generation of Indian builders is rising across R&D-first sectors, and we’re charting the innovators leading this shift.
Take part in India’s Ascends 2026 by @LightspeedIndia
Nitya Baskar retweeted
"The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do." Excited for the launch of India-ascends. Apply here: india-ascends.com
@LightspeedIndia #IndiaAscends2026
Every generation has its revolutionaries.
Ours isn’t waiting.
They’re busy building the future in AI, space, robotics, climate, bio, energy, and defense - way before the world is ready for it.
At Lightspeed, we believe ambition this big deserves a launchpad, not just a platform. That’s why we created India Ascends by Lightspeed - a program designed to give bold founders under 25, the tools, access, and backing to turn world-changing ideas into reality.
If you’re working on something the world hasn’t seen before, we want to hear from you.
🚀 Applications for India Ascends 2026 are now LIVE.
Time to bet on yourself.
Apply here: india-ascends.com/
#IndiaAscends2026