From Zero Code to Real Apps | Meet The Drapers Global: London

I'm Tim Draper, and I invest in big ideas before they become the next big thing. I invested in Tesla, SpaceX, Twitch, all when they were just a sparkle in that entrepreneur's eye. This season, I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. I'll bring these visionary innovators to Hero City in the heart of Silicon Valley, where they'll compete compete for a million-dollar investment. Here is the twist: you, the viewers, can vote for your favorite entrepreneurs and help them secure a spot in the finale. Who will rise to the challenge and secure the funding to, to turn their dreams into reality? Let's find out together on season 7 of— Meet the Drapers! London is spectacular. This is my 7th time to London. Every other time it was pouring rain the whole time. When London's beautiful, it's really beautiful. Uh, we're clearly in London here. You can see the double-decker bus, but the weather is so unexpected. Beautiful church here. It's really a great place for a Lime scooter. You know, in London, they drive on the other side of the street, so you gotta look right first. There's a big bus, would've hit me. There's so much tradition here and so many people that are trying to break out and do extraordinary things. London is now a melting pot. So many people from so many different parts of the world, and they've been attracted here because it's really good for investors. In fact, let's ask if you want to be an entrepreneur.

I'm hoping to. I want to save the world.

Good. That's just the kind of person we want on Meet the Drapers.

Well, so what would a million bucks do for us right now? More than the sum, a message out to the world that we are here to support the community that we have.

A million-dollar investment would do— just make life a little bit more easier for me. Like right now we have a lot of leads, but we just do not have manpower to close the leads.

What a million dollar would do for us is we want to hire a couple more 10x developers. Right now we've done everything ourselves.

It means that we will be able to reach more women, providing them with help and support they need. Yeah.

So welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers!

Woo!

So this is the show where we go around the world looking for the best entrepreneurs in the world, and now we've got 100 million viewers!

Woo!

Our first guest judge that I'm going to introduce is Lord Amr Safraz. And, and so, Lord, thank you for arranging the weather for this short time. A member of the House of Lords, the upper house of the United Kingdom Parliament, he was nominated by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the 2019 Dissolution Honours. Thank you for coming on the show. All right, let's hear it for him. Okay, on this show, I'm so excited. Because we've never had a supermodel. So we have Natalia Vodianova, and she is one of the most recognized supermodels with 86 international Vogue covers.

Whoa.

She's a serial impact angel investor in over 30 companies with 7 unicorns.

Can you—

would you like to tell us about yourself? Yeah, I'd love to. So what I thought we'd do together is just come up and we'll both strike a pose.

Would you like me to teach you some skills?

Yes, yes, yes.

One of my favorite ones, it's called deer in the spotlight.

You have to imagine that—

I'll try.

I'm going to try hard. Oh, I love it.

You know? And then it's—

Now I've got one to teach you, okay? Okay, it's for all the entrepreneurs out there, and it's called the superhero pose. Okay, can you do it? Oh, maybe not. Okay, right, how about just there?

I'll do it like this.

Ooh.

Okay, thank you.

When you're on Meet the Drapers, we're the Drapers. So as guest judges, I adopt you into the Draper family. So I'd like to adopt you.

Lord Draper.

No, no. Lord Amer Safras Draper.

Oh, I see.

Natalia Vodianova Arnaud Draper. Okay. Our 3rd guest just has already been adopted as a Draper. He came on the show earlier and he is one of the experts in crypto hedge funds. Terrific. Okay. With that, let's go to the entrepreneurs. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. And now, since you're Drapers now, it's an eyebrow thing.

