New Startups: A Roomful of Ideas

 ON A SATURDAY EVENING, on the second floor of a new cor­ner building in Koramangala, around 150 young builders gath­ered to celebrate the opening of the Localhost office. The room vibrated with bass and chatter, the kind of crowded, anticipatory energy that usually accompanies album launches or fashion pop-ups, not early-stage tech. Localhost had first entered public consciousness last year through its viral hacker house in HSR Layout—equal parts dorm, lab and internet myth—where teen­age founders wrote code into the night and posted clips that ricocheted through X and Discord, collapsing the distance between Bengaluru and San Francisco. The new office is an attempt to institutionalise that intensity.

Localhost still resists easy definition. The founders have settled on two pillars: venture and community on one side, media and events on the other. They invest in founders be­tween 18 and 30, writing early cheques, often before traction, sometimes before an idea has fully cohered, and then use events, demo days, physical spaces and cultural programming as market engines for talent. The new Koramangala space is meant to function simultane­ously as office, salon, lab and networking space, a place where portfolio founders work alongside unaffiliated builders, hardware tinkerers and policy researchers.

I spot the only familiar face in the room—Suhas Sumukh—slight, bespectacled, mov­ing gingerly between groups. Still a teenager, Sumukh, one of the co-founders of Localhost, has become a minor legend in young-founder circles, known for an almost comical re­sponsiveness and for having run Localhost through its early hacker-house phase. Around him are young men in PyTorch sweatshirts and Red Bull representatives handing out complimentary cans. Thumping music fills the room, played by a DJ who is apparently Urban Company’s youngest-ever hire. The average age here isn’t more than 22 or 23.

There is sushi, pizza and a cheese board. Someone is brewing coffee that is described as “smelling like GPUs”. The room has the feel of a live tech social media feed made physi­cal. At one point, someone mistakes me for Shruti Rajagopalan, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where she leads the Indian Political Economy Program and Emergent Ventures India. Emergent Ventures is a fellowship and grant programme that supports entrepreneurs and thinkers with scalable zero-to-one ideas for improving society. Several founders in the room are Emergent fellows. Some of the youngest attendees are still casting for ideas and connections.

Atharv Kotekar, 18, is heading to the US to study physics and economics and wants to build a space-tech startup inspired by biological structures and enabled by AI. “In the past couple of years, startup possibilities have opened up considerably for dropouts and students who are building part-time,” says Kotekar, who moved from Maharashtra to Bengaluru recently to meet like-minded builders. He sends me a spreadsheet, a global menu of “drop out, build anyway” options: microgrants, hacker houses, residencies and labs handing teenagers and 20-somethings anywhere from $100 to $250,000 to go work on strange, ambitious ideas. If college is the old default, this document is the underground syllabus, part patronage system, part co-living experiment, part rebellion against waiting your turn. “Bengaluru is finally catching up to San Francisco in terms of support for early-stage tech,” Kotekar says.

Many founders here first met on Discord or X, then in person at residencies, hack­athons or hacker houses. Mankaran Singh, co-founder of Eyecandy Robotics, traced his path through exactly those channels. “Most of these communities primarily live on X,” he says. Lightspeed Ascend, the programme he participated in, came to him the same way. “We found it on X and applied. Localhost and Nikhil Kamath’s WTFund—all of these communities are actually pretty active on X.” Lightspeed Ascend is the no-slide-decks-just-builders wing of the VC firm, pulling under-25 founders into a fast, credibility-boosting orbit with mentorship and exposure.

Eyecandy Robotics builds legged robots designed to traverse uneven terrain—indus­trial inspection machines that can climb stairs and operate where wheels fail. Singh’s background is in robotics, and the idea fit Lightspeed Ascend’s cri­teria closely. “They were looking for under-25 founders building hardware, deep tech,” he says. There was a two-day event where “they invited a lot of successful entrepreneurs—the founder of Razorpay, founders from deep-tech startups. There were sessions around financing and registration in the US versus India.” The centrepiece was a pitch event. At the end of the session, Lightspeed shortlisted finalists—Eyecandy is one of them—that it found promising and held a few more rounds of discussion, likely of­fering them a term sheet at the end.

