Free Flights, Free Housing, No Questions Asked: How India's Gen-Z Founders Are Funding Each Other

Suhas Sumukh, 17, has just finished high school. But he's already spent over half a decade as a software developer, including about two and a half years at well-known companies like the United States (US)-based SONA LLC and Merkle Labs (formerly DogeCapital), and in one as no less than a founding engineer. He was even Doge's youngest-ever software engineer.

Amidst discharging software development duties at various companies, Sumukh snuck in time to build and subsequently sell his startup, Neurifyx, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for workspace solutions.

Now he helms a microgrant fund, a venture fund called LocalHost, and also runs India's largest hacker house, which went viral online and even grabbed media attention after the house was captured on tape by Caleb Friesen, a Canadian content creator and entrepreneur living in Bengaluru.

But this isn't the story of a bright, young techie. It's more about what this bright, young techie, and some others, is enabling for other bright, young techies, either made or in the making, representing an underground movement in Bengaluru that promises great products and people, and perhaps an easier and more prosperous life for India's population.

Sumukh is among several individuals in the Bengaluru tech ecosystem who are not just doing remarkable things themselves, but also supporting other similarly high-agency people who may be short on guidance or resources but not on the will and drive to build great stuff (software, hardware, and everything in between) at a very early age. We are talking late teens through early 20s.

Besides Sumukh and his tribe (the team behind LocalHost) are individuals and collectives, such as Arnav Bansal and his Lagrange Point, and Paras Chopra and his AI research lab Lossfunk, who are facilitating the congregation of progressive, like-minded, tech-focused folks who have little on their mind other than building stuff and improving the make-up of societies, starting with India.

Helping Tech Youngins Take Off

An early inspiration to write this piece was an initiative by Sumukh called Skypass.

Sumukh experienced the abundance of talent in India firsthand.

"In January 2025, we thought, Let's host small houses like we did in Bengaluru. So we went across 15 different cities, and we got to know that across India there's talent, but these guys are not able to come to Tier-1 cities like Bengaluru, Delhi, or Mumbai for events or investor pitches and life-changing events because flights are so expensive, and these builders who come from Tier 2 or 3 cities cannot afford those," Sumukh tells Swarajya.

This revelation led Sumukh to kick off Skypass, starting 1 May 2025, along with co-founders, Japanese native Kei Hayashi and Canadian native Hardeep Gambhir. The whole thing brewed over a two-minute-long WhatsApp chat in the third week of April, initiated by Hayashi's casual enquiry on the cost of travel to Bengaluru "for an avg (average) builder in cities like mangalore, chennai, etc."

Skypass took off just as rapidly, taking about a week's time for launch. "Travel is the biggest blocker for young founders," Hayashi said in a post on the social platform X, where he announced Skypass to the public. This initiative would be a more productive use of resources than grants, "which are kinda wasteful," according to Hayashi.

With Skypass, any founder in the age bracket of 16-25 years and backed by LocalHost can fly anywhere, anytime across India for startup, innovation (think hackathons or popup villages), or research purposes at no cost, with virtually no questions asked. LocalHost would sponsor their flights.

Any otherwise-eligible founder not backed by LocalHost would also be able to avail of the sponsorship. They would only have to apply for a free flight every time they needed it for the specified purposes, and their case would be evaluated each time, as against the automatic coverage of LocalHost fellows. The applicants would get a yes or no in 24 hours, ensuring everyone's time is honoured.

"Anybody can literally fly anywhere as long as they are building something which can go big someday. This (Skypass) can open up a lot of doors for Tier 2- and Tier 3-city builders," Sumukh says.

Skypass ran into some turbulence a week after it was launched as India kicked off Operation Sindoor on 7 May in retaliation to a Pakistan-backed terror attack on tourists in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, on 22 April 2025. During the four-day-long operation, civil aviation was naturally disrupted (flights were cancelled and airports were shut down), preventing LocalHost from guaranteeing smooth air travel.

But just as civil aviation returned to normalcy, Skypass got back on track soon enough. In the nearly four months since its launch, about 20 people have flown for work using Skypass.

