HEMANT MOHAPATRA

PARTNER, LIGHTSPEED INDIA

I am a partner with Lightspeed India. I focus on global SaaS, Enterprise Infrastructure, and frontier / deep tech areas such as crypto, space/satellite, AR/VR and more. Lightspeed has offices in Silicon Valley, India, China, Israel, Europe and South East Asia, with companies such as SnapChat, Byju’s, OYO Rooms, Affirm, Docker, Nutanix, AppDynamics, Mulesoft and many more in our portfolio.

Prior to that, I was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a VC firm based in the silicon valley and investor in Facebook, Twitter, AirBnb, Zynga, Foursquare, Coinbase, Medium and more. I joined a16z after almost 5 years at Google doing strategic partnerships deals (e.g. NetApp, EMC, Verizon, TATA) and investments (e.g. Avere series E, acqd by Microsoft) for the Google Cloud platform team. Before a16z and Google, I was an Engineer & Product Manager at AMD, a micro-processor firm.

I have a bachelors and a couple of masters degrees in engineering, computer sciences, and business spread across India, USA and the UK. I love scrappy, unpolished, mad-crazy founders with a grand vision, relentless optimism, insane amounts of energy, and a passion for building products and delighting their audience.