A key part of Mankaran Singh’s founder story runs through Lossfunk, the research-first residency run by Paras Chopra, a serial founder and independent researcher best known for building Wingify and for later work at the intersection of AI, cognition and applied research. Lossfunk selects about 10–15 participants per cohort to pursue independent, mostly AI-focused R&D projects over six weeks, with regular progress meetups, a final demo-style presentation and a Slack network that persists after the cohort ends. Alumni also retain access to Lossfunk’s physical workspace, making it a durable network rather than a one-off programme.

“Peer learning is the most valuable outcome of our programme,” says Yuvraj Aaditya Arya, the India lead for The Residency, a global network of hacker houses that began in San Francisco in 2023 and has since expanded to more than a dozen homes across cities, in­cluding San Francisco, New York, London, Berlin and Bengaluru.

The Bengaluru house—India’s first hacker house—was set up in 2023 and has since run six cohorts, with the seventh currently underway. Each cohort runs for three to four months and admits around 10–15 residents. Demand far exceeds supply: the most re­cent cohort received over 1,200 applications for 10 spots. Residents live and work together in a penthouse in Koramangala. Selection is sector-agnostic. Residents include engineers, researchers, found­ers, creatives and artists. What the programme looks for, Arya says, is obsession with a hard problem and a demonstrated sense of agency—proof that applicants have already tried to build, re­search or experiment independently. The vetting process involves a written application, an AI interview and a final live interview.

The Residency does not take equity upfront. Instead, the programme focuses on acceleration through environment and accountability. Most residents arrive with only an idea or a very early prototype; by the end of the programme, many have either formed teams, found product–market fit, shipped multiple itera­tions or raised an initial round. Programming is intentionally minimal. There are no formal lectures. Knowledge, Arya says, is already available online. The core structure is weekly demo days, where residents must show tangible progress. Industry veter­ans, founders and investors regularly attend. At the end of each cohort, a larger demo day is held; the previous one took place at Lightspeed’s Bengaluru office, drew over 200 attendees and led to follow-on conversations and funding for several teams.

Arya cites multiple outcomes from past cohorts. Ananda Sai, founder of Matrix Bridge AI, cold-emailed Google AI chief Jeff Dean, secured a $250,000 commitment and used that validation to raise a larger round. Another resident, Dheemanth Reddy, returned to India intending to build a vernacular news app but pivoted after observing that Indian users prefer voice over text. With a fellow resident, he built Maya Research, creating foundational Indian-language voice models that outperformed existing benchmarks at the time and later raised funding. Kushagra Bhatia, from the second cohort of the Bengaluru Residency, is now closing a second round of funding for Kuki, the sustainability startup he co-founded. The house has also supported long-term, non-commercial work, includ­ing autonomous drone research, where residents valued access to peers and expertise over immediate monetisation.

Age is not a barrier. While the average resident is in their early 20s, the programme has admitted minors with parental consent. A notable example is a 15-year-old founder from Vrindavan, home­schooled and already trading global markets, whose startup was acquired within two months of joining. Following this, The Resi­dency removed its formal 18-year age restriction. The aim, Arya says, is exposure to real-world building rather than credentialism.

Arya attributes the rise of very young founders to three shifts: early access to information via the internet, visible global capital pathways and the emergence of hacker houses as an alternative entry point to entrepreneurship. “India still lacks sufficient early-stage philanthropic capital compared to the US,” he says.

Arya’s own trajectory mirrors the programme’s ethos. An en­gineering dropout, he moved to Bengaluru in 2023 with limited means, experimented with startups and later joined The Resi­dency as a participant in early 2024. By September, he was asked to take on the role of India lead. Alongside this, he runs WebKites, a sports-tech infrastructure company that provides end-to-end digi­tal systems—hardware integration, scoring, registration, broad­cast APIs and secure data rooms—for national and international sporting events. For Arya, the appeal of The Residency is personal as much as professional. “If I’m going to stay in Bengaluru,” he says, “I’d rather stay with the smartest people I know.”