Among the beneficiaries is Kushagra Bhatia, who shared on X that Skypass helped him get to Nagpur in time for a critical meeting. "The meeting? A success. We came back with clarity, progress and the realisation that the ecosystem can be generous (and a little bit magical)," he wrote, encouraging any other "young founder with a big opportunity and no way to get there" to utilise the Skypass service. Bhatia heads KuKi, a technology solutions provider that makes it easier for companies to meet environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards.

Skypass is just one initiative under the larger umbrella initiative called LocalHost. From handing out $100 grants to other students building cool things on the internet, Sumukh, Hayashi, and Gambhir have turned LocalHost into a global, talent-led initiative to build software.

The trio host the LocalHost India house in HSR Layout, Bengaluru, and the international houses in Romania, Japan (Tokyo), and France (Paris). A certain number of founders congregate at these 'houses' to live and work there for a predefined period of time, nearly all of it spent on building something of value. Almost everything at these houses is paid for by LocalHost. Housing and meals are free, and so are the flights for essential travel. The resident founders also get access to hardware labs and computing credits. The idea is to give determined founders as little to worry about as possible, not even laundry, so that they can home in on their work.

"In Bengaluru, we just brought like 15 different people from across different states in India. We gave them a house, food, and grants, and told them to build something and see what happens, and surprisingly everybody built something. Now two of them have raised a pre-seed fund, one got an internship at a robotics company, one got into the Vercel AI Accelerator, and one got a full ride to attend the Network School," Sumukh says, adding that LocalHost's expansion into North America is imminent.

Before LocalHost, Sumukh and the team raised money and hosted hackathons for students and young developers. While that was fun and useful in the beginning, the initiative soon lost its sheen. "We were trying to do something for the student community. So we used to raise money. We raised around $200,000. We hosted five international hackathons in Bengaluru, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, and London. But eventually, it kind of got boring to raise money and just deploy it to host hackathons. It was mundane work that we were doing. And we didn't like it. So we wanted to make an impact through something that could foster the next generation of builders," Sumukh explains.

They first went scouting for talent across the US and Canada, backing student-led companies with $30,000 cheque sizes. This kicked off their short-lived venture fund era. "We don’t fit the typical startup mould, so it’s hard to label what we do. Maybe a student-led fellowship is the closest comparison. We’re not here to build unicorns. We’re here to help passionate people commit fully to what they care about, even if it doesn’t fit any existing box," Sumukh says.

LocalHost sees itself essentially as a community supporting young researchers, artists, and founders around the world. In the past year, they’ve helped over 50 fellows across over 20 countries in wide-ranging areas, from Zen Buddhism and biotechnology to robotics.

Their focus is on offering fellowships, co-working opportunities, and connecting people to local hubs like Tokyo, Cluj-Napoca, Zurich, Paris, New York, Toronto, and Bengaluru. "We also go beyond the usual spots, reaching out to schools, maker spaces, and smaller towns that often get overlooked by traditional accelerators. Our goal is to support talent, no matter where it’s found," Sumukh explains.

The founder says his venture's focus is on investment in human capital. "That's what our entire motto is. We try to help students or young budding entrepreneurs from India, the US, and Europe to get off from their slow building pace and help them accelerate with mentorship backing from all our investors, from the capital we give them, and from the ecosystem we provide, which is the Indo-Japanese corridor or the Bengaluru-SF (San Francisco) corridor, which we have. All of this helps give them a global presence and view," he says.

For India in particular, Sumukh is focused on unearthing talent hidden away in Tier 2 and 3 cities and providing them ecosystem access to help them pursue their passions in a focused, accelerated way.

A Cracked, Collaborative Home Lab

Lagrange Point is a household name among the young techies of Bengaluru. Stationed in Indiranagar, it's a talent magnet for novel civic-minded, technology-enabled work. But it doesn't attract just any talent. There's a particular focus at Lagrange Point, flowing directly from its founder, Arnav Bansal.

"I find the problems of a rising India very interesting to look at, and I am keen on finding talent gravitating towards solving them," he tells Swarajya. What excites Bansal most is the scale of India, and thus the scale of its problems, and how to energise talent to get cracking at solving these problems. "We have some of the most pressing urbanisation problems because we have the largest population. But for this scale of our problems, we do not have the adequate scale of talent working at them," he says.

The wide, well-paved footpaths, the cleaner air, the smoother roads, and various other facets of good urban infrastructure generally witnessed in the more developed countries are not just a natural consequence of prosperity, Bansal believes. These things have to be thought of, planned, and built. "It's not like you sprinkle some GDP (gross domestic product) per capita and things automatically become great. Ideally, all of this stuff, which is civic technology, has to be invented or reinvented. And I feel like because of the scale of our problems, the talented young people have to take a shot at solving these problems from scratch for our country."

Hence there's Lagrange Point, a space that draws those interested in solving these problems and figuring out ways to accelerate the execution and adoption of novel solutions. "I always wanted spaces like this to exist when I was younger, but there weren't any. And if there were, I didn't know of them. So that's why I wanted this to exist," Bansal says.

After finishing high school in Bengaluru, Bansal took the unusual step (at least for India) of postponing college for a couple of years. When he did enrol, it didn't take long for him to drop out altogether. That decision marked the start of a four-year deep dive into engineering. A summer internship at Replit, a US-based AI company, evolved into a highly rewarding stint from 2020 to 2024.

In 2024, after leaving Replit, Bansal opted against joining another big tech firm, choosing instead to launch two ambitious projects: Lagrange Point and Findparts, a super-fast search engine for electronic components in India, designed to make sourcing parts simpler for hardware engineers.

"Rithwik (Jayasimha) and I were invested in why it's difficult to work on hardware in India. A common theme was how painful it was for people to just arrange their components immediately for prototyping," Bansal explains. "And so, we were like, okay, how do they do it in a place like Los Angeles? One of the things if you're there is you can order something on McMaster-Carr, and it will show up at your house the next morning. And it would be a very low-touch process. You would look up some parts on this gigantic catalogue, and they would have it all listed out with specifications. And then getting it to your house would just not be hard, right?" Bansal explains. McMaster-Carr is an American e-commerce company offering more than 5 lakh products necessary to keep businesses going.

The traditional way to look for hardware, tools, raw and industrial materials, and maintenance equipment is cumbersome. "You look something up and then spend hours and hours getting through to all the vendors, who talk to you in a different language and do not communicate specifications very well. So there's a lot of friction in procuring parts, to the point that one is almost working full-time just to procure parts," Bansal says, adding that he wanted to make it a lot easier for people to find components online.

Today, one can look up over 100,000 unique parts from component suppliers like Robu, Sharvi Electronics, and Probots on Findparts.

Food toxicity, and in general environmental toxicity, is a focus area at Lagrange Point. The space has been a home to the development of, for example, a hyperlocal AQI (air quality index) monitor to capture real-time air quality data and how it relates to various other important things like housing, health, and education.

"I feel like our food, water, air, all have an insane amount of adulteration or pollution. We're dealing with both intentional and unintentional pollution, in terms of both results of industrial processes and just wilful adulteration happening from people trying to increase their margins. It all just results in bad effects on people's health, like endocrine disruption from things like microplastics. And the fact that we've become the cancer capital of the world," Bansal explains.

"If you just look at the stories around the cancer incidence rates and the types of things that cause cancer and are prevalent in our environment, it just brings the realisation that we are just not doing enough to improve the quality of our food, air, and water. And I just don't think the regulators are interested in this problem at the level they should be. So one of the things that we are working on is research into food toxicity," Bansal explains.

The most important ingredients to cook up great products are people. Although Lagrange Point has almost always been stocked up with some highly talented chefs, Bansal feels the need to help identify and support talent across India (including even convincing talented folks of their dormant talents) that get lost in India's huge crowd.

Thus was born 'Quest,' almost as a side quest of Lagrangians Bansal, Shruthi Badri, and Apoorva Verma.

Quest's premise is deceptively simple: instead of judging candidates by grades and college pedigree, why not evaluate them by their ability to solve real-world problems that create public value? That's what Quest asks of willing questers: solve a hard technical challenge and, in the process, demonstrate skill and excellence in an area while also creating public goods. By demonstrating their proficiency, questers stand to get hired by founders who are part of the Lagrange Point-Quest community, depending on their interests and suitability.

