Bejul Somaia joined Lightspeed in 2008 to build the venture capital firm's India practice from the ground up. Today, he sits at the centre of the firm’s global portfolio that has $40 billion in assets under management with bets spanning Anthropic, Mistral, ElevenLabs, Sarvam, Emergent and many others.
We visited him at Lightspeed's iconic Sand Hill Road headquarters for a wide-ranging conversation on the AI super cycle, the India opportunity, and why venture capital will never look the same again.
Bejul believes venture capital today is "wildly different” in an AI era, that is making investing “very hard.” Companies are staying private longer, valuations have reached unprecedented scale, and the complexity of underwriting has risen sharply. Every 90 days, he says, his team reassesses what they believed was possible: which theses hold, which have been disrupted, what has been changed by AI. The old model of independent investors pursuing individual convictions no longer works. "Venture capital historically has been a bunch of bright, independent-minded people pursuing their own interests. That has changed. Teamwork within venture firms is more important than it has ever been."
Periods of genuine innovation always produce hype cycles where, as Bejul puts it, "the rising tide lifts all boats" and not every company will deliver on the promise its valuation implies. But that does not make the underlying technology or the best investments any less real. His evidence: Anthropic's revenue trajectory: $80 million in 2023, $1 billion by end of 2024, $10 billion by end of 2025, $40 billion earlier this year. "This has never happened before." This cycle, he argues, is unlike anything that came before it, including the internet boom, because AI is compounding on top of every prior wave of technology. The naysayers, he believes, are making a classic mistake: over-rotating on where something is today while ignoring the trajectory entirely.
Bejul is unflinchingly optimistic on India's long-term potential while issuing a pointed near-term challenge: the entrepreneurial energy is simply not where it needs to be for the scale of this moment. He sees India as an applications market and believes the next generation of consumer leaders are set to be AI-native. But his concern is about velocity. "Why isn't it five times more? This is such a moment." The raw energy of 2011 to 2014, when founders poured out of IITs and top consulting firms with an infectious sense of belief needs to return to take advantage of this era of “cheap and abundant intelligence.”