Anindyadeep Sunny Ghosh, 23, originally from West Bengal and now building AI infrastructure for drug discovery, describes The Residency as a turning point. “When I joined the Residency, I was very early,” Ghosh says. “It was more of a project for me rather than a full-stage startup. But when I met the people there and realised there are people like me who have left their jobs to do something very different from what society expects—that’s a different kind of energy.” Ghosh found his co-founder through overlapping networks. “We both got accepted into the Residency separately. He works from the US,” he says. Today, their company is building what he describes as “an AI scientist”—infrastructure designed to help uncover new therapeutic candidates. “The idea is to enable and hasten new discoveries or future drugs,” he says.

Sushant Pandey, 24, co-founder of Prava Tech, traces his entry into Bengaluru’s builder ecosystem through a mix of internet-native learning, physical co-living spaces and newer “launch pads” that operate as community-first alternatives to traditional accelerators. Trained in economics, with an early interest in cod­ing, he chose not to pursue engineering formally, teaching himself product-building during college and grounding his first serious startup ideas in a final-year dissertation on digital currencies and stablecoins. He met his co-founder Shubham Kukreti—an engi­neer who had worked at a Japanese startup—about four years ago at an invite-only co-living space in Bengaluru started by the Zostel founders, where builders with complementary skills gathered. After abandoning a stablecoin-based remittance idea in 2024 due to regulatory friction, they pivoted as AI agents matured, asking what it would take for AI not just to recommend purchases but to execute them safely. Prava’s solution is a payments stack for AI applications that uses tokenised, transaction-specific card credentials, restricted by merchant and amount, to allow AI agents to complete purchases without exposing users’ raw card details, keeping transactions in­side the AI interface and enabling monetisation.

The idea gained traction at a Singapore hackathon, followed by a full-time commitment in early 2025 and early validation via an X launch noticed by HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah. Pandey also entered Nikhil Kamath’s WTFund almost impulsively, submit­ting his application at the final hour. The multi-stage process led to a non-dilutive `20 lakh grant, which Prava uses largely for compliance and early operations. Pandey argues that Bengaluru’s launch pads—spaces like Localhost and The Residency—work because they normalise ambition, collapse social distance be­tween very young founders and turn randomness into produc­tive introductions. In such environments, he says, founders don’t just find capital or mentors; they find their co-founders, their confidence and their sense of what is possible.

“A lot of people are ambitious, but ambition is often looked down upon in our society, especially by boomers. They tell you, you’re just a kid—why are you thinking so big? Today, with the internet and AI, resources are democratised. If anyone says it’s too hard to build something now, that’s just an excuse. I think this is the easiest time to build anything,” Pandey says.

That belief animates many conversations in the room. It sur­faces again in the work of Surya Maddula, the young founder of WhisperWave, who is building an active noise-cancellation device for open environments. “You put a device in your environment, in your vicinity,” Maddula explains. “Because you are in that radius of efficacy, your environment will be isolated from environmental noises—construction, traffic, etc.” The system uses arrays of micro­phones and speakers, inverse sound waves and AI models trained to distinguish foreground from background noise. “It’s not one button that makes everything quiet,” he says. “It’s tackling each individual noise specifically.” WhisperWave is targeting a mid-year launch, with demos planned via videos. Hardware development is being done in collaboration with IKP EDEN, a well-known hardware lab in Koramangala. In the long term, Maddula sees WhisperWave as a foundational layer for how people work and focus in noisy, shared environments—offices, homes and public spaces—where silence today requires physical isolation.

Maddula introduces me to another builder, Harish Ashok, 17, from Chennai, the youngest participant at the Localhost HSR Layout hacker house, who is building Zenith. “It’s like Jarvis from Iron Man,” Maddula explains. “An AI voice assistant that can tell you how to put hardware together.” Zenith is described by others at the event as “a Cursor for hardware”, a tool that allows builders to ask, in real time, how to connect components, debug circuits and understand physical systems.

What emerges from this room, and from the other residencies, grants, hacker houses and launch pads, is a generation of founders learning to build in public and in proximity, moving fluidly be­tween Discord and Koramangala, money and mentorship, code and confidence, finding not just capital or credentials but co-founders, courage and a faster way from zero to one, long before anyone tells them they are ready.