AI to Prevent Preterm Births | Meet the Drapers S9: Silicon Valley (TiE)

In 3 years, we'll have enough to go unicorn.

Answer the question one more time. Show me any kind of vision at all. This is the episode we did with Tai, the Indus Entrepreneurs.

I want to build something which is not existing right now in the world.

And I will continue to have failures and push forward because it's that important.

If this really solves that problem, this is a big deal.

Nothing else wakes you up. It's a sense of purpose.

Year after year, banging on the door of not giving up.

I'm Tim Draper. I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. Thousands apply, but only top entrepreneurs have made the cut for a chance to win an investment of $1 million. It's a journey packed with unforgettable moments.

Yeah!

A million-dollar investment.

A million dollars would—

A million-dollar investment.

What a million-dollar investment into Plati would mean for us, address Medicaid gaps. We are talking about millions of people who have access to care issues.

Amazing to gain even faster traction and add more AI value-added services and scale faster.

Would mean we could get through our next round of research. The US actually has some of the highest rates of preterm birth In the developed world.

Will help us get product-market fit in the US. The recipe needs to change, the ingredients are different, so we need to remap a lot of things.

Welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers! This is a really exciting episode. This is the episode that we did together with TiE, the Indus Entrepreneurs. To my immediate left, we have Shalini Govil Pai, the General Manager Vice President of TV At Google, and actually I did. I made a mistake because Draper is her complete name because she has already been on the show. Further left is Shwark Sachavolu, is a general partner at Trinity Ventures. He doesn't know it, but he also will be adopted by the Draper family. You told me that that my father wrote a term sheet, your first term sheet for your.

It was actually a precursor to Yodlee. It was, it was a company that ultimately morphed into Yodlee.

What kinds of things are you going to be looking for today?

Founder-market fit, and is the market itself interesting? Those 2 things actually make sense, tends to be a great company.

Shalini, tell me what's going on at Google these days.

I think whatever you need to know is all in the press.

Press is pretty relentless when it comes to big, huge successes. I kiss your feet. I look and I say, wow, I don't know how many times in my life I've searched Google, but it's been so many.

We do work hard at it. You know, our focus is always on the user. How does this transformative technology really help our consumers?

And on my right, my partner, Andy Tang. Congratulations, Andy. We just closed a fund. Andy, tell me what's going on at Draper Associates, because Clearly, I have no idea.

Well, I'll tell you one thing I have an idea about. You asked who knew. Picked up a few things from Bill Draper. One of the things he said to me, well, we always knew Tim was gonna make it. We just didn't know how he was gonna make it.

Now, I think Dad's giving me a little more credit than is due because my mom, she said, the only way I'll let you take driver's ed is if you learn to type because at least He can become a clerk, was what he was thinking.

But having seen your handwriting, I now know why. Your mom was very wise. This guy's a little tight. The way I looked at it, it's encrypted. This isn't—

Let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what kind of eyebrows we've got. Now let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

