Meet the Drapers Season 6 Episode 4: Portugal

Welcome to Meet the Drapers, the world's largest global pitch competition. This season, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper travels to six continents and ten countries to find the next game-changing company.

We are officially in the game now.

The future of investing in Africa.

It's go time.

Introducing Bonvi.

This business is huge.

It blew up.

Carefully selected entrepreneurs from each region pitch Tim Draper and his VIP guest judges.

It's 5 cents.

It's 5 cents.

Did you feel an energy there?

I feel energy all the time.

Mystery luck.

They all have a mission.

They're gonna have a lot of leverage.

Tell me why you're different.

Uh...

The winners from each region travel to Silicon Valley for a chance to win $1 million.

They are ruthless.

I'm not even trying.

This is very depressing.

Let's see what we got here.

Which region has the best entrepreneur?

We've built Denmark's first flying car.

The blockchain is built for trust. Meet the Drapers! Find out on season 6 of Meet the Drapers.

My name is Andre Miranda, and I'm the founder and CEO of Musiversal. Music unites all of humanity.

My name is Ian Mullins. The company is Gamgo Limited, and I'm the founder and CEO. We're going to pay everybody their fair share from their digital actions.

I'm Greta Clementi, and I'm the CMO of MyMoney. MyMoney is a biometric payment system that works by only using your fingerprint.

Iheb, CEO and co-founder of Cumulus. At Cumulus, we create water from sun and air.

I'm Omar, the founder of Zeal Merchants. are going to be able to finally know their in-store customers.

How would you feel if you won $1 million from Tim Draper?

Cool, because I'd be ecstatic. I'd be super happy to meet him and to have him on the cap table. It'd be amazing.

If I was lucky enough to win the $1 million, we would invest it all in the company and our vision. We need capital now to accelerate our growth.

Winning this $1 million investment would be amazing. It means that we could really get things going.

I'll be very happy for the team, and it will be an additional proof that we're going through the right path.

As a very passionate entrepreneur that watches Meet the Drapers. I would love to get backed by Tim Draper and Bill Draper and Jesse. I love the family. I would love to have them even just associate my name with them.

It's amazing to be here in Lisbon.

It's one step closer to our goal.

It takes a million nos before you get a yes.

Just have to believe in yourself and the sky's the limit.

All or nothing.

Fantastic atmosphere, and I'm looking forward to the next 2 days.

Ready to rock. I've never been on TV before.

Super excited. Can't wait.

Without further ado, please everyone get really loud, make some noise for our judges. Please welcome to the stage, the Drapers.

All right, welcome everybody to meet the Drapers. We are here live at Web Summit and we're in Portugal. This is really a part—

Portugal!

We've been globetrotting. We're traveling all around the world looking for the best entrepreneurs in the world to get this million dollars of funding. Web Summit is such an extraordinary event. There are 70,000 people here. And last season, Rosie Rios became an honorary Draper. Rosie Rios, Rosie Draper was the U.S. Treasurer. If you look at your dollar bills, Rosie has signed all of them for you.

No one has made more money than I have, so there it is.

Our other guest judge is Jessie Draper. She's actually been in the family for a very long time. Jessie runs Halogen Ventures. She backs only ventures with women in the founding team. But before that, she ran the Valley Girl Show, which was only entrepreneurs. She interviewed Elon Musk. She interviewed all these great superstars. But then she said none of them were women. And that was what brought on Halogen Ventures. You have a theme for investing. What is that theme?

Well, thanks, Dad. Right now we're very focused on Future of Family, which is a new category. We interviewed hundreds and hundreds of families across the country to see what they're missing.

And we really want to solve child Rosie, what are you gonna be looking for in these entrepreneurs?

When you look at an entrepreneur, it's not just what they're presenting, it's who they're presenting. So you're investing as much in the person as you are the company. For me, the person who's making the pitch makes all the difference.

What do you think's happening now in this entrepreneurial world? What are you seeing, Jessie?

For our companies right now, I'm thinking about how do we make our runway last as long as possible? Cut back, make sure you're profitable. If you don't realize that it's no longer that market where we have these enormous valuations, I think you're going to be in trouble.