Hello, my name is Sumit Kishore. I'm the founder of ActaLink. ActaLink is providing smart wallet and programmable operations powered by account abstraction. One day, you know, some of my friends were going for the interview for British Telecom. in India, and they asked me to join them in the car. And I said, okay, let's go. And I got the job. And I worked for almost about 14 years in investment banking, asset management. So the way I quit my job at Bank of New York Mellon was I took one article from internet and I sent it to my brother and I asked him, how did you like it? He said, yeah, it's literally great. The blockchain technology sounds so good. I said, yeah, I quit my job. I'm going to join this kind of You know, technology, and this is how I decided to got into blockchain. First of all, I must tell you, like since we've built the product, this is my second social interaction. So I'm pretty new in this. I'm I'm always you know trying. I'm purposely trying to hide myself. You know, I think the goal of life is not to work less. The goal of life for me especially is to actually work more. My my parents both my mom dad. diabetic, and it is important for me to, you know, just take care of myself. So I'm wearing right now a medical device just to monitor the sugar level in the body. Last year I had some treatment and it just, you know, spiked my sugar. Now everything is normal. So just before getting into a trip, I just plug this in, and it's really helpful, by the way. The opportunity for us to work with Tim is the biggest reason why we are here. The kind of impact that we want to make, we really need someone like Tim with his access, with his knowledge, with his understanding of the global market. Payments is a very sensitive thing. It's everybody's money. This is why I think this is the most important thing for us, just to have Tim on board.

Why are you doing this? Why do you care?

I really enjoyed my time in London. You know, London serves everything. It has the financial district, entertainment industry, a lot of tourists, a lot of history, huge diversity. As I'm from India, I always enjoy the Indian food. London has a lot of such regions where you have a big community of India. It's one of the places where you can find people from everywhere. I love traditions, any kind of traditions from every country. Everywhere. I just like it. So this is what I like about English culture. Hello everyone, my name is Sumit Kishore and I will show you Actalink. Being in front of the camera is so neutral for me. Just like, have you imagined with your bank account, how would you transfer the money? With the help of Stripe, Visa, MasterCard, SEPA, SWIFT, you could transfer money everywhere. But you cannot do this in Web3, and that is why we have built a business process and payment gateway, which is powered by account abstraction. Let's say Tim has a wallet, he has a lot of digital assets, but can he do anything without making a signature? The answer is no. Well, that creates a huge problem, and that's why Web3 cannot outperform Web2. The reason is simple: technical limitation of a wallet. And this is why neither a payment or a process can be automated until we have a Solution by Actalink. It is a next-generation payment gateway and the business process gateway. It is powered by account abstraction. How do we do this? We just actually create a smart wallet out of your wallet. So we're not giving you any new wallet. Your just current wallet is kind of—I don't want to say dumb—but it's kind of a dumb. It cannot do everything. So we create a smart wallet out of your wallet and add programmable operation. So as a user, just like you go to the Netflix and you buy a subscription. subscription payment from your Visa card, you're just going to do the same thing with your MetaMask wallet, Ledger wallet, or any crypto wallet. Well, that will change the world. We just got the product ready and we have seen amazing traction in the last few weeks.

So let me get this straight. You take my wallet, my Bitcoin wallet, and I start wanting to pay my team or whatever in Bitcoin, and you make it really easy for me to do that.

Exactly.

And it's built on a smart contract so it can be programmed for me to pay those people every single 2 weeks.

Only to them. Even if somebody will hack it, they can only send the money to them, not to their wallet. I think it is not harder for people to understand the deep tech because the audience and the judges were very qualified and they could understand, but the time was too little.

So the smart wallet, is that— it's more for regular payments that are pre-programmed in?

We have looked at debit card in the wrong way or incorrect way because of the banking. So let's say I have one wallet, but now I go to YouTube. I have one smart wallet for YouTube which will only send $10 a month to YouTube for 12 months. Then I have a Netflix account and I have another smart wallet.

Why are you doing this? Why do you care?

I've spent 14 years in investment banking. I'm a very simple guy from India. And when I do everything, I'm really excited that, you know, a basic guy could do something. And I would love to build the very, very powerful payment infrastructure.

I've got one question. I know some people are not a fan, but does this apply to central bank digital currencies as well?

It absolutely applies. So let's say I live in Poland, we have 38 million people. Let's say country will create a CBDC. But if you create a CBDC in the open environment, a big bank could manipulate the market cap, right? But now you can create a programmable wallet for your country to leverage the technology. Lots of governments could use this technology to program the wallets, program the limits, calculate the tax, and everything is transparent.

