Dev Khare

Partner @LightspeedIndia. SF 1998–2011, India 2011–2021, SF again. Backing founders building between India and the world.

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

Mission India! Awesome evening here, high energy. ⚡️⚡️

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

Beautiful evening in SF @ a wonderful housefull event w/ @pratykumar of @SarvamAI talking about the company's plans, hiring for an SF office, scaling out compute, building v. large models, and global GTM. Inspiring and genuinely one of the clearest visions in the world of AI.

[Lightspeed India @LightspeedIndia]

We're excited to double down on @Triomicsinc's Series B as they continue to expand their oncology-specific AI platform for cancer centers.

Oncology breakthroughs are keeping patients alive longer, but patient histories are growing into dense, multi-year records that take clinicians a long time to navigate.

Triomics helps oncologists and administrative staff cut through that complexity. Starting with clinical trial matching, the platform has since expanded to include verifiable patient summaries that surface key information directly inside the tools clinicians already use, reducing appointment prep time without adding new workflows.

Congratulations to @k__sarim, @hrituraj1997, and the team!

More about the fundraise: https://t.co/1srXBcpEaJ

@dkhare @BaggaRohil

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

Spent time with @pratykumar tonight. Good conversation on sovereign AI and what @SarvamAI is building for and in India. See you Thursday in SF!

@ravirajjain
@MohapatraHemant
@lightspeedvp
@LightspeedIndia

[Pratyush Kumar @pratykumar]

Speaking this Thursday evening in SFO on all things model research and future plans @SarvamAI. Will also give a peak into the scale and impact of our deployed products. Bottomline: It's a generational opportunity to build a consequential Indian deep tech firm...

RSVP to join - https://t.co/kvZD24Eguz

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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.

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

🚨 SFBA AI Researchers 🚨 Our portco @SarvamAI is building one of the most consequential AI labs in the world and the pace at which we are building, shipping, scaling (and hiring!) is just incredible. We @LightspeedIndia + @lightspeedvp are hosting yet another evening with Sarvam founder @pratykumar in SF on May28th! If you are an AI researcher or a PhD / MS grad, early to mid-career, this is for you! Please RSVP on the luma-link in 1st comment - we only have room for ~100 - age, experience no bar - all that we care about is your research impact/output & quality of what you've done so far!

[Pratyush Kumar @pratykumar]

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 - https://t.co/TLlNBp8ojJ

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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.
https://t.co/tal8Ef4sXN

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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.

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

@sateesh_andra @EndiyaVC Congrats Kissht team and Sateesh!

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

Enjoying Thums Up in Delhi 😊

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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: https://t.co/dv5PLyFkQX.

Congrats again Rohit and Ayush and wishing you all the best in your journey ahead!
@jumbld @LightspeedIndia

[Palo Alto Networks @PaloAltoNtwks]

We’re excited to share our intent to acquire @PortkeyAI.

Once the acquisition has closed, we plan to integrate Portkey’s AI Gateway into Prisma AIRS to establish a control plane to secure autonomous agents, thereby allowing companies to accelerate AI innovation with confidence. https://t.co/pam892aSOJ

[Lightspeed India @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: https://t.co/tDJ18q2nQn

@youkaey @kumarharsha2212 @PriyalMotw89880

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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

[Lightspeed India @LightspeedIndia]

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: https://t.co/8MVs6Cb32m

@ajshrihari @dkhare @BaggaRohil

[Rohan Nayak @RohanNayak2]

@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.

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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

[Dev Khare @dkhare]

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