Meet the 8 startups selected for Lightspeed's entrepreneurship programme

Venture capital firm Lightspeed India Partners has picked eight startups for its training and mentorship programme called Extreme Entrepreneurs.

The eight-week programme gets underway on Tuesday at Lightspeed’s Bengaluru office. Startups will undergo mentorship sessions from the partners at the venture fund and will also attend community events.

Vaibhav Agrawal, partner at Lightspeed India, said the programme had received applications from more than 49 cities.

"We met some incredibly unique founders – from DJs to army lieutenants – going after bold, audacious ideas such as aerial transportation,” he said in a statement.

Business leaders such as Microsoft chairman John Thompson; Jon Steinberg, founder and chief executive of media firm Cheddar Inc; OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal; and Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of cloud computing company Nutanix, will share learnings and insights from their entrepreneurial journeys as part of the programme.

Below are the eight startups that have made the cut:

Dose FM: A vernacular audio platform that streams uniquely Indian songs, news stories, along with shows.

Culturegrade: A platform that claims to improve employee performance through feedback and translates it to better interpersonal relationships and personalised microlearning.

Kutuki: This startup specialises in pre-kindergarten learning through words, numbers and pictures in an intuitive video-based learning experience.

Kubric: The startup says it is re-imagining the content marketing toolkit by redefining how companies work with creatives, leveraging data and experimentation to achieve the best performance for the brand’s message.

Trell: A travel content platform that collates and broadcasts experiences.

Squadcast: Provides developers a platform for easy incident management, escalations, schedules, runbooks, post-mortems.  

Waani: This startup is trying to democratise voice assistance for Indians in an array of languages including Hinglish. 

Yellow Messenger: Deploys conversational artificial  intelligence (AI) to help large enterprises better engage with their customers.

Lightspeed India Partners recently raised its second fund of $175 million (Rs 1,200 crore).

The VC firmwas one of the early investors in branded budget hotels marketplace OYO. Its other portfolio companies include ed-tech unicorn Byju’s, B2B marketplace Udaan, social networking platform ShareChat and food-tech firm FreshMenu.