Yes, I have one question. So I have a Web3 wallet, um, there's Trust Wallet and MetaMask. How would I use your product?

You go to the dApp, let's say you took a service from a company and you have to pay $900 a month, for example, subscription. So you go to this app, you click connect MetaMask. In the backend, we have created a smart wallet with that company already. Then you see the UI, you click I agree to pay 12 months contract, $25 a month. It will— the smart wallet will have allowance. And this is another beauty, we never block your money. So for the 12 months, this money is allocated but not So I have to give you signing permission? Exactly, to the smart wallet, and not to me, to your own wallet.

Right.

We do not have any private key. We are only—

No, but you spend on behalf of our wallet to do these subscription payments, correct?

Again, you make your own wallet to spend money. In my understanding, he was asking if the user needs to make the first signature to make an action. And the first actions, user has to make it because it's a user account.

Terrific. Well, Sumit, thank you so much for coming on Meet the Drapers. Great to have you.

Everything went really well. I was— I'm really happy the way it went. Nothing to change. I just feel like jumping. I'm not gonna jump, but yeah, this is how I feel.

What do you think of Sumit and his Actilink?

I like Sumit. I think he's great.

I'd really, really want to look at how he's doing the third-party signature request to really kind of understand it, because I think it's a great idea. Right now, if you have a technical wallet and I do want to do a bunch of third-party bill payments, there's no real efficient way to do that in terms of scheduling. So I think the idea is really, really good. It's just kind of how he's going to execute on it.

On rolling out a product like this, it's a very difficult challenge, and you have— you need a lot of money, a lot of financial power behind you. That's my humble opinion of someone who doesn't really understand what he was talking about.

You are a Draper. Yeah, I loved him. I thought he was great, and I think he is solving a possible major problem down the road. Let's move on to our next entrepreneur, but before we do, Let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

Hi, my name is Peter Salentai and I'm the CEO of Lazy AI.

I'm Misha Leland. I'm a co-founder at Lazy.

Lazy AI is a platform for people to develop software using natural language.

I've been doing games for the last 12 years of my life, and every day people would come to me and say, okay, I have this game idea. What do I do next? I say, well, you have to develop a prototype. And that would often stop people right there, right in their tracks, because they would start calculating all those thousands of dollars that need to be spent.

I was working on some of the technology that went into ChatGPT. And so as we were playing around with some of this new software that was coming out, and it was quite exciting, I think, kind of felt like there was an opportunity to push it further.

I was born in Russia. Right, in Moscow. When I finished high school, the whole country basically dissolved. I got into university, but I couldn't really attend it because we didn't have any money. I've always had this hunger for innovation, for something new.

I was born in Budapest, in Hungary, in '89. Yeah, right about when the wall fell in Berlin. And Hungary was a communist country before that. So the notion of entrepreneurship just simply didn't exist. When I arrived to the US, I went to study mathematics at UCLA. I then needed to get a job afterwards. And so it wasn't so easy to get a visa and go through the immigration process in the US. And ultimately, I think my entrepreneurial journey was pushed by these External difficulties that society sort of put on me. Ultimately, I think everything I've learned to date in business and my experience has made me really believe the phrase, your network is your net worth. I made every single possible mistake in entrepreneurship. You know, I think of myself still as very young and inexperienced, partly because all of these failures that I've had in my life where I made I made all the mistakes that everyone told me not to make, so I'm trying to avoid that this time around.

We're trying to tackle a really big, big problem. Tim is somebody who looks at the world, at the world's biggest problems, and thinks long-term.

I get really excited about people like Tim who have seen so much. Developing a relationship with them is, I think, the coolest part about it.

I mean, are we—

if we fund you, are you gonna abandon this company too?

So this place is called Primrose Hill. I moved right here when I first moved to London. You can see the whole view of the city here. London is an incredibly creative city, but it also has a lot of different mixed industries. Just feels that life is a bit more mixed up in London. It's a big city. You'll find a lot of pockets where you feel completely alone. It's almost like you're out in the woods. So if that kind of thing calms you down, which to me it does on a nice sunny day, it really makes a huge difference in terms of the stress levels that you have.