My name is Ashley Crafton, and I'm the CEO of Galena Innovations. We are developing the solution to preterm birth. I'm actually a nurse by trade. I started working in women's I started working in women's health when I was 17. There's a lot of things that are similar about nursing and what I do now. Nurses are problem solvers at the very core. Most nurses have been taught that they have a sandbox that's this big and they better be problem solving in this. And I'm not willing to accept the sandbox. I worked a lot in 2 main arenas, perinatal bereavement, which is when people lose their babies. And the other was I worked in refugee work. I evacuated Afghanistan in 2021 and Ukraine shortly thereafter. When I was evacuating all of that, I was running my startup, but then I went full-time in 2022 with my startup. Whenever anything goes wrong in pregnancy, the same question always comes up. Why can't we do anything about whatever just happened to me? Regardless of what it is, people don't understand, like, the emotional and familial burden that it is to have these babies early. It's monumental. I realized one day I was part of the problem. That if I didn't do anything about it, nothing was going to change. We've tried for the last 60 years medications that cause harm and don't work, and we've tried them over and over and over again with the same outcomes. And we've tried to compress the cervix closed in order to stop early cervical change, which was very backwards to me because it's actually a technique that we use to induce labor. So thinking it would ever prevent a baby from coming out was bananas. I built something on my kitchen table and used those prototypes that I built to go do a cadaver study, and we stiffened this woman's cervix within 3 minutes, and it was just kind of miraculous, and we just kept moving forward. I have 5 kids, and my husband's an opera singer, so we already live like a pretty crazy life. One of my kids still lives in Germany and plays soccer for a club there, so like we are just ultra crazy, I guess. My parents were super supportive, actually, and so was my husband. And I honestly think there's been times, I think for every entrepreneur out there, where you're like, yeah, this is not gonna work. I don't know why we did this. My husband being like, no, this is a really important thing that needs to happen. I will continue to be able to have doors slammed in my face, and I will continue to have failures, and I will continue to have all of those things and push forward and cross these boundaries because it's that important. Where I'm from in Idaho, there are a lot of mountains and a lot of really beautiful scenery. And so that's something that's really nice to be able to connect with the outdoors always, and something that I appreciate about this area as well. I think that is one thing that is unique about the Bay Area in general is that it's a very diverse place, and I think diversity breeds good ideas, innovation. It's embraced when people think about things differently, which isn't the case in a lot of other areas. And that's something that is really refreshing as an entrepreneur to see good ideas spur on and grow other good ideas. I've been in other pitch scenarios where their whole intent is to tear down Everything you're trying to build. Tim's not like that at all. After witnessing preterm birth for years as a nurse, my patient began to show signs of birth. We sewed her cervix closed, but this tore through, and she delivered a baby that was too young to survive. And I had to solve this. 13 million babies are born preterm yearly, and it's the leading cause of death for young children. Survivors face complications and hospital stays, costing the U.S. $25 billion yearly, with racial inequities and a 60-year tech gap. Causes are varied but have one commonality: cervical change. In pregnancy, the collagen-rich cervix keeps the fetus inside the womb. At delivery, the role reverses, and it then facilitates birth by changing. Positive pressure through pregnancy breaks down collagen, leading to cervical change, and then Birth. A baby! Aside from medications that cause harm and don't work, prevention tools aim to compress the cervix closed. This weakens the cervix and can lead to birth. Our unprecedented tools work completely opposite. The ultrasound diagnostic detects a soft cervix, and our daily treatment used in early pregnancy stretches the cervix. Causing collagen regrowth and stiffness. Stiff cervixes don't change, and babies don't deliver early. We'll be to market in 3 years, selling to developed world health systems, and we will be bringing access to the developing world. And when you improve the life of a mother or her child, you improve a family, a community, a generation, and a society. Let's be that change together.

What percentage of preterm births come preterm because of the cervix?

It's interesting, 100%. In order for a baby to come out, regardless of what the cause is—

So sometimes they die in there?

The cervix has to— yep, and that's not preterm birth. But anytime the cervix changes and a baby comes out of the body, that is a preterm birth.

What's the business model here?

Most AI imaging stuff uses a SaaS model, and they charge a hospital either a yearly or a monthly fee. We are actually working towards getting reimbursement codes so that we can charge per use. It's really refreshing when you have an investor looking at your business through the exact right lens.

First of all, brilliant mission.

Thank you.

What is your moat?

We have 2 issued patents. We have 5 more filed. We're filing another 2 this week. With maternal health, there's no data. So we have the unique opportunity to have the data ourselves, and then that will be protected with trade secrets and copyrights.

It is actually interesting to me that there's actually a test to figure this stuff out. Is this a known scientific fact?

Shear wave speed elastography and quantifying tissue stiffness is known in research and has been shown to be a better predictor of preterm birth. There were those issues before where it hasn't been validated, there— it's high user variability, and it really needed to be scalable. And because they weren't ever able to fix those 3 issues, it hasn't been able to actually influence the standard of care.

Can you talk a little bit Can you tell us a little bit about the financing history?

We will be raising $15 million in the next few months to get us through our early feasibility study, and then we'll raise another $15 to $20 after that to get us through our pivotal trial. The average medical device takes $94 million to get to FDA approval.

Why are you more efficient?

Because we're a scrappy startup.

Terrific.

Ashley, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Yeah.

The thing that stuck out to me most was How interested they were in solving the problem.

