Lightspeed Launches 'India Ascends' To Back Early Stage Deeptech Startups

SUMMARY

Lightspeed aims to pick 12—15 best ideas, who’d be brought to Bengaluru for a 2-day programme

The accelerator programme is launched in partnership with Anthropic, groq, Google Cloud and AWS, where each of these participants will get around $100K in support from its partners

Applications for the programme will close on January 12, 2026, and winners from the training will be announced on February 6

Multi-stage venture capital (VC) firm Lightspeed Ventures has launched an accelerator programme, India Ascends 2026, to back under-25 year old Indian founders building R&D-first tech startups.

“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,” Lightspeed Ventures’ partner Hemant Mohapatra said.

Lightspeed aims to pick 12—15 best ideas, who’d be brought to Bengaluru for a 2-day programme. The accelerator programme is launched in partnership with Anthropic, groq, Google Cloud and AWS, where each of these participants will get around $100K in support from its partners.

Further, 3-4 ideas will be selected as winners to be venture funded, where the ticket size of investment ranges between $200K and $3M, with almost $500K of non-dilutive credits and grants from the partner brands.

Applications for the programme will close on January 12, 2026, and winners from the training will be announced on February 6.

Lightspeed India Partners, founded in 2008, currently has a portfolio of 61 companies, including DarwinBox, Pocket FM, Acko, CredAvenue, GlobalBees, Razorpay, Udaan, ShareChat and Zetwerk. In 2025 alone, the VC firm has backed 10 new-age startups.

The development comes at a time when VC firms and global corporations have begun rolling out accelerator programmes to filter emerging business minds and capture early share of path breaking startups.

The higher interest typically leans highly towards specific sectors such as deeptech, AI and innovation.

For instance, Amazon picked three Indian-origin GenAI startups in the third cohort of its AWS Generative AI Accelerator (GAIA) in October, from the 40 AI startups selected for the cohort.

Prior to that, Google unveiled the 20 startups selected for the 2025 cohort of its “Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First” programme, in September.

Pertinent to note that 25 investors announced funds worth over $2.5 Bn, with 17 targeting early stage startups across these aforementioned sectors this year. As per Inc42’s Indian Startup Investor Survey Q3 2025, investors have a clear preference towards early stage startups, with 58% of investors bullish about angel, pre-seed, and seed rounds.