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 the chaos of multiple teams sharing the space 24x7. They are usually hosted by either a single person or a group, where people come from all over to ‘hack’ something together, be it an app, robot or even a startup.

People as young as 14 years attend these one-to-three-month long residency programs, entering India's burgeoning startup ecosystem very early. Some groups born out of hacker hostels have managed to raise money for their startups.

“It's a very recent and growing phenomenon in India. It started picking up only this year," said Bhaskar Kode, founder of AI Grants India. The company is a non-profit that helps budding startup founders and builders with getting access to large language model credits, access to hacker hostels as well as introductions to venture capitalists or exited founders. “We wanted to remove the friction that currently exists when it comes to fostering AI in India," he added.

Traditionally, hacker houses in India have had a visibility issue. They've either been unreliable or unable to sustain as a business or just bad at brand positioning across social media.

“LocalHost cracked distribution fairly well and that's how people are getting to know that the hacker house culture exists in India," said Nimisha Chanda, India lead of The Residency, a hacker house that was started in 2023 in San Francisco by Nick Linck. The India chapter is based out of Bengaluru's HSR Layout, a suburb where every second street is home to startups.

LocalHost was started by three friends, Kei Hayashi, Suhas Sumukh and Hardeep Gambhir, who met over messaging platform Discord three years ago. What started as a Discord server for people with an interest in tech has now evolved into a hacker house across different countries, including Romania, Japan and France. “We started with cohorts of just five people and have now expanded to 15," said Sumukh, who turned 18 earlier this year. He sold his first venture during the Covid pandemic, when he was 15.

Bengaluru ± 1

One of India's earliest hacker hostels didn't even crop up in Bengaluru, but in Dharamshala, in Himachal Pradesh. Altspace was launched by Prashant Abhishek, back in 2018. “Back then, we were more of a coding camp than a hacker hostel. We were AltCampus then."

When the pandemic hit, Abhishek took the company online and later pivoted to make it a co-living and co-working space now called AltSpace. It is the largest hacker hostel in the country, capable of housing 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, a nine-week-long program for builders to come and build products together. At the end of AI Launchpad, AltSpace said it held a demo day, for founders to showcase what they had built and invited investors including Antler India, Blume Ventures, Lightspeed India, and Peak XV Partners. Mint could not independently verify this.

Meanwhile, LocalHost is planning to double down on Bengaluru. While it initially started as an online cohort, Sumukh said that it has decided to take it offline in India on account of the talent pool and density in the country. For its recent cohort, the company received over 500 applications pan-India, including from several smaller cities like Indore, Bhopal and Jaipur.

LocalHost had tried out a two-month long residency program in Gurugram for technologists as well as creative enthusiasts. “It went well, but we found that on break from college, NCR folks would move to Bengaluru to break into the startup society here," said Sumukh.

As part of their Bengaluru push, LocalHost is hiring out a house in the tech city to create a media and startups lab. One floor for ‘minus one founders’, one for hardware development and another one for SaaS and fintech folks. “We realised that startup founders need visibility and that's the media side of it. The startups side is for founders to get money, investments and a support engine," Sumukh said.

Term sheets

For the hacker hostels that are cropping up in India, the average age is below 25. The youngest resident at the Bengaluru chapter of The Residency was a sixteen-year-old building an AI tool for the film industry.

“We're fairly sector agnostic. We've seen founders working on problems across everything, from deeptech to robotics, to AI, even healthtech and augmented reality," said Chanda.

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

At LocalHost, the youngest person was sixteen as well and building ‘Cursor for hardware.’ Point the camera in the device to any hardware such as a circuit board and it would suggest what kind of code is required and write it up. "This founder literally built this in just 30 days," said Sumukh.

Some of the startups that have come out of the company's programs have managed to raise money as well.

Maya Research, run by Dheemanth Reddy, received a $30,000 grant from Emergent Ventures and has raised an undisclosed amount from an institutional investor and various angel investors. Prava Payments, a payment stack for AI agents built by Sushant Pandey and Shubham Kukreti, is currently raising money, as is augmented reality glasses company dawnAR.

Space, food, equity

On the other hand, money is always tight for people running hacker houses. Grants and sponsorship opportunities aren't always easy to come by to cover the costs of hosting builders.

For the hacker house ecosystem to grow in the country, they have to either find backers in the form of exited founders who have enough money to burn and have an altruistic view of growing the scene or build a venture capital fund of their own, according to industry veterans.

A venture capital model would be similar to Erlich Bachmann's from the Silicon Valley show. Bachmann is a fictional arrogant character in the show who made his money selling his company and then made his home an incubator space.

Going the venture fund route means hacker houses have to take a chunk of equity from founders and have first right to write a cheque to first-time founder. This also helps them build credibility in the ecosystem.

“It would be something like a hacker house running a fund. Like college meets Y Combinator, except hacker houses back founders from the minus one to zero stage," said AltSpace's Abhishek. Y Combinator is a storied startup accelerator in San Francisco that helped start Airbnb, Stripe, Doordash, and ScaleAI, among other wildly successful companies.

LocalHost is planning to go the fund route in the long run. Currently, it provides micro-grants and co-invests with companies from their cohorts. Sumukh, Hayashi, and Gambhir are currently figuring out how best to provide more targeted financial assistance to founders. “When the time is right, we'll expand our investment capabilities to further support the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs," Sumukh said.