Oh, look at this, you're wearing the t-shirts.

To have a stage to talk on, you know that people are listening, you can sort of pour your heart out. Hi, my name is Peter Salentai and I'm the CEO of Lazy AI. I spent my last decade working with large language models, and as I was, was watching this technology developing, I couldn't stop but think that we're on the brink of a new industrial revolution, but one that will this time also touch the information industry. Software development is one of the greatest sectors of the information industry, with an approximate $2 trillion spent every year and still growing at 20%. It seems the world has an almost insatiable appetite for more software to be developed. So imagine if a tool existed that could drastically decrease the cost of software development while also making it more accessible so that more software could be developed by more people quicker. Today I'm happy to present Lazy AI, which achieves exactly that by empowering all of us to create software with our most innate Natural language. But Lazy is much more than just a tool that lets you create software with words. It's primarily a community, a community of forward-thinking software ideators who are working together to create the software the future needs. Since the launch of our beta, we've experienced incredible demand. In just a short period of time, our community has grown to over 30,000 members who have now started more than 50,000 applications. on our platform. It sounds like a simple idea, but as it usually is, quite complicated. It wouldn't be possible without our amazing team. Our team has experience from companies such as Google.

Hang on, the software has gone to 30,000 people, but I see here that you halted software. Was it because it wasn't working?

It's actually quite simple. We had an influencer go live that we We didn't even know they were going to do that, and the video went viral about us. I was seeing about 300 people sign up every minute, and then our servers crashed.

Cool. Okay, go ahead. Who are you?

Cool. So I used to work at Google Search. And Misha here, he built a huge gaming studio actually before. If some of you like mobile games, he built a game called Cut the Rope with over 2 billion downloads. Actually, this is our second company together.

What happened to the first company?

It's running, we're earning cash, but we decided to focus on this.

But who's steering the ship?

Which ship?

Yeah, I mean, what's happening to that company?

The company is still running, it's earning cash.

I mean, if we fund you, are you going to abandon this company too?

No, that's not at all what happens. I will always pursue the largest opportunity that will bring the most money for my investors.

But you didn't do that the first time. We did. Oh, are those shareholders along for the ride?

Of course, we would not leave our investors behind.

Oh, so you had an old business, it's profitable, you're using that as a cash cow for this. That's exactly what happened. Oh, much better. Okay, great.

I mean, perfectly fine. I mean, any investor would want to know if you You abandoned your investors before.

Can anyone code on your platform, or do you have to have some technical skills? And what about issues around hallucination and stuff? You don't want your code hallucinating.

So first of all, anyone can code. There's a bunch of people in our community that have learned how to do it. As far as hallucination, which is a big problem in AI, one could ask the question, well, why wouldn't ChatGPT do what you guys do? Right? One of the answers is actually ChatGPT doesn't write correct code in so many cases that we needed to work around it, build infrastructure around it to correct its answers.

So my 7-year-old creating characters right now and he says, Mommy, I want to build my own game. So my 7-year-old using Lazy AI, can he build a game?

Absolutely.

I have a few questions actually, because I'm an engineer myself and I've used Copilot. So how does your product differ from, let's just say, using GPT, for instance? Do you guys use the large language models from GPT?

We use a combination of large language models and we invest heavily into detecting problems with the code.

So you guys can actually put in, hey, I have a request for like DevOps It'll help you generate DevOps code, help you support your systems. And how much does this cost for like a developer team?

Today we're selling actually premium plans for $40 a month plus usage fees.

Yeah, but the way we deploy it, it will still be 50 times cheaper than you would deploy it yourself, right? So your cost will be very minimal.

Terrific. Great to have you here. Awesome.

Meet the Drapers. Thank you. Nice to meet you.

You're great. Great job. Thank you.

I enjoyed the questions that they gave. I did get cut off in the middle of my presentation, which threw kind of a curveball into it.

Why don't we start with you, Natalia?

