Hemant Mohapatra
@MohapatraHemant • 76,023 subscribers
VC @lightspeedindia, ex: @a16z, prod/engg @Google @AMD; @supabase @pixxelspace @composio @sarvamai @solana @unslothAI @emergentlabs @airbound_aero & more
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Today's a special day for Lightspeed India. 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 Lightspeed India have been fortunate to partner with several of these founders. We met Pixxel when the founders Awais Ahmed Kshitij Khandelwal were just 22yo. We backed Airbound when Naman Pushp was just 17. We’ve backed many others doing their life’s work at absolute cutting edge of what’s possible - Arun Vinayak of Exponent Energy, Pratyush Kumar & Vivek Raghavan of Sarvam Devdut Dalal & Xavi Laguarta at Mitti Labs and more. Beyond our portfolio, there is some amazing founders doing their life’s work - Pawan Skyroot Aerospace , Soham Sankaran PopVax 🇮🇳 , khushi Aspera, N A Gokul CynLr, Adrian Schmidt sarla aviation, Deepinder Goyal LAT Aerospace & 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 Anthropic Groq Inc , Google Cloud Amazon Web Services 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:
Hemant Mohapatra726,597 views • 6 months ago
My ultimate test for AGI continues to be a very simple prompt. Word ladder: space to earth So far, no model, including deepseek has reasoned this out, even though technically it's a straight fwd intersection of data structures + dictionary; something LLMs are very good at!
Hemant Mohapatra539,844 views • 1 year ago
I didn't realise how impressive this release is but thanks to Vinayak Gavariya, got these videos that really blew my mind. If you know Hindi poetry you'll enjoy it even more... see the first (original) and the auto-dubbed 2nd version (English) one after the other. Just 😱
Hemant Mohapatra83,121 views • 4 months ago
Another banger from Sarvam , this time: real time speech! We are now world best on all things Indian - accents, languages, tones - speak any Indian language in the same conversation, we will switch our tokenizer/mode, and automatically transcribe. Don't miss the demo video!
Hemant Mohapatra78,428 views • 4 months ago
Today we are proud to bring our portfolio company Airbound out of stealth and announce it to the world at large. We met Naman Pushp, the founder, when he was just 17yrs old but by then he had already dropped out of CMU and spent a year building a VTOL prototype that blew our minds during demos. Over the last 1.5yrs, Airbound has obsessed to build the world's most advanced and aerodynamic Blended Wing Body Tailsitter drones for consumer-grade deliveries. To do this, we've had to design, fabricate, mfg, and heat-treat an entirely new kind of carbon fibre chassis that is almost as light as an A4-sheet of paper, and has the world’s best strength-to-weight ratio - a 22g airbound drone panel can withstand a 70kg human. At Airbound, we are not just building the best drones in the world. We are building the world’s most efficient aircraft to change the last-mile delivery experience. It’s a long road — no pun intended — but we are really excited by how far Airbound has come in just a year. As we finally come out of stealth, it gives us great pleasure to also welcome our co-investors gradCapital, @dshglobal, together with founders and operators at Pixxel and , and grants from Peter Thiel backed 1517 Fund, & Mercatus-Emergent Venture.
Hemant Mohapatra118,552 views • 1 year ago
What many don't seem to realise is that we have entered the age of the showman entrepreneur. The beginnings of every industrial revolution is marked by these showmen. They are necessary because it is not the quiet tinkerer who first pulls the future into the world, but the one who can make a crowd hold its breath. They've always been there, we just forget about them because these revolutions used to come every 50-60 years, and now maybe every 20-30yrs. On New Year’s Eve, 1897, Thomas Edison lit a single lane in Menlo Park with his "impossible bulbs". Hundreds, maybe thousands, came to watch. So many, they had to hook up extra wagons to the trains. They came not to buy anything. No one had yet pulled up an electric pole to their door, no wires laid at their altars, no sockets waiting like open mouths punched into their walls. They didn't need a bulb. Not yet. They all came to see an incandescent beast caught in glass. To stand in the dark and watch the world tilt toward the electric. We are entering that age again. There will be entrepreneurs who will build in the shade, and they should. And then there will be those who build at the center of the theatre obscura, the theatre fantastica. These founders will pull ahead and win the crowd as long as the story is sound, the act is authentic. The world will pay attention to these founders... through success and miserable failures, but the world will pay attention.
Hemant Mohapatra45,621 views • 8 months ago
I wake up fairly early and I love listening to classical Hindustani ragas to get my day going. I got inspired recently by this website called Dhuni and wanted to get some of my own favorites built into a radio station and build an interesting interface with a man slowly walking through a forest as dawn becomes day becomes evening becomes night and the dawn comes back again. Used Emergent And literally one-shotted this whole thing in less than 10 minutes. I was just 🤯. I have used the product often over the last 6-8 months as an investor but this was genuinely so well done. I tried using the same prompt on at least 3 other platforms and some essentially connected to radio stations that had Hindi music but then randomly inserted English music. Some didn't have an interface as cool, some had output that was barely understandable and needed a lot of APIs to YT. Some asked me to use curl on the terminal to download my favorite tracks as MP3s 😆 This experience just brought back to me how large an opportunity personal apps can be in the future. This exact thing would have cost me $20/mo as saas sub and would be fairly generic. This app now is exactly to my taste. The interface is exactly as I described it, the music is exactly like I want it. Just a delightful personal software I'm now waking up to every day. I am hosting it on Emergent here if you want to check it out:
Hemant Mohapatra19,168 views • 2 months ago
We are pleased to announce that Airbound has closed an $8.6M seed round, led by our friends Lachy Groom & Leo Polovets (Humba Ventures). Lightspeed is doubling down in this round. We wrote last year about meeting a 17-year-old founder (Naman Pushp) who had dropped out of a US college admit to build an aircraft he believed should exist. That first demo was the start of a long, quiet year filled with crashed hardware, streamlining mind-boggling complexity of manufacturing a one-of-a-kind drone, hiring a killer team, and putting out fires in every sense of the word. In that year our: > team went from ~5 to over 50+ engineers across mfg, aero, composites, ops & SW. > component mfg rate went up from ~6/d -> 16/d > full drone mfg rate went up from ~2/30d to ~1/day > flights-to-failure went down from 1 incident/30 flights to 0 incidents / 789 flights (and counting!) What began as a prototype in a garage is now a system that manufactures, flies, and scales. We are excited for 2026 as Airbound comes ever closer to their vision. Also welcome in their personal capacity: Tarun Mehta (ather), Jared Rosner (elad gil fund), Abhay (anduril), Dhaval Shroff (tesla), Mohith Mothukuri (physical intelligence), and Balaji (network school). cc: Lightspeed India
Hemant Mohapatra22,652 views • 8 months ago
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