I agree with everything you just said, Jesse. You know, this is a correction for many people. This is kind of the time to really rethink your expenses. But also, you know, in many downturns, there's also just a spurt of innovation. So if you think about the downturn of 2007, 2008, 2009, think about it also that in 2007 is when the iPhone was invented. And then you had the mass-scale use of social media in 2008, 2009. So this is also the time to really think about how to keep Terrific.

I'll bet you're all wondering what the crystal ball's about. The crystal ball knows all and sees all. It needs the input of the audience. It needs the input of the judges. The crystal ball actually makes the final decision on who moves on to the semifinale of Meet the Drapers. So with that, let's bring on our first entrepreneur, shall we? But before we hear the next entrepreneur, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. How's your Halloween night?

Uh, good. I literally slept 1 hour before coming here, so I don't know if I'm giving my best performance ever, but I'm trying. Why is that important to you, to do something that's going to change the world? That's a tough one. I was raised to be very ambitious. I think given the possibilities that I have been given, it would be a waste not to try and make the most of it and do the greatest amount of good that we can do. So My Money was founded by my mom, actually. Ever since I was 16, I've been helping her out doing various things. Working with my mom is amazing because we've always been very, very, very close. We really understand each other very well. There's never any conflicts, really. We're always on the same page about everything, and I'm just very happy working with her and for her. I just respect her so much. She has transmitted her passion for this industry to me. It's hard being a woman and being an entrepreneur and being in tech. Just seeing how much she cares about this business and being her only child, I just feel like I have to and I really want to continue working on this with her.

How is your mom going to feel if you win?

I think she's gonna be super proud. I don't know, possibly she's gonna cry. I really hope I can make it happen because it would mean the world to me to give back to her everything that she's done for me. It takes a million nos before you get a yes. It's just knowing that you really have to be consistent and keep going until you find that one person that's gonna say yes.

Tell us about My Money.

I'm just like, take a deep breath. The lights are actually so bright in your face. So there were all of these cameras and I didn't know where to look. The Drapers were right there and I was like, oh my God, he could have asked me my favorite color and I would have been nervous. So My Money is a biometric payment system that works by only using your fingerprint. So it's very easy. They just need to download the app, register all of their information, connect their credit, debit cards. Register their fingerprint, and then they can go out and pay by only using their finger without needing their phone, their wallets, their credit cards, or anything. Our core market is the one of mobile payments, which is set to increase by four times in the next four years. But so will fraud and financial exclusion. USPs of MyMoney include the fact that it's the most secure payment system on the market according to the PSD two. We will be able to replace all of the existing payments. on the market right now very easily because we have partnered with all of the major machine producers, the smart POS. We plan to apply for becoming a virtual bank, which will allow us to have 0.7% of every transaction.

You've got a fingerprint. Can't that be easily copied?

So all of our readers are FBI certified, which means they have liveness detectors in them, so you can't have like a copy of it on top, or no one can chop your hand off and go and use it to Now, there have been a lot of efforts like this before.

Why is yours going to succeed?

It's so futuristic, let's say, that people sometimes get scared and they're like, oh, but is it time for this innovation on the market yet? And the answer is yes, it is. We have the patent, so it's been approved. Actually, the CEO of Pax Italia is an investor and he's in our core team. He's a very influential person in the industry and he really believes in this as And are you the founder? No, actually my mom is the founder.

Okay, so it's a family business.

Yeah.

We're a family business too. Initially, she was my only support. She is very good and I trust her. I'm happy and also proud that Greta is following with me in this adventure.

Did you know that women raise half as much capital and double the return in a year less time?

Yes, I know.

It's not a lie, no.

My mom, she's been struggling so hard to get this through. Just because she's a woman, she gets so much pushback, especially in tech.

Even if I know that this is a male-dominated world, I'm working very hard, really very hard, 7 days a week, 18 hours a day.

It was nice having 2 women on the panel.

So your mom runs the business, Is this your passion or is it her passion? How'd you get roped into speaking here at Web Summit?

She was supposed to be here, but she is in Singapore for another summit. It's always been me and her, and this business is our second child, basically. So it's like we're all a big family, me and also my money.

I mean, I think this is the future. I mean, we're not gonna have credit cards, so someone's gonna take it there. Is it gonna be you?

Of course. Isn't it obvious? You know, we are the first movers. I know the team that's behind it. I know all of the efforts that's gone into it, and I know what the competitors are doing. So like, I like that question.