Well, I love it because I know the guys and—

You invested in them.

Uh-huh.

I want to try it today. I want to actually see the product. I think a big part of AI is just such an interesting space, so to actually see the actual product work, to see if we can solve some real-world problems. I love that.

There's a lot of need for all kinds of similar software that you build in crypto that perhaps Lazy can handle well.

I like them. They seem super smart. In my line of work in politics, it's rare to come across super, super smart people, and so it's a pleasure.

I have actually tried to program in ChatGPT and it comes out okay. It actually does a pretty good job. So this would be like, do you pay and make it better?

I don't think we nailed the pitch yet, but, but I think we're very, very close.

With that, let's move on to our next guest. Well, let's see our next entrepreneur. But aren't you excited about this?

Yeah.

It's gonna be great.

I'm practicing.

Okay. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

My name is Martin and I'm the CTO of Kru. And I'm José Martín, although my friends know me as JJ, and I'm the CEO of Kru. And Kru is a deal copilot for private equity. Both of us have started a business before Kru as well. We're second-time founders and we came together through an intro through a mutual friend. I was looking for my next co-founder because I was finding that early traction for this private equity gig and people recommended him and they said, look, if I could hire someone, I would hire him on the spot. We spoke on the phone trying to convince him to abandon everything, drop everything and go with me. And in the end, I managed. I was born in Spain to a family that has roots from across Western Europe, but I've lived all over the place. I got scholarships to live and work in either the US, Pennsylvania, China, Shanghai, Paris, London, basically on my own. Parents were here for a little bit, but they decided to move back to Holland. I decided to go to university at 16 years old, which socially was relatively tough. I think you finished your master's at 20. I finished also my, like, 7th degree at 23. So from early on, we both knew that we wanted to do something special, but perhaps didn't quite have the focus of where to go.

I was raised quite religious.

I'm not religious anymore, but the one thing that stuck is I want to have a positive impact in the world. So part of the reason why I think I have a sort of resilience you need for entrepreneurship is because very early on I had a bunch of health problems. So I was run over by a car, almost killed when I was 12, 13. My lungs have collapsed like maybe 6 times. Thankfully, through a combination of factors, great friends, a loving grandma, those kind of things, I did manage to pull through. So I think now there's kind of like this mentality where nothing's going to faze me.

What do your sort of friends and family feel about this leap that you guys have taken?

My parents hate it. They're asking me to stop quite often and they want to have like a pretty like conventional life, I guess. Um, but you know, sometimes it's okay to disappoint your parents. Um, in the 20th century, people were revolting about sort of cars substituting an entire other type of workforce. AI is coming. We want to be part of this revolution, not sort of live— we don't want it to happen to us, rather. And we generally believe that it has to be responsible actors to lead this Transformation. Martin and I, I believe fundamentally that he's a good person. I think I'm a good person. So I think this tool wielded by the right people can have a massive impact in the world. Part of what I want to take away from working with Tim is when I latch onto his energy. I love this, sorry Tim, but like unhinged energy that he brings to the table. We both love to set for ourselves unrealistic artificial deadlines. So when we said, oh, he's coming to town, let's just like absolutely blow him away with what we can do.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers.

Why why did you join him?

I mean, you guys only known him for a couple minutes now, but JJ is actually the smartest person I've ever met.

How many people have you met?

The thing I love most about London is meeting everyone else around Europe in general. When you talk about diversity, London is the best place in Europe, I'd say. I mean, there's an ontv. Entrepreneurship community in London in general, what's good about it? It's growing.

It's also a safe city, you know. So something that London does is it provides you like a bare minimum safety net. So I think it also does give you a little bit of leeway to take risks. I go to galleries a lot. London is great in that the vast majority of museums are free, so you just walk in, which I love because it's not like a huge thing or we have to make this whole plan to go. You know, just walk in, maybe then end up at the pub afterwards.

We practiced a little bit beforehand, of course. Hi, my name is Martin and I'm the CTO of Crew.

Hi folks, I'm Jose, the CEO. Crew is a deal copilot. Wait, you're both CEO?

