It’s HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ in India as hacker houses catch on — minus the profanities and open bathrobes

Hacker hostels are places where such builders live and work, complete with chaos, where multiple teams share the space 24/7. They are usually hosted by a single person or a group; here people come from all over to ‘hack’ together an app, a bot, or even a startup.

Even 14-year-olds enter India’s booming startup ecosystem very early by participating in these one- to three-month-long residency programs. Some groups born out of hacker hostels have managed to raise money for their ventures.

“This is a very new and growing phenomenon in India. It started increasing just this year,” said Bhaskar Kode, founder of AI Grants India. The company is a non-profit organization that helps startup founders and builders with access to big language model loans, access to hacker hostels, and also meet venture capitalists or previous founders. “We wanted to remove the friction that currently exists in promoting AI in India,” he added.

Traditionally, hacker houses in India have had a visibility problem. They either became unreliable, couldn’t sustain a business, or were bad at brand positioning on social media.

“LocalHost has cracked distribution pretty well and that’s how people are finding out that hacker house culture exists in India,” said Nimisha Chanda, India lead of The Residency, a hacker house founded by Nick Linck in San Francisco in 2023. The India section is based on Bengaluru’s HSR Layout, where both streets are home to startups.

LocalHost was founded by three friends, Kei Hayashi, Suhas Sumukh and Hardeep Gambhir, who met on the Discord messaging platform three years ago. What started as a Discord server for people interested in technology has now turned into a house of hackers in different countries, including Romania, Japan and France. “We started with groups of just five people and now we have reached 15 people,” said Sumukh, who turned 18 earlier this year. He sold his first startup when he was 15 during the Covid pandemic.

Bengaluru ± 1

One of India’s oldest hacker hostels has emerged not in Bengaluru but in Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh. Altspace was started by Prashant Abhishek in 2018. “We were more of a coding camp than a hacker hostel back then. We were at AltCampus back then.”

When the pandemic hit, Abhishek moved the company online and later moved to turn it into a co-living and co-working space, now called AltSpace. It is the largest hacker hostel in the country, with the capacity to house up to 50 people at a time.

So far, AltSpace has hosted two editions of the Indiehacking Retreat and the recently concluded AI Launchpad residency program, a nine-week program for builders to come and co-create products. At the end of the AI ​​Launchpad, AltSpace said it held a demo day for founders to showcase what they’ve built and invited investors including Antler India, Blume Ventures, Lightspeed India and Peak XV Partners. Mint has not been able to independently verify this.

Meanwhile, LocalHost is planning to double its footprint in Bengaluru. Sumukh, which initially started as an online group, said it decided to take it offline in India due to the talent pool and density in the country. The company received more than 500 applications from across India, including several smaller cities like Indore, Bhopal and Jaipur, for its latest batch.

LocalHost had trialled a two-month residency program in Gurugram for tech professionals and creative enthusiasts. “It went well, but after taking a break from college, we found that NCR employees would move to Bengaluru to join the startup community here,” Sumukh said.

As part of its efforts in Bengaluru, LocalHost is renting a house in the tech city to create a media and startup lab. One floor for ‘minus one founder’, one floor for hardware development, and one floor for SaaS and fintech people. “We realized that startup founders need visibility, and that’s the media side of it. The startups side is for founders to get money, investment and support engine,” Sumukh said. he said.

Term pages

The average age in hacker hostels that have emerged in India is under 25. The youngest resident at The Residency’s Bengaluru chapter was a sixteen-year-old boy who was building an AI tool for the film industry.

“We’re pretty industry agnostic. We’ve seen founders work on problems in all areas, from deep tech to robotics to artificial intelligence, even health tech and augmented reality,” Chanda said.

So far, seven people from previous batches of The Residency in India have raised $100,000 in grant money from Emergent Ventures, an initiative of George Mason University in the US, and another has raised $250,000 in a seed round led by Google AI leader Jeff Dean, according to its website.

The youngest person at LocalHost was also sixteen years old and was developing ‘Hardware Cursor’. Point the camera on the device at any hardware, such as a circuit board, and it will suggest and write what kind of code is needed. “This founder literally built this in just 30 days,” Sumukh said.

Some startups that emerged from the company’s programs also managed to raise money.

Maya Research, led by Dheemanth Reddy, received a $30,000 grant from Emergent Ventures and raised an undisclosed amount from an institutional investor and various angel investors. Prava Payments, a payments stack for AI agents created by Sushant Pandey and Shubham Kukreti, and augmented reality glasses company DawnAR are currently raising funds.

Space, food, equality

On the other hand, money is always tight for people who run hacker houses. Grants and sponsorship opportunities to cover costs for home builders are not always easy to come by.

According to industry doyens, for the hacker house ecosystem to grow in the country, they need to either find backers in the form of enthusiastic founders with money to burn and an altruistic outlook on growing the scene, or set up a venture capital fund of their own.

A venture capital model would be similar to Erlich Bachmann’s. Silicon Valley to show. Bachmann is a fictional, arrogant character in the series who makes his money by selling his company and then turns his home into an incubation ground.

Going the venture fund route means hacker companies receive some equity from the founders and have the right to write a check to the first-time founder. This also helps them build credibility in the ecosystem.

“It would be something like a hacker house running a fund. It’s like college meets Y Combinator, but hacker houses back founders from minus one to zero,” AltSpace’s Abhishek said. Y Combinator is a well-established startup accelerator in San Francisco that has helped launch Airbnb, Stripe, Doordash, and ScaleAI, among other highly successful companies.

LocalHost plans to go the funding route in the long term. It currently provides micro-grants and co-invests with companies from its groups. Sumukh, Hayashi and Gambhir are currently trying to figure out how best to provide founders with more targeted financial assistance. “When the time comes, we will expand our investment capabilities to further support the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs,” Sumukh said.