Have you studied all the other entrepreneurs who have tried to do this and why they have not succeeded?

So most people are trying to do this through other biometric methods. Some have used It's all about the execution, and we have built the team, we have the patents, we have everything set up for it to be successful.

Visa and MasterCard are not going to go quietly.

No, they'll go buy her, or they'll go—

Or do it themselves.

Compete. But they're, they're not as innovative.

It was very nice to have her there. You have someone on your side that really understands you. Women do business, and they do it well. I felt a bit vindicated.

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

Thank you so much.

Let's hear it for Greta!

All right.

Thank you, Greta.

Thank you.

Nerve-wracking, but honestly fun. I think a lot of good can come from this business, and it's a great idea. I really, really do believe in it. It's going to be helpful in first world countries, but also in third world countries. It's gonna help close the financial gap between people and the technological gap between the countries.

So what did everybody think of Greta?

I mean, I think of CLEAR, you know, CLEAR at the airport. I think this could be the next CLEAR if she does it right, except it would be CLEAR everywhere. But Rosie, to your point, the iPhone does something like this. So competition, you really need to dig in.

Yeah, I'm all about female founders. I'm a big supporter of empowering women and girls. I wish mom was here because I think that would have made a difference in the pitch and in kind of the passion that one gives to their product. And look, consumer behavior is the hardest to change. When companies like Square came out, you know, everyone thought that credit cards were going away, but then the swipe came back. Not to mention, she's talking about a separate terminal at the point of sale, which, do we really need another terminal at the point of sale?

I would have liked to have met her mom. It's always It's great to meet that CEO, that founder.

That's true.

With the drive and the—

Yeah.

You can go to meetthedrapers.com and you can vote and play our game and, you know— Play the game. Have some fun. Do whatever it is you do. We're going to move on to Ian, our next entrepreneur.

It doesn't make any noise.

It's a real piano, but it has A really expensive mechanism that shuts off everything. It's a waste of money. I'm 32 now, and ever since I was about 5 years old, I was making music. A violin, piano, later had a computer, and I would just go to the instrument or the computer and make my songs. And I always had this problem. I was creating my music and I couldn't really realize it or record it. It was always just an idea. I'm gonna be on the phone for real because I'm a terrible actor. Nobody picks up anyway, so So I guess that's fine. I looked around and all my friends had exactly the same problem. Why are we learning music for 10+ years and then it never becomes real? We said, guys, we got to solve this. I'm the kind of person that really wants to thrive, and sometimes you question why. Why do you have this desire to build and to make a startup? I needed to do something bigger in my industry, so I created Musiversal, my company. I even sold my house to fund the company so we could start. I wouldn't recommend you do this, but it was, to me, was all or nothing. I just wanted the freedom to do what I loved, and that meant making a company. And here I helped produce music, and I employed lots of musicians. That's my contribution, and people will look at me and say, thank you for not wasting your time on planet Earth, you know, you did something good. That's the real reason that you get up in the morning, and sometimes occasionally everything sucks, and you just keep going. Just do your job Just do it. It's the most uncomfortable path you could follow, but it also helped me to just put myself out there and pursue what I want. If you're thinking about starting a company or doing anything creative, you're just afraid of risk. And at the end of the day, the biggest risk you can have is not do anything. So bias towards action and just get started today. Just do it.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers.

The reviews on Trustpilot are like, best thing since sliced bread.

But what is sliced bread? That's not technology to me. What is, what is it?

Welcome back to Meet the Drapers. So Andre, give us your pitch.

It was a big crowd waiting for us. There was the cameras, so I was really pumped, full of adrenaline. Music unites all of humanity. Actually, music was the first common language humans had. Millions of people around the world that have this innate desire to create music. Raise your hand if you ever played a musical instrument. Oh yeah, lots of hands. Raise your hand if you ever actually produced a song from start to finish and released it. Oh, I'm surprised by that hand.

Didn't you just hear it? We're funding heroes.

I wasn't sure how much Tim actually knows the music space and industry because on one end he composed the music for his show, so he obviously has skin in the game. But on the other end, that kind of raised my eyebrow a little bit, and I was not sure if he really understood the full picture. Maybe this doesn't sound like hell.

I had help though.

Yeah, there you go.

And, and there lies the problem. For most people, producing music just is out of reach. They feel this It's expensive and cumbersome to produce music at a high level, professional level, because you need to get your musicians and the studios and the engineers, connect them all, pay them. It just doesn't really work. So we came up with a solution that is simple and cost-effective. It's a music production platform where music creators pay a monthly fee to access our roster of creative musicians, and then they can book any music service they could imagine with a click of a button. They can choose The musician, the day and hour, and then they collaborate live. We basically figured something special out. We give a stable income to our musicians, the supply side, and that disrupts the cost of hourly music production by a factor of five.

Now I'd be a customer, but I'm not sure as a business how big this can get.

I don't know if he's pitched the whole thing.

Oh, okay.

Is there anything else you want to tell us about it?

Yeah, yeah.

Probably talk about metrics and market size. I was not done with my pitch. If she didn't interrupt. Tim, I would have done it for myself, but it was definitely really cool to see that. We're doing $100K monthly revenue now, growing 15% month over month since beginning of the year. Our churn rate is 2.7% monthly and our CLTV to CAC is 5 to 1. I'm just going to tell you a quote from one of our users. Musiversal has changed how I make music forever.

I pay for this monthly thing, but then once I've got my song, I cut you off.

What we see is that people use Musiversal for an extended period of time. I think he just would benefit from experiencing the product and getting to know our user base a little bit. What we've seen is that the behavior of the users is they just want to produce more music because they can finally afford it.

So you're like a Match.com for writers and musicians?

Yes.

No, Musiversal is not Match.com. But for the time we had, I was like, yeah, that's kind of it. Kind of got it.

So you've been really focused on affordability. Is it better? Is the technology better? Because cheaper doesn't always mean there's better technology.

We've done over a million minutes of session. Our customer satisfaction is 98%. Our NPS is +82, and the reviews on Trustpilot are like, best thing since sliced bread.

But what is sliced bread? That's not technology to me. What is, what is it?

It was a long time ago.

Oh, the technology. Okay.

A little bit frustrating because I really wish they got to use the product and understand it, because if they did, I think the conversation would have been Quite different. So our technology is a booking platform.

Okay.

And then we didn't develop our own streaming technology yet. We will in the future.

Long term, are you going to be a music producer?

Yes.

Users are paying for a set number of sessions every month. Some of them get wasted, although they're paid for. We use those to create our own music catalog.

If I get a guitarist, how do I know if I'm getting Adam Draper or Carlos Santana?

You have an artist profile. And you'll see lots of them won Grammys. You can hear samples.

And do I pay more for Carlos Santana?

No, probably not.

No.

I mean, we don't have— we don't have Carlos Santana on the platform.

Then what's the incentive for Carlos Santana to be on the platform?

We have tens of thousands of applicants. We accept less than 1% of candidates because we want to make sure every single session is going to mesmerize the user. For the supply side of musicians, this is for the musician upper middle class. It's not for the top 1 percentile of musicians that are pop stars, right? Those don't need a stable job, but you get amazing musicians in that tier.

So do you get an equity stake at all in the music that is produced?

When the user produces music, it's their music 100%. When we produce music with the wasted sessions, that's 100% our rights.

So you're gonna discover the next Taylor Swift?

Yeah, we have a few teenagers using the platform and they're pretty good.

And then you could take equity from them?

Exactly. Is huge for the music creators, and they're starting to ask us for solutions. One of our users won a Grammy last year.

Well, Andre, thanks so much for being on Meet the Draper. Let's hear it for Andre!

All right, so nice to meet you. Great job, great company.

I tried my best, and I think they understood what the company is.

So now it's up to them to decide if they like it or not.

I'm happy.

People could be rooting for Musiversal because The music industry is broken in many ways. All we want is to create musician jobs, create a better music economy, and I think it's a mission that deserves to be in the game.

Okay, so what did each of you think of Musiversal?

I think it's a great concept. I would have wanted to know a little bit more about his target market, his demographics. You know, the Tim Drapers of the world who can karaoke but maybe want to write the next big Grammy Award-winning song. I was a little curious where he was going with this.

I wanted to see more what was the vision, and that was harder for me to build. You can give the founder all of these ideas, but they're the ones who have to build it. But he's an early-stage business, and everyone wants to be a musician. He wants to be a musician.

Are you guys ready for me to sing?

Nope.

Ready to go?

Nope. Just say no. No way.

So I said, are you going to want to be a production company? There was a little sparkle in his eye like, yeah, you get it. I think he needs to lead with that. I also thought getting us to it was a little difficult. It was a little bit—

It's nerve-wracking. Look at all these people.

It is.

Give him a break.

Before we hear the next entrepreneur, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

No, I want to know about you.

That's cringe.

Oh, get on with it. Yeah, well, let's hang on. Um, I should really have practiced my personal narrative, right? Try again.

Was it always a dream of you to be an entrepreneur?

I've always had the ambition to be an entrepreneur, ever since from a young age, literally washing the cars and mowing the lawns at every single one of my neighbors. I didn't have a minute to myself, but I made a lot of money. That inspired me to go on and be an entrepreneur. I'm a kayaker, a whitewater kayaker, so I'd buy a new boat, a new kayak. I could spend my weekends abroad kayaking. So I continued my entrepreneurial journey into university and set up a bungee jumping club. We used to sell tickets for nightclub events at university as well. I'd just get involved. I was the chairman of the climbing club, the kayaking club. I learned to paraglide, learned to skydive. I had a great time at university and I had to fund all of those activities.

And did you do all those things?

Parasailing, jumping out of planes?

Yeah, yeah. I've done over 1,500 hours paragliding. I've done nearly 1,000 skydives, whitewater kayaker. I'm a top mountain biker at the moment, go mountain biking twice a week. And I always had the ambition I wanted to run my own company. I felt happier mowing the lawn and looking at the lovely lines that I'd made than working in the finance industry making a million on a How are you feeling? A little bit nervous. You'll manage, you'll manage. I've been passionate about technology ever since I've been a teenager. I first developed our initial infrastructure 10 years ago. I've gone through various iterations and pivots in our technology platform. I'm the right person to lead this company to unicorn status. We're going to be the world's leading unicorn, guaranteed.

Ian, tell us about Yamgo.

It's nice to be challenged and it's great to be under a bit of pressure, but as soon as you see the lights, it's like we can't even see the audience. And then you focus on Tim, Rosie, and Jesse. I was just trying not to fall over, to be honest with you folks. Yamgo is a profitable, rapidly growing technology company aiming to empower consumers to earn, spend, and collect crypto assets. Right now, as we speak, there's more than 5 billion people out there creating value for brands from their digital action, the big businesses, and they don't get paid. We think that's wrong, and we've reached a critical point in the industry where people's data is being used, abused, and profited from, and their digital actions. We want to change that. So we are on a mission to create a metaverse where consumers can generate income from their digital actions. We want to pay them for life. So our platform enables us to track and pay for digital actions at a tiny fraction of the cost compared to fiat. This will enable brands and big businesses to use programmable incentives and change the way the current Web2 industry works. We're going to change the industry. We're going to pay everybody their fair share of what they're due from their digital actions.

Let me get this straight. If I'm playing a game or I'm putting up social media, I get Bitcoin. Or whatever, right?

That's right. In our case, you get our utility token called Yamgo. I had a 3-minute pitch, and after 1 minute, Tim interrupted me and started firing with questions, so I couldn't get the full narrative out of our proposition, how it all structures together. It was sort of like Q&A straight into it. My heart was racing.

Once I've got a bunch of Yamgo for playing a bunch of games, how do I use my Yamgo?

You can exchange it. We're going to enable early—

Is there a current market for Yamgo?

We haven't officially launched it. First of all, it'll be a fair launch to our community. There's 185,000 people that have already signed up to Yamgo that have received our rewards already.

Why do I want to buy a Yamgo?

I went in there thinking like, wow, we're a profitable company, we're scaling, we're growing, you know, we're ticking all the boxes. And it was like, actually, no. Firstly, it provides you with utility within our game. called Yammies. So we have 2 dual functionality for our utility of our tokens. You can access a world of composable business services if you're a business. So if you want to launch your own token, if you want to reward your community, if you're a big brand, we enable the tools to do that.

So I'm picturing it as an airline rapid rewards moved onto the blockchain. And the reason you would want to use yours versus anything else is because it's much more sensitive The great news was that Jessie Draper, she got it straight away.

She understood the opportunity. She understood the potential of this technology and how it can change consumers' way of life. In terms of traction, we currently do 10 transactions per second. We've reached a peak of 1,372, and we've recently closed a huge multimillion, multiyear deal to help us to build our metaverse.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you.