We'll start with Andy. We'll finish with you, Shalini.

I want her to succeed. Medical device companies, very capital intense, and oftentimes the investment reward happens more in the later stage.

Yeah, I've had 3 grandchildren in the NICU.

Oh, wow.

One of my daughters-in-law has had a lot of trouble bringing a baby to term.

Right.

If this really solves that problem, this is a big deal.

I've actually had one of my companies pivot into These kind of FDA approval type things, staying alive long enough for it to work seems like the biggest challenge.

Like I said, I love the mission, love the science and the fact that they have patents around it. I wonder if like getting money from an established player, like they talk about GE and you have GE kind of come in as a big funder and supporter.

So with that, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, it's all about the eyebrows. Eyebrows, eyebrows, eyebrows. What's going on behind the scenes?

I'm Aditya Moruli. I'm the founder and CEO of SwirePay. It goes back into basically making wire transfers faster, so SWIFT wire.

Swire.

While working full-time, I also had a big data AI services company. I was getting paid in B2B, and wires in ACH were just like Going into black holes, I was chasing checks like it was 1985. That's when I thought back to my days at NASA and was like, "How is it easier to land a rover on Mars but move money between two businesses so difficult?" And that's why we actually submitted an application to Y Combinator, which got then picked up for an interview. At that time, we weren't ready to leave our full-time jobs. A year later. I did get married, and with my wife's support, I was able to leave and found Swarupay. We had to launch in India first because instant payments, UPI, was already ubiquitous there. We ended up partnering with one of the largest private banks in India, ICICI Bank, and that set the foundation for the company where we partnered with banks to get customers. My dad being in business here, wife being supportive, there was a good safety net also, right? which I feel like is critical. You know how expensive the Bay Area is. So if you want to, you know, not get paid for 3 years, you're going behind on your mortgage and things like that. Being an outsider and not giving up and year after year banging on the door of the banks again and again. And eventually, you know, when we went to Y Combinator, the idea was to be like one of the Silicon Valley companies where you challenge the banks. Banks have a lot of staying power.

Right?

So if we can enable the banks to compete with Silicon Valley innovation, very easy for us to get market share and be ultimately the winner. A good entrepreneur usually saw— tried by solving problems that they had, right? In my case, it was a problem I was facing that I think can be related to almost every other business and just somehow pushed it through with actual backing from bankers.

Right.

So we're actually at the NASA Ames Research Center right here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View. This is the first place I interned. I was building components. At the same time, I was helping out my high school robotics team, the Funky Monkeys. We got to use some of the leftover gear NASA had originally prepped for space. What I feel like is the early years had really shaped me. Because NASA's mission to really push boundaries is what drives a lot of the spirit here in Silicon Valley. Every founder, in a way, is trying to shoot for the moon and make something that changes the world for the better. The California climate is one of the best, especially here in the Valley. Best people from all these cultures around the world are here and making an impact for humanity. The view is amazing, so you feel like you're on top of the world. So hi guys, I'm Aditya Morali. I'm the CEO and founder of Swarupay. I was running a big data AI services company. That's where I had the firsthand experience of the painful nature of B2B payments. The US leads the world in many areas, but in fintech it's far behind. That's because most businesses, after opening a bank account, quickly abandon the bank's outdated tools just to end up piecing together multiple solutions to run their business. In B2B, it's not even digital. 50% of all payments are still through manual wires and physical checks. And while other countries have leapfrogged with instant payments, they remain hard to access in the US market. So we built Swirpay, the AWS of financial services. We have an orchestration layer that helps businesses connect with multiple banks and payment rails, supporting both traditional as well as instant payments such as FedNow, RTP, and stablecoins.

And Bitcoin too?

Yes.

Now they can use AI for reconciliation, anomaly detection to prevent fraud, as well as get better business insights such as optimizing pricing, as well as identifying shrinking margins. The key unique value proposition is as an orchestrator, you can use our functions natively or plug and play with some of these tools if you're already using them. The goal is to provide a single mechanism to get all the data for analytics, as well as extend instant payments both in consumer and business end. And we're also backed by some great investors who believe in our vision. And thank you.

