Lightspeed selects 17 startups from SEA, India for its winter 2021 cohort

Lightspeed Venture Partners has announced a lineup of 17 startups as part of the third cohort of its Extreme Entrepreneurs (EE) program – a six-week initiative to train founders with a lot of potential.

Vaibhav Agarwal, partner at Lightspeed India/ Photo credit: Lightspeed Venture Partners

Launched in 2018 with a mission to “bring outsiders in,” the program doesn’t charge equity and fees for participation. The third batch – the firm’s winter 2021 cohort – received over 1,200 applications, with 200 from Southeast Asia.

It includes business-to-customer and business-to-business startups across sectors such as fintech, agritech, gaming, healthtech, social, software-as-a-service, and electric vehicles.

The selected startups from Southeast Asia are:

• BukuGaji, a lightweight mobile platform that modernizes traditional human capital workflows for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises.
• BuzzBreak, a content network that rewards users for paying time and attention to the platform’s stories.
• Nano, an income-streaming platform that helps employees get paid on demand, while helping employers improve retention and employee engagement at work.
•  Supermomos, a knowledge-based social network that allows users to share bite-sized knowledge about work and life through short videos. It also helps knowledge influencers engage directly with their followers.

The startups selected from India are:

• Aavaz, an analytics platform built on natural language processing to help product teams learn from large-scale customer feedback.
• Avalon Meta, a digital university with live and scheduled classes.
• BharatX, a tech company that gives consumer-facing apps access to a “buy now, pay later” option.
• BizzTM, an ecommerce platform for home and personal care products.
• Doto, a live quiz game-show app for users where they can connect and compete with friends.
• Economize, a company that helps companies analyze, manage, and optimize cloud expenses.
• Electorq, a turnkey solution provider for businesses that’s based on the mobility of goods and people.
• Evo Foods, a company that recreates food using plants and food technology with a plant-based liquid egg substitute.
• FarMart, a business-to-business agritech platform for small and medium-sized enterprises.
• Fitbee, a platform that designs fitness and nutrition plans for women who deal with hormonal imbalance problems.
• LetsDressUp, a platform that designs and customizes cloths, aims to be India’s version of US-based Stitch Fix.
• Vavepay, a contactless payments application.
• OxfordCaps, a housing facility for university students in India and Singapore.

“[EE 2021] is 100% online, which eliminates geoboundaries completely and allows the program to expand to founders anywhere. [It] packs more one-to-one clinics on functional areas like product and engineering that take the blinders off for EE founders,” said Vaibhav Agrawal, partner at Lightspeed.

A few global tech leaders who will be speaking at the program include iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Grab president Ming Maa, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, and Coinbase ex-chief technical officer Balaji Srinivasan. The program will also feature prominent Indian founders such as Vue.ai founder Ashwini Asokan, Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran, and Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar.