One of the biggest events this summer in Bengaluru is Y Combinator’s first-ever Startup School in India. Designed for early-stage founders, it will impart a free online course, and will involve a global community offering guidance, mentorship, and growth to young founders and builders.

Y Combinator, or YC, is a San Francisco-based accelerator and early-stage fund. It has been running for 15 years and has launched companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe. Closer to home, it has funded startups such as Zepto, Groww, and Meesho, whose founders will speak at this day-long event on April 18 (Saturday) at Whitefield in India’s IT hub. YC’s Startup School is coveted, as it has an acceptance rate of ~1–2% and has funded ~5,000 startups globally.

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If you have been on X, the buzz around this event is hard to miss. There are secret parties, pre and post, to be attended by Y Combinator’s partners: Jared Friedman, Ankit Gupta, and Jon Xu. This event is going to host 2,000 of the top founders, builders, and engineers across India to vibe and code. Builders, mostly aged 21-25, are arriving from across the country to showcase agents and AI platforms developed through “vibe coding”—a practice where natural language guides AI generation to focus on outcomes rather than manual syntax. Some of these projects are already at the launch stage.

Surya Uthkarsha, a 14-year-old Class 10 student of National Public School (NPS), Rajaji Nagar, Bengaluru, is hosting a pre-party on April 18 morning, and his WhatsApp group is abuzz. Apart from questions including where to stay and whom to meet, builders are discussing their products and ideas. I spoke to a few of them.

Uthkarsha is not just your regular teenager—he started working at 12 and is currently the Head of Growth at Edza AI, a personal AI-based tutor for students. He is also the founder of a stealth startup funded by Emergent Ventures. He believes that the future generation (Gen Alpha, as they are called) will never understand the concept of a 9-5 job. It is easy to build a product these days, and Uthkarsha’s AI agents make him money as he sleeps.

India is building

Uthkarsha isn’t the only one—Patna’s Gyanshu Pathak is 22 and in his final semester at IIT Roorkee, where he is studying metallurgy. Pathak started working at 20 with full-time remote stints as a full-stack developer in AI and Crypto startups—opportunities he would never find through his college placement department. He is building Oasis AI, a vibe-coded platform that can make the creation of videos as easy as text. He is hoping to find his co-founder at the event and get a chance to attend YC’s OG Startup School.

Solving a more complex problem is Aditya Kumar, 17, from Jehanabad, Bihar. He lost his aunt to breast cancer—a leading cause of death among women in Bihar, with high mortality due to late diagnosis. (Studies indicate over 30% of female cancer cases are breast cancer, frequently diagnosed at stages 3 or 4). Kumar is building Aasha AI, a platform designed for breast cancer screening that requires low internet connectivity. He plans for it to be carried out by ASHA workers (India has over a million ASHA workers, one of the largest grassroots healthcare networks in the world). He has also written a paper published by the Harvard Dataverse publication.

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He achieved a 99.96 percentile in JEE Advanced and is preparing for higher studies while working on Aasha AI. In Bengaluru, he is expecting to network with fellow builders at the YC Startup School (SUS).

Age no barrier

Vanshika Shrikant Anam (16), from Mumbai’s RA Podar College of Commerce and Economics, has been building Studojo, a project helping college students with internships, presentations, career opportunities, and networking.

She has already been promoted to Head of Strategy and Partnerships at an AI startup where she started as an intern. For her, age has never been a barrier, nor is not having a degree. At 16, she is a builder and has a full-time job—she says she has learned from both—but thinks jobs are “de-glorified” in her generation. Though she also believes that building and working come with their own sets of challenges and opportunities, she maintains that one must only do what they are passionate about.

Jaisal Khurana, 16, from Delhi, started coding when he was seven. He is self-taught and has created multiple websites, earning Rs 40,000 per week. He is currently building IoT devices for electronics and hardware. His tools can turn text into a full IoT (Internet of Things) device. He calls it the “Lovable for real-life technology” (Lovable AI is an intelligent full-stack app development platform that turns natural language prompts into working web applications).

STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS ADAn AI-dentity shift

This is not all. Final-year VIT students are running a Deep AI Research Lab and building state-of-the-art LLMs (Large Language Models). Students from Ranchi are building AI-powered legal research for India’s law firms. And a student from BITS Pilani is building a personalised AI language-speaking tutor. All of them will be present at the YC event this Saturday.

From these conversations, a few things are becoming clear:

No age bar: Today, there is no age bar for an internship, a job, or building. One can be self-taught and still earn Rs 40,000 a week without anyone asking for work experience or a degree. Fun fact: in Silicon Valley, the world’s largest startup hub, the average age of a founder is 36.2 years. At an average of 28.5 years, Bengaluru has the youngest entrepreneurs in the world.

Removing barriers: AI has broken the remaining barriers to entry for builders. They are building many things—and at the same time interning, working, and starting all over. But they are building.

Beyond metros: The revolution is not restricted to metros—students and engineers from across the country are finding remote opportunities and pursuing their passion. The recipe for success is not tied to where a person hails from. All that matters now is what they can do.

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Work dimensions: Structured office work will continue, but it will have different dimensions. Every student I spoke to wanted to complete their degree and had already interned at some point irrespective of their age. They have work experience even before graduating; they are opinionated about what work should look like. Most prefer building and following their passion instead of “giving away their time to someone else”.

The need for mentors: Finally, these students need mentors. By choosing to come to India, YC will benefit from the ideas and talent in the country, while builders gain access to their network. Builders also need funding and grants, which will soon become mainstream given the rate at which India is innovating.

For a generation that is already building, shipping, and earning before it graduates, YC’s arrival in India is less a beginning and more a recognition—the builders are already here; all they need is professional guidance.

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(The writer is an observer of the future of work)

First Published:
April 13, 2026, 11:27 IST

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