Arif Janmohamed's path to venture capital is unusual: he grew up across East Africa, India, Canada, and the U.S., trained as a computer engineer at Waterloo, worked as a chip designer and product manager at companies like WebTV and Sun Microsystems, and even ran an early experiment where he networked PCs together to lease gaming time to friends instead of just reselling computers. He also built his career around long-term relationships and early ecosystem work—meeting Netskope founder Sanjay Beri back in 1994 as a fellow Waterloo student before eventually investing in him decades later, and separately starting a student-run venture fund at Wharton and helping organize the Canadian tech network C100.
About their Fund
Lightspeed India focuses on solving India-specific problems rather than copying U.S. or China playbooks, invests mostly at the seed and Series A stage but can offer much larger follow-on funding through its global platform, and writes checks from about $1 million to $100 million across India and Southeast Asia using the same fund. The firm also provides dedicated in-house support in areas like talent, leadership, and M&A, has added experienced operators such as former Boat CEO Vivek Gambhir and Gojek cofounder Kevin Aluwi as venture partners, prefers secondary share sales over IPOs as its main way of returning capital, and sees India's biggest AI opportunity in application-layer tools and upgrading IT and BPO work rather than building foundational AI infrastructure.
















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