Lightspeed selects 4 deeptech startups for its India Ascends 2026 cohort

Lightspeed India, one of the leading early stage venture capital firms has selected four deeptech startups with founders under the age of 25 as part of its India Ascends cohort.

The India Ascends cohort aims to back founders who are engaged with frontier technologies such artificial intelligence, space and aerospace, robotics, biotechnology, and defense technology.

Lightspeed has partnered with Anthropic, Groq, Google Cloud, and AWS for the India Ascends platform.

According to a statement, each winning team will receive equity funding ranging from $200k to $3 million, along with a year-long, founder-aligned strategic roadmap designed to help them scale from early innovation to real-world impact.

The winners will also gain direct access to policymakers, global influencers, and Lightspeed’s extended network of founders and operators, in addition to over $500k in cloud, AI, and software credits.

The selected startups include:

Sapien Labs: Founded by Shashank Choudhary and Aakash Bhagat Reinventing drug trials by enabling every company to run Pfizer-scale studies with data, not human subjects.

Eyecandy Robotics: Founded by Alqama Shaikh, Raghuvamsi Velagala, and Mankaran Singh. Building next-gen physical AI characters that are 10x more engaging than anything on shelves today.

Celestial Aerospace: Founded by Shreyans Jain. Developing balloon-assisted launch systems to make space access radically cheaper and more scalable.

Sentience: Founded by Abhishek Parmar and Akash Karnatak. The startup is building a robotics foundational model with zero sim-to-real gap.

Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed, said: “What stood out across this young cohort wasn’t just the technical depth, but the clarity and the intent to build enduring companies solving hard problems. These founders represent a new generation of builders who are thinking globally from day zero, and we are all in on their journeys.”