Do you think this is one of those things that little by little the banks just chip away at you and you end up being at their mercy? Or is it something where you get to control the end user?

This is why banks partnered with us. BNY, for example, took us to go to their customers like First American and their vendors and be like, hey, I'm not giving you a rail, I'm giving you a solution. And that's how they can compete with Silicon Valley companies. The orchestration is just a hook to get the data. It reads that data and helps better optimize pricing.

I'm trying to still understand a little bit about, you know, what you do and for whom. If you do payment orchestration, is that like mostly disbursements? Is it acceptance?

Is it—

Everything.

So what we're building is what we call actually a hyper-personalized recommendation engine, which is powered by the user interaction of their own payments data.

Great. What does this look like 20 years from now?

Oh, I believe in 3 years we'll have enough to go unicorn, especially if you guys invest and bring all your portfolio and partners, right?

Terrific. Well, Adithya, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

I know it's a Monday today, so definitely they're going to have some— a lot of work to catch up. But definitely we'll plan like an outing and come back to SF. We love coming to SF.

I'm still trying to understand fully because if you're selling to the supermarket, isn't the finance department in charge of payment and then the sales department in charge of pricing? $5 million revenue. So I think there's just more to be learned.

What'd you think?

Yeah, I'm with Andy. I'm still trying to understand the business. Clearly sold something to someone. So that means that, you know, there is, there is something there. I'm still trying to understand what that is. There is a bunch of companies that tend to start in India where there's a lot of competition for that product in the US already, but the Indian market doesn't quite, you know, buy as much from the US or the European competition.

Shalini, what do you think?

Well, I would say if Hubert didn't understand it, I definitely did not understand it. My only question on it was, what is the market size? That was not clear. It almost felt like a feature. I would probably be within one of the bigger systems.

I didn't like the answer to the last question, which is, what does this thing look like in 20 years? And he said, 3 years, we go unicorn. The people who come to us with passion to do something extraordinary end up making the money. The people who come to us wanting to make money never do. God, Draper came up with some other weird thing that he said. But, but that's the way it's worked out in my experience. Okay, with that, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. Eyebrow, eyebrow, eyebrow.

Hi, I'm Yatin. I'm co-founder of NOS. NOS is a cooking robot which cooks one-pot meal completely automatically. I'm born and brought up and studied in a small village in state of Gujarat in India. For my master's, I moved to Bangalore, and that's the first time I went out of my comfort zone. I got my first job there, I started working there, started traveling around. I was working as a chip designer, the semiconductor IC designer. Initially, first 3 years, the work was great, I enjoyed it. But then I was asking myself, like, I want to do it for entire my life. Right? And the answer was coming out that no, I want to do something different. I want to build something which is not existing right now in the world. I exited and joined very early startup called Lumos. I was like a CTO there. Our sales was not growing, so that didn't work out. I got the idea that whatever you do, um, the problem should be large enough. That's when I thought food is a large enough problem to solve, and that's where we got started. My mother spent like entire her life making sure that we eat good food, and that raised the standard of the food we get. And when I moved to Bangalore, I was like, where is that food? And that has been a constant struggle. This is something I have been telling from childhood. To them saying that I want to do something different, I want to build new technologies. Like from my childhood, I have been always saying that I will do something new. When I joined the other startup, it was not a big bump because it still felt secure. But when I started my own company, it became— it is like no salary, you stop earning everything, and then now you have to put in money to Build the prototypes. It felt like a dream even to my wife, right? So she was like, "Everything is okay. You do your startup, but not in the food," was her perspective. Entrepreneurial energy that flows in. Everyone talks about some new great idea, new technology. Plus, it's beautiful. Like I like the rolling hills. First time I visited California, I was amazed by the beauty of California. And one thing is here everyone is busy. There's a new thing like Palo Alto and the vibe of the entire Stanford campus and around area. First time I visited, it was full of energy. What I like about the office is that there's always something going on. TIEC have lot of, lot of events and VC Connect, which will bring the entrepreneurs and VC together. This was my first time on a big stage, but good part is we could come here, tell our story, tell what we are building. So really happy about that. Now we are talking about making jalebi video versus making real food through AI. That's what my startup is. We are NOS Robotics. We are building a cooking robot. Eating healthy is surprisingly really hard. Takeaways are easy, but they are loaded with oil, salt, and sugar. The packaged food, preservatives, empty calories, and stuff that you can't pronounce. And cooking by self is time-taking, messy, and not sustainable for everyone to do every day. And that's why we built Nosh. Nosh is a cooking robot which makes Real food from your fresh ingredients and your preferences. So this is how it works. You select a dish from our 400+ recipes and load the ingredients as suggested by the app, command it to cook. It follows the recipe step by step, making sure every ingredient is cooked to perfection and cooked completely well. Also, it has a culinary intelligence engine which uses camera and other sensors which It detects like your onions are golden brown, tomatoes are caramelized, or the prawns are curled. And that way it makes perfect meals just like human. Also, you can set your preferences. You want your dish to be creamy, salty, spicy, you just customize it and it will do it for you.