How are you beating out all the other companies that are doing The same kind of thing.

He was concerned about the competition. I think he understands the size of this market. I just think I didn't sell him on us being the company that is going to deliver it. If you make a digital action and you want to get paid, we can do that within about two seconds. Everybody else is still trying to figure out how to do it on Ethereum.

Why would I want to sign up for a Yamgo? What's your pitch? You have to pitch your customer. What's the pitch to the customer?

We we have enough. So if you go to a website, you see an advert, and you click on it, we will pay you.

What will a Yamgo get me?

Yamgo, you'll be able to exchange for any other currency. We'll enable you to put it into fiat.

So what's a Yamgo worth in fiat?

You're talking to the former US Treasurer.

We're hoping around 5 cents.

It's 5 cents. 5 cents per Yamgo? Yes.

She was coming at it from a monetary perspective. What am I going to be able to do with this now? Right now? What's it worth? How are you valuing it?

If I click on an ad, How many Yamgo do I get?

If you click on an ad and download a game, you could be looking at maybe getting 10 or even 20 Yamgo.

Do I alert Yamgo that I'm about to spend money or about to do something, or are you sitting in the background watching everything I do?

It wasn't actually live, so I was a little bit careful about what I can actually say. That was holding me back a bit. We don't— we can't track everything. We have to have your permission. You have to literally sign up. You have to be able to—

Once I've signed up, you, you track me the whole time?

Only certain websites. We can't track you across the internet. It's not possible. We generated £2.1 million last year and made a profit of £1.1 million.

Terrific. Well, Ian, thank you so much for coming on Tim Draper's. Let's hear it for Ian.

Thank you.

All right. Cheers.

Thank you. Cheers. Straight into the questions. Bang.

After the moment.

Yeah.

You tell us like, oh yeah, fair enough.

I didn't get a chance to finish my full pitch, We're straight into the questions, but hopefully I answered them very well. But yeah, I'm happy. I'm very confident we're going to be a very successful company and have unicorn status within a few years. We believe that we can be the world's number one simply because we're passionate and we're going to deliver. We work hard and we're going to make this happen.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers. So no sales so far?

No, I said sales, signed contract.

Welcome back to Meet the Drapers. Yeah, so what did everybody think of Ian and Yamgo?

It didn't motivate me to go look it up. Like, I'm still trying to figure out what the incentive is for me to go and figure out what a Yamgo gets me, and is it worth my time?

I think this is the way of the future. It's just a matter of Who's going to get there first? Could he work with other tokens that we're already familiar versus building his own? Yeah, because I feel like creating an entire new brand when we already have a lot of great tokens like Bitcoin doesn't necessarily make sense to me. But I do feel like he's going in the right direction. It's a complicated business model. Yeah. And he needs to simplify that, I think.

Yeah.

So let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, what's going on behind the scenes? Do we know?

We need your brows, guys.

Meet the Drapers.

This is a big thing.

What inspired you to make this happen?

Amazing. It was, it was a trip to the Tunisian desert. We were 10 persons going for 4 days. We brought with us about 100 liters of drinking water, bottled plastic, and we wake up in the morning and we saw the dew covering our tents and cars. So then we said, okay, There is water even in the deepest desert. You just have to know how to extract it and then make it drinking. Like, I'm an engineer, so when I saw this, I remembered all those things related to air conditioning, the droplets of water and how they form, theories behind thermodynamics, and I just came up with the idea. I loved engineering. I love solving problems, and mechanical engineering is life for me. So I studied at UC Berkeley. There I improved my love For this kind of field. Okay. I think my family stopped trying to understand my choices because I left a career in private equity, stable job, good revenue, and then decided to jump into the void of entrepreneurship. For me, the key element is creation of something that has a purpose. It helps me to have this family who's just trying to tease me sometimes. At the end, they're supportive of whatever I do. They just stopped trying to understand. It's really worth the risk. And today when I see the team that we have been able to gather together for this company who started in Tunisia and in Paris and then being in this international show hoping that we will be in the finals or semifinals in Silicon Valley, it's an accomplishment by itself. I think we're really on the right path. Ready to rock. For me, when I wake up in the morning and I know that every day I'm working to solve a problem that is related to access to water, less plastic, less pollution, and then achieving this goal for me is a life changer. What is life if not serving a purpose and trying to improve the world where we live?

