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Lightspeed India spent the past year meeting the teams building personal AI assistants, and Harsha Kumar has written up what that year taught them. The piece calls itself notes rather than a thesis. What makes it worth the read is how much of it is checkable rather than argued: what the 2015 to 2017 wave of assistants cost to run and why every one of them was out of the business inside three years, where the price bands sit today, and which of the wedges founders are trying select for an executive rather than for everyone. The question it opens with is the one for founders here rather than for a fund. The talent and the early-stage capital are here already, it argues, so why has this not come out of India?
Lightspeed India
Instinct, Town, Grok Bot, ChatGPT Work - the race to build your personal AI assistant is on. It is hard to overstate how crowded the category has become over the last six months.
The question closer home is who builds one for India and what will that take.
At Lightspeed India, we have spent the past year and more looking closely at this space, meeting the teams building it and watching every channel get tried, from WhatsApp and Gmail to standalone apps.
In our latest Substack piece, Harsha Kumar (@kumarharsha2212), Partner at Lightspeed India, writes about how to find signal amidst all the noise around AI assistants, where the moats are and are not, why OpenAI may be every startup's biggest competitor, and where the opportunity for an India-built assistant sits.
Read it here: https://tinyurl.com/AiAssistantNotes
Lightspeed India's post on X, curated on eChai
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