Dev Khare

@zmwang Need a cookbook of these recipes! The food sounds awesome 😋

This afternoon was a movie. My heart is so full. 1st SF Chindian Meetup ✅🎉! Folks went full send on potluck (Szechuan-y parathas, kimchi pani puri, gobi Manchurian, ras malai) +300 people Intergenerstional & intercultural: Grandparents, parents, couples, singles, babies.

AI in India is different yet additive and expansive to what is going in AI in the US. If you are an AI researcher and want to learn more about this, join us here in San Francisco for this conversation with @pratykumar, founder of India’s sovereign AI platform @SarvamAI. Luma link in @MohapatraHemant’s post below.

Speaking tomorrow at Stanford about the opportunity to build deep tech in India. If you want to train models, build products, create population scale impact, or are just curious what we are up to then RSVP and show up - sarvam.ai/events/stanfor…

At @acceldataio’s Autonomous conference today with Rohit and Ashwin here in San Francisco. T-Mobile, Verizon, Barclays, Merck, Pfizer, Qualcomm in the room. All of them hitting the same wall: agentic AI doesn’t work in Fortune 500 enterprises if the underlying data — spread across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid — isn’t compute-ready at petabyte scale. You still need a control/compute plane that runs compute and data workloads across your entire legacy and modern data stacks as well as within any agentic harness like Claude or Codex. That’s exactly what Acceldata’s AI-native data runtime is. Proud to be an investor in this category leader in enterprise data & AI platforms. go.acceldata.io/autonomous26

I don’t disagree. Broadening out to two other vectors that founders can think about 1. Think regional (ie Asia) markets not just India to US. Founders building for India’s complexity have solutions that work regionally and globally. 2. Think beyond software to cross border commerce / financial services / digital media.

@aakrit I don’t disagree. But this indecisive approach will mean that we will never know. Good builders should go all in and build for global only. I have zero doubt that the Indian talent is good. Just that they aren’t opening up to see what’s happening globally.

Counter intuitive as it may sound, the most ambitious Indian founders probably shouldn’t build for India. They should build just for the world. India becomes another country on the world map. India’s biggest tech success stories weren’t created by solving local inefficiencies alone. Infosys and TCS went after global markets, competed with the world’s best, and in the process built one of India’s largest export engines. India’s IT exports are >$250Bn annually. Software and services became one of the country’s most important sources of dollar inflows, white-collar employment, and global influence. There are already thousands of founders solving for India’s fragmentation and inefficiencies. That matters. But the exceptional founders — especially in AI and deep & emerging tech — should aim bigger. They should build products that can win in New York, Singapore, London and Tokyo. Price globally. Compete globally. Hire globally.

Half life of your product wedge = weeks. What will you own in 18 months that nobody else can vibe code.

Beautiful view from Old Delhi of Jama Masjid tonight. Then on from here to San Francisco in a few hours.

@sateesh_andra @EndiyaVC Congrats Kissht team and Sateesh!

Backed Kissht at seed in 2017. It listed today. Nine years. Multiple cycles. In FY25, the team chose credit quality over growth, even in an IPO year. That made this IPO credible. Built with discipline. With Ranvir Singh, Krishnan Vishwanathan and team. @EndiyaVC #kissht

Enjoying Thums Up in Delhi 😊

Portkey is being acquired by Palo Alto Networks — just three years after founding. Congrats Rohit, Ayush and the whole @PortkeyAI team! Another proof point for the US-India corridor — world-class AI infrastructure built by India-origin founders for a global market. A win for the Bangalore and San Francisco startup ecosystems. I first met Rohit in Pune in 2012. Watched him build his first company which got acquired by Freshworks and go deep on LLMs at Pepper. When they mentioned they wanted to solve this problem in AI production systems that they had identified, we were right there to back them at the concept stage - more on the Lightspeed thesis here: lnkd.in/gzSuxGeE. Congrats again Rohit and Ayush and wishing you all the best in your journey ahead! @jumbld @LightspeedIndia

We are doubling down on @oolka_ai in their Series A as they bridge the gap between India’s robust credit infrastructure and the consumer’s need for real financial clarity. While credit tracking has been the norm, Oolka is shifting to agentic finance, moving beyond static data to deliver contextual guidance for a new generation navigating their financial lifecycle. Read more about the fundraise: inc42.com/buzz/credit-ma… @youkaey @kumarharsha2212 @PriyalMotw89880

Loving the lightning and crazy sheets of rain right now in Bangalore. Less traffic here in Indiranagar and Domlur, ironically.

The U.S. healthcare system loses billions to administrative inefficiency every year. Coral is fixing that by breaking this healthcare bottleneck at scale. Despite operating in a challenging environment with legacy systems and fragmented workflows, Coral is delivering real outcomes. In less than a year, it has reached millions in revenue and helped some of the largest U.S. customers dramatically reduce patient intake times and first-pass denials. We have been alongside the Coral team from the beginning, and we are proud to double down as they continue to push the operational transformation that U.S. healthcare urgently needs. Read more about the investment: forbes.com/sites/davidpro… @ajshrihari @dkhare @BaggaRohil

@PocketFM_App has now crossed $400M ARR. The first $200M took 6 years, the next came in just 12 months. AI changed everything for us. When we started Pocket FM, the idea was to build a new entertainment format - bingeable, bite-sized audio series. We built this category in India, then scaled it to the US and Europe and today it’s part of mainstream entertainment across 20+ countries. While building Pocket, we reimagined the entertainment playbook by pivoting to an AI-native storytelling system. At the core of this AI-native engine is our fiction writing co-pilot, trained on billions of minutes of engagement data. It enables creators to go from a raw idea to a fully dramatized series in minutes, while allowing us to rapidly identify potential blockbusters and adapt stories across languages and cultures almost instantly. Content creation has exploded on Pocket - 300,000+ creators are now producing 80,000+ hours of content every month and this isn’t low-effort content; it’s storytelling people keep coming back to every day. AI isn’t replacing creativity, it’s unlocking it. One creator story recently stuck with me, a first-time creator from Hyderabad whose show found an audience in the US and he made ~$50,000 (₹50 lakh) in a single month. This is democratization of storytelling. Feels like this is just Episode 1. Many more cliffhangers ahead. P.S. We are now free cash flow positive, at ~5% EBITDA.

@RohanNayak2 @PocketFM_App Congratulations, @RohanNayak2! We are so honored and privileged for @LightspeedIndia to have been your partner from the seed stage onwards. 🚀

@RahulSanghi1 @ThePrintIndia India is different, in a wildly positive way

"The “timepass generation” has now given way to a youth who now film, edit and upload the wait, clinging to the fragile hope of earning big money in the ephemeral and overcrowded world of likes and virality." Great reporting from @ThePrintIndia about the realities of the creator economy in India's 'Youtube capital' - the village of Tulsi - where 1/4th of the residents once harboured dreams make it as content creators theprint.in/ground-reports…

@vibamohan_ How?

think i fixed my attention span. i just finished my 3rd book for the month. please give me book recommendations. i want to read more fiction!

Helpful case study on how to become relevant again *and* grow durably. Useful for saas companies founded pre AI.

Super interesting analysis on enduring founder talent pools.