Why don't you go ahead and tell us what you do?

Hundreds of ideas going through my head. What if I cannot make it? What if there is no connection? But then when they call the name, you just go and boom, all the stress fades away on stage. At Cumulus, we create water from sun and air. And it started with a trip to the Tunisian desert. Very deep, 4 days, 10 people. We brought with us 100 kilograms of bottled mineral water. We arrived to the place, set our tents, and wake up in the morning to the view of the dune. That covered our tents. And this is where we knew that there is water in the deepest desert. You just need to know how to extract it. And we came up with the idea of Cumulus. Cumulus is a machine that is the size of a mini fridge that is producing every day 30 liters of drinking water using only renewable electricity and air.

Does it need to be moving?

No, it just absorbs the humidity and the moisture in the air.

Is there a fan?

There is a fan, and there is a cold machine in it.

And is it self-contained, battery-powered?

I didn't have the time to pitch. It was boom, question, answer, question, answer. I'm a kickboxer, so when you do kickboxing, you don't have time to think. You need to know your business, you need to know your company, and you need to answer the questions. The power pack is separate, so it's PV panels plus battery, but then the machine itself, you can plug it to the grid.

How much does that cost you?

Yeah.

And how much do you charge for it?

It will be costing me $1,000 per machine, but for you as a client, it will cost you $100 per month.

You keep ownership of it. It pays for itself in about 11 months.

There is the maintenance, there are other things to add up, but approximately in 2 to 3 years—

How often do you have to service it?

6 to 12 months, depending on how much you use it. But I'll add one more thing, because we focused on the hardware part. The hardware is 50% of what we're doing. The other 50% is the software. It's a remotely controlled machine, remotely monitored, so it gives you signals about the quality of the water that you have. Do you need to make a filter or change a filter? And it has intelligence with predictive algorithms allowing the machine to know when to produce in order to reduce the electricity usage.

Does it take a lot of electricity to make this work?

It's— so the liter of water for us is approximately 10 to 15 euro cents, which is 30 to 40% cheaper than the plastic mineral water that you So give us a few application alternatives.

Why would people use this?

Those people are running 200 an hour with their bike. You don't even have time to overthink things. So we haven't started selling the machine yet, but we received about 1,000 pre-orders of a total value of €6 million. Clients are hotels who would like to go green. So if you have a hotel with 700 people, you buy like 20 machines distributed in your hotel, and you're creating water that is free of chemicals. Fresh, clean, less plastic, less logistics, and cheaper. We're talking 400 kilograms per machine of plastic that is replaced per year.

So I'm a little confused though, because a hotel or an office can get much cheaper water from where?

From the tap.

Tap?

Because you live in the US.

Yeah.

You go to southern France now or northern Africa, the water tap is very bad quality. Sometimes you open the tap and there is no water at all. Why it is a multi-hundred billion dollars market, this bottled water? Because people do not drink tap water anymore. The quality is very bad and you cannot even filter it in North Africa.

But also they're running out of water. We're running out of water in the world and everywhere.

I felt that they understood the problem and I felt that they were very aware of the issues that we're going to face as humans when it comes to drinking water. A lot of investors I spoke to from developed countries Sometimes they're not aware that it's going to knock on their doors in the next, I would say, 5 to 10 years.

Do you have any customers yet?

We signed 6 contracts already with big companies. We raised $1 million and we're working on the certification now.

So when you sell to some of these stationary customers, is it still the same size or could you scale up for larger?

Hardware is very hard. We would like to focus one machine. We make it better, better, better, better. And that's it. If you want 10 times production, we put 10 times machine certification.

I don't understand what that is.

It's like FDA in the US, for example.

You need to go through something, go through certification before you sell this thing.

Exactly.

So no sales so far?

No, I said sales, signed contracts, and people paid contingent on certification. Exactly, exactly. Which should come in the coming months.

What would those add up to? How much?

Well, if you take the lifetime of the contract, we're talking about—

oh, how about per month?

I prefer to talk about the lifetime of the contract. So we're talking $50,000 to $60,000 for one month of sales. That means I'm selling only for the month of December. So you multiply this by next year, hopefully we'll reach a million.

