Lightspeed Venture Partners is raising a new India fund built around a single thesis: that AI will create more value in India than the internet did. The Silicon Valley firm is targeting $250 million for Lightspeed India Partners V and has already secured commitments for about 80% of it, according to a letter to investors sent on Thursday and seen by TechCrunch.
The new vehicle is half the size of its $500 million predecessor, raised in 2022, and is designed to be deployed faster: roughly a two-and-a-half-year investment period, with the firm planning to start investing within two months while it finishes the old fund. Lightspeed also disclosed the fund in a US regulatory filing in late April without naming a target; Indian media had reported a range of $300 million to $350 million.
Two structural changes stand out. For the first time, Lightspeed is aligning its India fundraising cycle with its global funds, tightening a regional business it set up nearly two decades ago into the firm's overall rhythm. And the new fund is dedicated entirely to AI — a sharper thematic bet than the generalist approach of its earlier India vehicles, which backed quick-commerce, consumer internet, software and services companies including Zepto, Pocket FM, Snabbit and SolarSquare.
The firm's AI credentials at the global level are well established: Lightspeed is an investor in Anthropic, xAI and Databricks. In India it has backed Sarvam AI, one of the country's leading large-language-model developers and a company selected by the Indian government to help build sovereign AI models. The letter's thesis is that India, despite lacking a frontier model developer of global standing, has an outsized opportunity in the application layer, drawing on its deep pool of software developers and its decades as a services hub.
With more than $65 billion in assets globally — and a record $9 billion raised across several funds last December, including a $980 million early-stage vehicle — Lightspeed's India vehicle is a rounding error on the balance sheet. But its India and Southeast Asia funds have deployed roughly $900 million, with another $1.6 billion coming from global funds for regional portfolio companies, according to the letter.
The move mirrors Accel, which in August raised a $550 million India fund alongside new US and European vehicles as part of a coordinated $3.5 billion effort. The same team that ran Lightspeed's previous four India funds will manage the new one; a company spokesperson declined to comment.