How much does this cost?

This is $1,500.

And how much does it cost you to make it?

So it costs us around $700 to make it right now. Once volume will pick up, it will come around $350 to make it.

And what's the continued revenue stream that comes from each?

So we are working to partner with grocery players, which will become the grocery subscription, and we'll take a cut out of it.

So I'm still a little hungry. Anything you can do for me right here?

Yeah, we have already done it.

Is it working?

We have. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

Boy, ask and you shall receive. Thank you.

Yes.

How do we know this was made on your machine?

You can ask the clue.

Is that a DoorDash logo?

No. Ooh, that's good. What do you call this?

This is butter garlic chicken bites.

I'm really sorry our studio audience can't try this because it is really delicious.

So how do you think of cloud versus in your home, like on-premise almost?

So on-premise is better because you can customize as your tastes want, right? If you see any cloud kitchen or any restaurant that runs more than one outlet, they use the cold chain because at a scale you can't have customized meal made. They are all done months back, frozen, and then served to you, right? I couldn't articulate very well to that answer, I feel. Making a prepared meal in that scale, it's all very, very costly and you can never trust it. We believe it's on-premise because you can do customization and preference, like based on your preferences, you can cook. That's the thing.

Terrific.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, it's nice meeting you. I knew I'll be interrupted in between because the team is connected to this idea. Then that's what happened.

If I'm the sous chef and it's doing the cooking, it feels like it's the reverse way of the real world. If you may, like most people actually might actually enjoy cooking if somebody did all the sous chef stuff for them. And here we're basically doing all the sous chef stuff for them. So that thing—

So the robot's taking all the fun stuff away.

Exactly.

What'd you think?

Yeah, if there is a personalized chef that is not even in my house and it just gets delivered when I need it, I wonder if that's the better model.

I like to just point out, um, so you had lettuce on the show before. I had an insect burger I think on the show here before.

It was—

it was—

did you?

Yeah. We took one for the team. This is what we do. We experiment with our own body. We'll let you know tomorrow how this settles. But so far it's great. So far it's great. I think this is an interesting combo with the meal kit companies.