Quest, therefore, represents a cultural revolution away from India's credential-obsessed hiring practices towards a merit-based system that values demonstrated problem-solving ability over institutional pedigree. What it also does, importantly, is uncover India's rich tech talent that would otherwise remain hidden, underused, and undervalued by traditional institutions. (Swarajya carried a detailed report on the Quest initiative in June 2025.)

Lagrange Point operated under the radar for the most part until one of its more successful experimental works, just like in the case of Sumukh's Bengaluru hacker house, thrust it into the media limelight in November 2024.

Bansal and fellow Lagrangians Rithvik Vibhu and Rithwik Jayasimha had built a Faraday cage aimed at unlocking the hearing aids mode on the AirPods, geoblocked in India, for Bansal's grandmother. "This cage is in Koramangala, Bangalore. But inside the cage, your phone thinks it's Menlo Park, California," Bansal posted on X. "A Faraday cage is an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic fields. We designed ours to block GPS, Cellular networks, and WiFi signals, to differing extents," he explained in a subsequent post.

Once the AirPods stuff went viral last year, it garnered a lot of attention. Obviously, there have been good things about that. But it also means that everyone wants to be in this secret club. That's not what we want to be. It's more like a tight-knit group of friends working on problems together," Bansal says.

The young founder is now keen to bring more people who have ideas to solve India's civic problems with technology into the Lagrange Point fold. There are resources available at the home lab for builders to advance their project work, and Lagrangians would even be happy to fund some projects depending upon the significance of the work being pursued.

Other Initiatives To Support Budding Founders

Paras Chopra (of "steal this idea" fame from his relentless tech idea posts on X, for the casual Indian tech watcher on the platform) runs an AI lab for independent researchers called Lossfunk in Bengaluru. It's an exclusive space for curiosity-driven research and development (R&D).

Before Lossfunk, Chopra founded the software company Wingify, which was behind the market-leading A/B testing tool VWO, grew it to about $50 million in annual revenue without ever raising venture capital funding, and then sold it.

Now at Lossfunk, he runs three separate programmes to advance AI R&D: a "research internship" for students (perhaps on their way to a PhD or independent research) who are exploring a career in AI research, a "residency" for curious minds who want to dig deeper into AI and related topics for a span of six weeks, and "initialise" to host AI research aimed at achieving a crazy or ambitious goal.

Tiwari has been in email contact with Chopra since 2020. "I keep emailing him and asking him for advice. He's always been kind enough to respond, help me however possible, and point me in directions which I should be exploring," he says.

There's also gradCapital, co-founded by Abhishek Sethi and Prateek Behera, which invests in students who unabashedly pursue personal passion projects in science and technology. gradCapital offers two tiers of grants: the $2,500 no-strings-attached Atomic Fellowship grant for students eager to work on independent engineering projects that have the potential to benefit the world, with the possibility of an additional $40,000 or $100,000 if the passion project is set to turn into a company; and a Rs 15,000 (or more) Feather Grant (again, no strings attached) to students who are not out to change the world just yet but are eager to take a step in the direction of creating something small but interesting or helpful.

What emerges from these interconnected initiatives is more than just another startup ecosystem. It's a fundamental reimagining of how innovation happens in India. While previous generations of Indian tech entrepreneurs often had to leave the country or wait for established institutions to provide opportunities, today's young builders are creating their own infrastructure of support.

When a 17-year-old in Rajkot can fly to Bengaluru for a critical meeting through Skypass, when talented engineers in Tier-2 cities can prove their worth through Quest rather than their college credentials, when curious minds can pursue AI research at Lossfunk without institutional backing, these aren't isolated acts of generosity. They represent a new model where the next generation of founders actively lowers barriers for their peers, as well as for the generation after them.

They're not waiting for someone else to fix India's innovation gaps; they're doing it themselves, one house, one flight, one research project at a time. And with each project that tackles civic problems, each tool that makes hardware prototyping easier, and each initiative that uncovers hidden talent, they're laying the groundwork for a more indigenous, ambitious, and equitable technology ecosystem.