India, Dec. 11 -- Multi-stage venture capital (VC) firm Lightspeed Ventures has launched an accelerator programme, India Ascends 2026, to back under-25 year old Indian founders building R&D-first tech startups.

"We are proud to launch INDIA ASCENDS 2026 - our flagship yearly program for the most cracked young builders in the country doing incredible cutting-edge research in robotics, quantum, space, energy, AI, bio or more," Lightspeed Ventures' partner Hemant Mohapatra said.

Lightspeed aims to pick 12-15 best ideas, who'd be brought to Bengaluru for a 2-day programme. The accelerator programme is launched in partnership with Anthropic, groq, Google Cloud and AWS, where each of these participants will get around $100K in support from it...