Let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

I'm Raja Sundaram. I'm the founder and CEO of Pleti. We're a musculoskeletal care program. Our focus is to enable the human being to recover and get back to work or life quicker, faster. Yeah, I'm from south of India in Madras. Came here to do my master's in Oklahoma State, then later in life got an MBA at Berkeley in This has been home ever since. Spent nearly 20 years at Cisco Systems in several roles, from sales to marketing to product and services. Then somewhere along the way, walked down the path of this journey that I'm in today. I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I don't have an inception story. I was reading an article on— from World Health Organization on musculoskeletal care and fundamentally talked about any joint in the body, right, that hurts. And it made me think about my parents' age because the challenge with musculoskeletal is it impacts mobility and therefore it impacts social— it creates social isolation, impacts earning potential. I thought about my parents' age and I thought to myself, like, how does that get addressed? And they all have access to care issues. The problem is we do have solutions for people who have access to care because they can afford it. What about the rest of us, right? And I thought, why not go solve something like that? When, when you try to do the healthcare model, it's a hard journey. It's a 7-year, 10-year journey because it's a market that is not conducive to radical change, if you will, right? So you'll have to show efficacy, that it is real, it's not snake oil, and you have to show reimbursement models. It's a harder journey. It's the need to solve complex things and get my mind working constantly. I seem to be addicted to it, and, and this fits that need. At the end of the day, whether you're automating how sales workflow works or you're trying to help Grandpa and Grandma Recover quicker, faster. It's a sense of purpose. And nothing else wakes you up in the morning, early in the morning, other than the sense of purpose. And that's the drive, is kind of what I've learned now. I'm really thrilled because we are about to enter the Computer History Museum. And Uday is going to give us a tour. Being an uber geek, I've always wanted to see it, never had an opportunity. One of my jackets is in there in the Cisco archives. I'm really excited for this visit today. As a tech entrepreneur, look, this place, Silicon Valley, people like me have an opportunity and we stand on the shoulders of folks who built incredible products. I'm really looking forward to seeing the Cray supercomputer, the Fairchild machine. Silicon Valley is the place to be. Look, the diversity of people here and thought process and being able to change humanity and how we communicate, how we interact, this is the place to be. Watching the previous episodes, I was making an internal bet to myself as to when the first At Pleti, we empower people to recover and get back to work or life quicker, faster for all musculoskeletal conditions. We address 2 underserved markets. One is working class, think blue collar. The second is Medicare-aged population. So we can all kind of agree in the marketplace that access to care now is an issue, and it's been an issue for several years. It's worse. Musculoskeletal cost has gone up 34%. So we're trying to solve 2 problems.

This year.

What if there was a mechanism for patients to engage their care at home and recover quicker, faster? That's really what we've addressed. The way we have addressed this market is it's an insurtech and a healthtech stack. It's an app in English and Spanish. Patients follow their care, a sensor that looks like this that they wear twice a day for 20 minutes, and computer vision along with a coach. What we are doing is profiling patients on their behavior. How they like to be coached, cajoled, kicked, empathy shown. Meet them where they are. Profile them on archetype. Use psycholinguistics to nudge them to do their stuff. And then use big data analytics to drive personalized care for quicker, faster recovery. The kinds of outcomes that we are driving is 10x ROI for any surgical case, $3,000 saving per claim for any access to care issues, 5 weeks quicker return to work for complex issues like shoulder surgery, Employees have a 23% higher retention rate because they feel that the employer cares about them.

Can you describe, like, what exactly— how do you get them to do that? Like, you showed us 2 sensors.

Right.

Do they put it in front of their phone and then there's like a virtual coach that's like—

Yeah, from a tech standpoint, it's an app that takes iPhone, Android, and then it gets them to follow what their care program is. The second is a sensor that tracks range of motion, as does computer vision.

Can you tell us a little bit about the regulatory approval requirement and then also the revenue composition?

That caught me by surprise because it's a bit— it's a public policy, because I kind of know the answer to the question, but it's not my place to opine on it. Yeah, so we are an FDA Class 1, Class 2 registered. We're California FDA medical manufacturer licensed. We have peer-reviewed clinical studies from the like of Cleveland Clinic, so that efficacy— we've checked all the boxes that it actually does what it says on the brochure. The second part is 2 different models in the 2 markets that we are in. In workers' comp market, it's paid as billed, so we charge between $700, $750 per patient per month. They normally stay on an average 3 months unless it's shoulder or spine where we've had 2-year-long patients in the platform. Our margin model there is about 90%. In the healthcare market, which is the Medicare-aged market, we are reimbursed by Medicare, UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and every other. And so the doctors or the clinics become our clients. There we charge between $85 and $125, and our margin is about $54.

Terrific. Thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

Very nice to see you.

Yeah.

It's a great opportunity for our firm. We worked very hard to be in this space at this time. I really love the questions and, and the opportunity to respond back to all of them. I was absolutely thrilled.

I think with the rising healthcare costs of the country and the world, uh, something needs to be done, and this is a lot more efficient compared to going to a I'm a physical therapist, and, you know, I think it's definitely a trend we've seen in the marketplace. So I think it's interesting.

Even on the tech side, I would say a lot of our big tech companies are looking very seriously. You know, you're wearing so many instrumentations from all of us, and so how can we put that to use to better your lives? And so I think there's a big, big focus there that I can really see them playing into.