Did I hear CTO? CTO, CEO. Okay, good.

Lower ego, you know, we just share. I'm the CEO. Crew is a deal copilot for private equity. We're bringing back alpha by making private equity teams superhuman. We do that by allowing you to ingest Millions of your files, no matter the format. You put it into the system, we make sense that you can ask queries no matter how complex, and everything will be referenced inline, auditable, and traceable. Not just that, to make it more exciting, you can automate entire teams. You can do, for example, a commercial DD, a red flag report. The thing will get it done in minutes. We met 2 months ago.

Everything you see on screen has been done in 2 months, and Wait, sorry, you met a month ago? 2 months ago. 2 months ago, the 2 of you? Yeah. How'd you get together?

Someone said if I ever had to find a co-founder, I would head over heels for him. Like, he was the most recommended person I'd ever heard about. Yeah, absolutely.

So previously I've built products for companies such as Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, and I've also created an AI agent company that's doing $2 million in revenue right now.

And in my case, my previous company had Number one products. I worked at Google, at McKinsey, and I graduated with my seventh degree by age 23.

What did you do for Google?

Consumer marketing, so helping to launch consumer products.

You know, Google—it's tough to get somebody out of Google to start a business because there was paid so well. I felt what happened to you?

What made you feel like I wanted to retire? I was like, this—I should this shouldn't be not should not be so slow at age 22. I just felt like when you are making When you're making 40% EBITDA margins, you don't have the urge anymore, the fire.

Why did you join him?

I mean, you guys only known him for a couple minutes now, but JJ is actually the smartest person I've ever met.

How many people have you met?

Like a good amount. It's the most important decision you make. I've never talked to a commercial CEO about the computer architecture of GPUs and it actually makes sense from the commercial side, so.

So you need people who are not going to get daunted by complexity. And one of the things that motivates him, as you've said many times, is the harder the better. Make simplicity out of complexity. We actually are the first multi-agent AI system in the market.

Sorry, the first what in the market?

Multi-agent AI system in private equity specifically.

So let me get it straight. You go— this is mostly for private equity companies?

We start with private equity, partly because we got approached.

And you grab all their data from From everywhere.

Yes.

And then you, you pull it out for audits, for different needs, due diligence, other things. Is that the idea?

It's running right now. It's pulling, looking at everything it needs to look at, and on the left it's creating the reports, and it's about to give you the report after doing all the research on your behalf. It can look both at internal data, but it can also go to the internet and get stuff. You know, how much is it worth to find the weak spot in this company so that you don't get screwed? we found it for you. How much is it worth to find the right company? Because we found it for you.

Have you guys applied this to like the blockchain crypto industry yet or no?

In short, no. And in long, um, can you? We can, yes. Um, right now it's almost more important what we say no to than what we say yes to. Being everything to everyone was not the way to go. You have to start small, cater to your audience, and then grow from there.

So are you charging a carry or how do you bill for this?

What we do right now is we charge for usage. If we consume this much data, we charge for that. However, that's not very easy to sell once we start selling to less sophisticated people. So we might say, okay, look, what's a private— what's a DD? It's $3 million, 2 weeks. We can charge a tenth of that. First of all, give you the results in half an hour, and we still make a ton of money from this.

Terrific. Great to have you on the show. Thank you. It's a great presentation. Good job.

I'm super happy with the way it went. Like, I don't, I don't think there's any any point where we screwed up or anything. I think we performed well. I think we were relatively natural, so I'm super happy.

Look, facts on the table, cards on the table, we're 2 months old. Yeah, there's only so much you can do.

Okay, what did you think?

You know, the guys met 2 months ago and they're already very sure of themselves. It's great. I really, I really love that. I cannot comment because I don't understand.

I've never I think the idea is great. If you have like a deal copilot, I've seen a lot of times when you're trying to gather a lot of information that's available on the public internet, it's very, very tedious. So I think it solves a big problem. The question is, using AI, how much real-time data can you actually scrape? And then what about stuff that's not available online? You know, how do you ingest that?

