Dev Khare

Excited to celebrate the founders of @lightspeedvp portfolio companies here at India AI Impact Summit this week - @DarioAmodei at @AnthropicAI - @arthurmensch at @MistralAI - @pratykumar at @SarvamAI - @mukundjha at @emergentlabs - @matiii at @ElevenLabs - @RohanNayak2 at @PocketFM_App - @arvindjain at @glean - @bipulsinha at @rubrikInc - @Pwarier at @qure_ai - @jumbld at @PortkeyAI - @ShivdevRao at @AbridgeHQ Kicking off today at India Accelerates, hosted by Lightspeed and Bank of America, here in New Delhi, with @RishiSunak and Arthur Mensch.

@jumbld 📈🚀

We processed 1 Trillion llm tokens and 1 Million llm spend today on Portkey at least this saas is thriving

Super to see so many Lightspeed portfolio companies presenting here at @MontySummit in LA - @ScrutAutomation, @acceldataio, @composio, @PixxelSpace, Bridgetown Research, @PortkeyAI - all AI-native approaches to GRC, data management, tools automation, AI gateway, consulting / research and more. @awaisahmedna @jumbld @AayushGhoshCho2 @KaranVaidya6 @hershsah

‘AI for India is under-appreciated’: Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed Venture financialexpress.com/business/news/…

Today, we're launching the Sarvam Startup Program. AI is the era for builders. We want to compound that momentum by powering the startup ecosystem with high-quality models and tools so they can create with full agency. The program provides credits, priority support, and production-ready infrastructure so startups can focus fully on building.

Bad decisions are forgivable. Unconsidered ones aren’t. The skill isn’t judgment — it’s knowing when judgment is required.

Amazing to see traffic (and customers!) ramp on @PortkeyAI. The last six months have been 🔥 ! portkey.ai/rankings/

The response to Indus has been incredible. People are using it across languages and asking questions that require depth, context, and real reasoning. We’ve been listening closely. A lot of what we’ve shipped comes directly from your feedback. Recent updates: 1. Indus is now available across the United States, Canada, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom on web. We will be live on Android and iOS within the next 2 days. 2. Dark mode is live on all platforms. Please update the app to experience it. 3. Stability and performance improvements across the stack. 4. Improved reasoning for math, logic, and science questions with more structured, step-by-step answers. 5. We’ve increased context windows and rate limits on Indus to support longer conversations. We will keep iterating. What would make Indus better for you?

The 3 biggest challenges facing Indian founders are flipping simultaneously: 1. India's talent scarcity will dissolve as low cost AI co-workers become abundant. 2. AI's declining cost curve enables founders to deliver digital services at price points that crack open the world's largest but most price-sensitive markets. 3. The app layer favors whoever best understands local context & complexity. 🧵

India’s frontier AI future is taking shape, with @SarvamAI breaking new ground. Indus, their new chat interface powered by Sarvam 105B, is now live. Led by @pratykumar and @vivekrag, the team is proving that sovereign AI can be built with India, not just for it. Proud to be part of their journey as they continue raising the bar. See it in action 👇 @MohapatraHemant @ShashBharadwaj @abhabhakoo @mansichugh

Over the past year, we have all seen the parabolic growth in inference tokens — and higher level abstractions like MCP — consumed by enterprises and developers alike. Anyone building, launching and scaling AI-infused apps is now feeling a sharp need to control, govern and meter this usage across multiple apps and large development/ops teams. We at Lightspeed backed Rohit on day zero anticipating this surge. A second-time founder I have known for over a decade — since his first startup in 2013 — Rohit’s ability to build enterprise-grade infrastructure thoughtfully and at speed is truly rare. This is the right product at the right time: a production control plane for AI, I think this can be a core ingredient for all AI deployments. Proven through adoption by hundreds of organizations including Fortune 500 enterprises and technology scale-ups globally, we are just getting started! 🚀 You can see LLM usage rankings across Portkey’s network here: portkey.ai/rankings/daily. Shoutout to the @bitspilaniindia and @FreshworksInc alumni communities around the world! And welcoming our friends at Elevation Capital, joining us on this journey.

𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮’𝘀 𝗔𝗜 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗱! Today at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, @SarvamAI unveiled new frontier models - 𝗦𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗺 𝟯𝟬𝗕 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗺 𝟭𝟬𝟱𝗕. Sarvam 30B delivers real-time, cost-efficient conversational AI that can be used even on a feature phone, while Sarvam 105B ventures into complex reasoning, holding its own against leading global open models. And that’s just the beginning of their sovereign AI vision. With Saaras V3 for speech recognition, Bulbul V3 for text-to-speech, Sarvam Vision for document and image intelligence, Sarvam Dub for multilingual dubbing, and Sarvam Kaze, their AI-powered smart glasses, the company is building a full-stack sovereign AI - all under a single platform. The idea is not just to compete globally, but to bring AI to every citizen of India. Sarvam proves that India is no longer just dreaming of AI leadership; it is realizing it. Congratulations to @pratykumar, @vivekrag, and the entire Sarvam team on this incredible milestone! @MohapatraHemant @ShashBharadwaj @abhabhakoo @mansichugh

Great to see Vivek and Pratyush build India’s sovereign AI @SarvamAI. Proud to be investors from the seed round onwards @LightspeedIndia.

@shyamalanadkat If we don’t watch out we might go to “I don’t know what x means or where it is good or bad” and so we give up perspective / judgement / taste.

in the past few decades, we’ve gone from: “why is X important” → “figure out how to do X” → “teach how to do X” → “hire me to do X” → “our software does X” → “our AI does X” → “you don’t need to think about X anymore” the entire knowledge economy is being compressed into a single prompt

@evantana @AcquiredFM Acquired is so good. Favorites episodes are on Rolex (although I do not own one), IPL, Trader Joe’s. These were all startups at one point and products of their time.

The NFL is a societal and economic juggernaut. $20B+/yr, $110B media deals, 100M+ Super Bowl viewers, but it wasn't always this way. Just listened to @AcquiredFM's pod on the NFL. Here’s what the history of the NFL teaches about building great consumer businesses. 1. Often start as fringe ideas. e.g. Football began as a niche college pastime at elite Ivy League colleges. 2. Path to greatness is messy. e.g. insane fragmentation across the APFA, AFL, AAFC, bidding wars. 3. Distribution is king. e.g. Invention and adoption of TV turned it into a juggernaut and helped it leapfrog MLB, which suffered from innovator's dilemma and was slow to adopt this new audience. Great businesses aren’t born big. They consolidate chaos and scale distribution.

I’d even broaden it out to any services segment eg - mgmt consulting (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) - IT services (Accenture, Infosys) - BPO (Concentrix, Genpact) - advertising/media (WPP) - RCM (Optim, Change HC) - legal (large law firms, UnitedLex) - data/content (Lionbridge, TransPerfect) - market research (Nielsen) - and so on

In 2006, every section of Craigslist was a $1b marketplace startup waiting to happen. In 2026, every section of PWC's website is a $10b AI startup waiting to happen.

@kushalbhagia Good to chat last week, Golden Ticket looks like a fantastic program. Not only are many founders moving but investors have also moved to San Francisco (me!). See you here.

Today, we are launching the All In Golden Ticket program. Because the best founders building in AI deserve to build with the best customers and the best talent. The quality of companies, talent and capital in AI that has concentrated in SF over the last three years is unprecedented. We consistently see that the founders that move there build much faster and bigger companies. The US is very unique because it aggressively pays for software and automation. The U.S. spends more on software than the EU and China combined—multiplied by two. We are very clear - if you want to build a global AI company, don't waste your time by starting with the domestic market and think about moving later, you will be too late. Indian founders have the hustle and grit to win in this race and we want to back those who are willing to take the leap and build from the US from Day 0. We will be your first investors, fly you to SF and help you soft land into the ecosystem with our network. You will also get enough credits to build an almost free MVP that can help you get revenue and investors. Only one condition - one cofounder has to be technically strong -either prestigious college or strong work experience. Fresh grads are also encouraged to apply. You will have fewer things to unlearn than grown ups and will adapt to the SF mindset quickly! Accepting applications till Feb 15. Link in comments - go and apply!