Well, I'm probably maybe less enthusiastic only because of of these investments we've had experience with in the past, at least when we looked at them very, very early stage, they all had, you know, good traction, early traction, but those tended to be hard to scale. But I've generally had somewhat negative experiences in trying to get these things to scale.

Hey, Athan, welcome to TIE Silicon Valley. The last time we met was in Bangalore at the TIE Global Summit.

Really love how much support we got from TIE. I think TIE shaped our journey.

You know, it's awesome to hear that. TIE Silicon Valley, it's all about this having the full flywheel, right? Today we can see young entrepreneurs practicing their pitches. We see VCs here having Funding Fridays, and the GTM Accelerator program is in full swing. It's great to hear that it's helped you. I'm maniacal about our focus on youth. So today is our final day of the high schoolers finishing a 1-week program On entrepreneurship. So they're going to be pitching to other VCs later in the afternoon.

I just walked in, I said, like, kids doing pitch practice? I was like, okay, what, what in the world is this? I can see a lot of energy flowing through TIE, and the help and the guidance they provide will shape the future.

Now we have this very difficult time in the show. Which of these 4 entrepreneurs is going to the semifinals? Let's bring up the 4 entrepreneurs. Yatin, really cool food product. As a consumer, I'm kind of really excited about, but is it a business that really takes over, or is it a really competitive business?

This is not just hardware which anyone can replicate because there's a computer vision and the sensor processing coming in. So we will have moat. Cooking robot will transform the food, and that's what we are here for.

from Galena. Have you thought, I mean, we'll do FDA, but we won't, but we're going to get revenue along the way?

Our main market is here in the U.S. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama are huge issues, and their preterm birth rates match that of Malawi. And me as a nurse, I can't ignore that. It's not necessarily, um, a business decision for, for me personally, and, and maybe that's not what an, uh, an investor wants Generally, no. However, what we're doing is actually changing the world for the better.

Swire Pay, Adithya, I'm gonna let you answer the question one more time. What does this business look like 20 years from now? Because you did not show me any kind of vision at all. Talking about how you were gonna become a unicorn was just like, whatever.

I run a small business, and I know how painful it was Juggling multiple payment systems. But it was very easy when I used AWS or Google Cloud. I can manage all my infrastructure in one place. That's what I want every small business to access through SwirePay.

Plethi, how do you get big enough so that it becomes something the government wants?

Half the states in the United States, 25 of them, if you do not use Plethi, the employee loses his benefit.

So it's already happening?

Yes, half the states. is now orthopedic surgeons and spine surgeons for the first time have to show outcomes a year after surgery. Without us and a horizontal telemetry of data, they can't. We have to execute in order to scale, but the 2 tailwinds, regulatory tailwinds, are there.

Who are we going to put on the spot first here? Shalini?

It's always very hard to pick. This is not recency bias, but I would say my vote would be for Plethy. Startups are always about risk. If the company can really make it such that you can recover at home, wow, what an amazing thing.

Quick, I would vote for Galena. The problem that they're trying to solve is massive. Clearly, they seem like they figured something out.

Andy, what's your choice?

This must be an early-stage venture capital kind of thing. I'm also gravitating towards Galena. It's the kind of thing we do at Draper Associates. We take early risks. At the right pricing, of course. It's a long way to success, but it's a meaningful journey.

And the good news is that none of us really have to decide here because we have the crystal. It has never steered me wrong. Quite extraordinary. It takes all the feedback from all of you, all of you out in TV land, all the judges, all their thoughts. I, I'd like everybody to just send their vibes to the crystal ball. Anybody know any magic words? Other than that one.

Galena!

Galena moves forward. Congratulations. Well done.

Yeah, it was pretty exciting. It is validating to win, especially I think At a level like this where there's such great entrepreneurs that you're with.

You should vote us back in because food is a problem for you. Try to eat healthy, but it doesn't really happen because you don't have time and energy. Nosh changes that.

So you should vote us back because you want a chance to lower your cost and simplify your payments of payment stack. You will see what we're— what we actually have to offer.

What we are addressing is a societal problem. We're all growing older, living longer. That's the reason you should bought Aspire.

I want to thank the Thai guys. Way to go. See you next time on Meet the Drapers.