Well, I was briefly concerned that they'd met only 2 months ago, but then I remembered that that's longer than These are the sort of guys who'll end up putting your industry out of business, so I'm all for it.

I don't have a driving need here, but it might be really good for all the data out there for diligence on companies before we made an investment. Okay, with that, Let's bring on the next entrepreneur, but before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

Hi, my name is Olga. I'm co-founder of SoloCare. SoloCare is a personalized AI assistant for women. It's basically a big mama which helps women to cope with challenges and mental stress of their daily life. On my professional journey, I faced burnout several times, and I was always thinking that it's great to have more help on this journey. For example, I went out of my burnout using professional psychological help, but I actually wanted to be in more contact with my psychologist, but it wasn't possible. And a year ago, on Cyprus, I kind of met Natalia, and I've fallen in love with the project they were doing. For Natalia, this project is very personal. She's a professional coach who helps women in their maternity process. She's also a professional newborn baby photographer. She actually holds over 3,000 babies in her hands, and doing that, She kind of started to understand how much support, actually empathetic, caring support, means for women during these stages.

What is the sort of day-to-day life as an early-stage entrepreneur?

Oh, we are hectic! Everything changes all the time. Like, we do have our goal and our direction, what we want to do. want to build, but in terms of in which sequence we will go, it actually depends. We're experimenting all the time, we're doing a lot of A/B tests, we're exploring our users, and we're learning every day. It's a hell of a journey right now. If I win today, my first phone call will be to Natalia, because right now the people who The people who are most nervous and most supportive of me are my team. What does the opportunity to work with Tim mean to us? It means a lot, because working together with Tim, we will have access to the best knowledge and to the best expertise there which exists in VC world. And with this support, we will be able to develop and scale our project as big as it gets. And yeah.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers.

Just so you know, there are thousands of these mental health apps out there. How are you going to be better than all those other applications out there?

I always loved London. I really enjoy the architecture. I enjoy the vibe and the combination of entrepreneurial dynamic and very interesting traditional deep-rooted culture. That brought me here. Actually, I really like this area for walking around. I think it's beautiful, and I like Covent Garden for theatres and artistic places. Each area is a small different city. You can find so many cities in London. Some places, they look like Amsterdam. Some places look like Vienna. Some It was the first time doing something like this. I do have experience pitching, but not like this.

So, hi everyone, I'm Olga, co-founder of Sola. Women face a lot of struggle with mental well-being throughout their life, such things like anxiety or burnout. It's especially painful because there are barriers like stigma and non-affordability. We have a solution for that. We created AI personal assistant, a female coach.

Why do you care about this? What is it in you or in someone around you?

During my career, I've been burned out 3 times. I was happy to have professional help of psychologist, but I wanted to contact her like all the time, and I didn't have this chance. But with Sola, you actually do. You can text Sola 24/7, and you can get very empathic, very human-like replies in the chat, and a lot of personalized content which actually, which you actually need. And you don't need to Google everything. You have everything there in the chat for you. And we're tracking your progress. We're making proactive check-ins. To know how you are doing. Actually, Solo feels like a passionate campaigner who actually cares.

Just so you know, there are thousands of these mental health apps out there. Thousands. Are you— you're specifically going after women, I see that. So that maybe narrows it down to hundreds. How are you, like, how are you going to be better than all those other applications out there?

We're different in 3 points. First of all, we have an innovative neuroscience to back us. We have— we're using the NeuroBalance scale in order to assess your mental state and provide actionable advices on how to boost it. Second of all, we have expertise in AI. With two people from Google who were actually building Bard.

It's a lot of Google people. Are they laying off these days? I mean, every every pitch is the the neuro balance scale. Is that deeply rooted in science, and how proven is that?

Yes, our neuro balance scale is an innovative scale from Neuro Integration Institute. It was created by Yekaterina Lengold, and it was. Proved on a study with 5,000 employees at Procter Gamble that it actually changes the mood and increases productivity.

I felt that I was able to answer them that we are backed by science, our NeuroBalance scale, and that we are better in marketing. So we actually have on board a person who helped Flow to become a unicorn.

You know, a lot of these AI assistants are very impersonal. How do you, how do you make Sola more personal and feel real?

That's actually our number one task, and we are already 50% more empathic than general AI. We use, we use reinforcement learning. Sorry, I'm a bit nervous too.

Maybe I should We should use solar.

We use reinforcement learning with actual experts in the field in order to make this— make the chat sound real life. And we put focus on 3 major things: I see you, I'm here for you, and your emotions are important.

Just a simple question: why leave the men out? I mean, there's probably There's probably more suicide rates from entrepreneurs that are actually men, from what I understand. So why leave men out? I think you're leaving a big part of the market out.

You know, there's an interesting thing. We often don't pay attention to what women are actually experiencing because women, they don't share. They kind of care about other people more than about themselves.

Sure, but you still didn't answer my question on why isn't there a product for men and you just focus on on women? Everything is always about the men.

Our focus audience right now is women. Women alone is four hundred billion market.

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

Great job. It was a pleasure. I'm feeling. I'm super pumped actually. I'm bursting with energy, very excited.

Judges, what do you think? Can I go first?

Yes.

Just to say that it scares me sometimes how real, for example, Alexa feels. Sort of, you know, you ask, you speak to these machines and they feel very real. They're super support you on your journey. I think it's really important we look into this space.

Harry, what do you think?

I mean, I love it. Emotional AI is actually one of the areas I was looking at studying, like, post-crypto. So I think the fact that it's here and people can speak to a computer or AI and then get that same emotional input or output is very, very important because it scales. I don't think people really I realized just how much stress, whether it's male or female entrepreneurs, go through to build a company, leave everything behind. So that's really, really kind of why I addressed it. And I think the total addressable market of emotional AI is massive.

It's super important. I like that they're starting with women. In this country, there are 2 million people waiting for mental health support, and they might be waiting for months and months.

Yeah, that's terrific. We have I've seen hundreds of these.

There are many companies who are doing that. That's true. And actually, that's a good sign because the problem is big and there are other competitors who want to solve it. But so far, the mental health problem wasn't solved.

So now we have a very difficult decision on our hands, and fortunately, None of us really have to do it because we have a crystal ball here. The crystal ball knows all, sees all. But now rubber meets the road. Who goes on to the semifinals? Now, if they all and these guys all vote for you, you can skip the semifinals and jump right to the finale. Okay, I'll take you one at a time. ActiLink, at first I thought It's a little ethereal, whatever. But then I realized, no, this is something that's really needed in the world. You— there are all these crypto wallets. We somehow need to be able to exchange, move money. Lazy AI. At first I started to think, what the heck? And then I realized, no, you're like Webflow of the future kind of thing where you're allowing people to design what they need. Put it out there. Crew, your market size is still pretty small. Now maybe it's a niche you can get into and then grow it from there, and maybe you can charge a lot. Sola, you are solving a very important problem. It is in all of our hearts. After that pandemic, everybody was depressed. You think your market is just a few women? It's every I, I think I need, you know, extra crystal ball help here. You know, it needs some love and support too. Oh, we are conflicted. Is it— there we go. I'm feeling something else. Lazy AI moves forward.

Congratulations. Well, it's always nice to win, right? To be honest, it was It was quite unexpected in many ways.

By the way, if you don't like our solution, vote. Get on there and vote.

I think they should bring me back because I would make, you know, a very reasonable, logical, very responsible, secure payment processor. And now the solution that I'm offering is a completely practical solution for many wallets, apps, and ecosystems.

The only reason we were voted out is that there are a lot of companies like this. I would love to go on stage again and show even more traction and even more reasons why we are different from the competitors and why actually our team can succeed.

Vote for us because we self-sabotaged.

Yeah, we definitely did.

We're trying to make world better by moving the technology further today with these use cases, very specific. I'll let us show you if what we've done this in 2 months has gone like this, then I'll show you what we're gonna do in 1 year, in 2 years.

See you next time on Meet the Drapers.