Terrific. I don't know about you two, but I'm thirsty. Well, Inef, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks a lot, Drapers. Thanks. All right, let's hear it for Inef.

Really great work.

It was great. Too many questions. Very interesting ones. It was very interactive.

It went well.

To be honest, at the end, the objective is to bring drinking water to those who need it the most and to replace this ugly plastic bottled water. So it's one step closer to our goal.

What did you all think of ENIP?

This keeps me up at night right now. Like, where are we going to get water from? You know, I'm— I live in California and I'm watching all the reservoirs Reservoirs just drain. I mean, this is so important right now, and he seems to have a big vision.

This is a very innovative idea. I think it's very timely, especially in the areas that he's talking about, whether it is Africa, whether it is the Middle East. I, I do kind of wonder what his real competition looks like.

I like his model. It's like, we're gonna give you something that costs us $1,000. Yeah, we're gonna charge you $5 a month.

I like that a lot.

And you're gonna have all the water you want. So let's move on to our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. I want to see eyebrows.

I see all your eyebrows, guys.

Practically, I don't want to get technical at all. I was very fortunate as an Egyptian to study abroad in England, and I always took this as an opportunity to make the best of every single opportunity I come across. I was thinking to myself, imagine if the least fortunate person in Egypt, my home country, had an opportunity to travel abroad. What would he be doing? I personally, when I finished university, I went back to the family business and they expected me to work alongside my brother, and I told them I don't want to do that. I ended up working with them from 9 to 5, and after 5 PM, as soon as it hit the clock, I would go to a coffee shop with my co-founder and CTO and just work on the business. I did that for a year without telling my family. I knew they were very supportive, but they didn't give me the kind of support I want. I've moved onwards to a very good startup that I'm very passionate about, and my family is very supportive, actually financing the company as well. So everything happens for a reason, and yeah, it's life. So sometimes you don't need people to actually believe in you at the beginning. If you believe enough in yourself, go through with it, Super excited. Can't wait.

Coming up on Meet the Drapers. The crystal ball actually makes the final decision on who moves on. Welcome back to Meet the Drapers. All right, go, go ahead. Give us your pitch.

It's pure excitement for me when I'm going on the stage to meet the Drapers. This is the World Cup final. There are more than 200 million credit card machines worldwide processing billions of customer transactions every day. And unlike e-commerce, this payment method does not recognize in-store customers for retailers. So for example, they wouldn't differentiate between new versus returning customers. And this is where the Zealy unique solution comes into play. We've developed a patent-pending solution that can integrate on any credit card machine worldwide. Our vision is to connect merchants to billions of customers. We've already launched with Network International, the largest payment acquirer in the Middle East and Africa, and Geneco, the largest credit card machine manufacturer in the world, giving us access to 30 million terminals.

So help me with this. The retailer is your customer. Customer, they have the box. You go to the retailer and say, "I can put software on your box." We speak to a bank.

The bank tells us we have 100,000 terminals on the ground. Can you please integrate with all of them? So now we're speaking to Chase in the U.S. Where we just got into the Barclays accelerator in London.

Why would the bank give you all that data?

If you think about the supermarket scenario, when you go, let's say, buy water and chocolate, you pay by card on a machine. The FMC The CPGs have no idea who's consuming the product because you as a customer, you're not identified on the point of sale.

You're going to be in like data wars because people do not want to give away their data to those specific brands. How are you going to deal with that?

So there are a few questions when I get asked, I know that the person in front of me understands what I'm talking about, and this is one of them, the data question. We take privacy very, very seriously. Of course, all the data, we're GDPR compliant, and all the data that It's SSL encrypted. If you think about it, we're literally just giving the retailers what the e-commerce people have. We're not giving any extra sensitive data at all.

If I'm a grocery store and I have a Square terminal, Square already provides diagnostic information for that particular store already. What is your benefit to that?

As the US Treasurer of State, one of the judges is a fintech expert, so it just added a bit of a new challenge. So actually, we would integrate with Square. The way Square does it right now is they ask for your phone number and they put it on the Yeah. No, with Zeal, I'd be integrated on the Square terminal. When you pay by the card, you'll find that the terminal says, hi Rosie, and it automatically detects you and it gives the retailer the info that this is a new customer, returning customer, etc., etc.

So at that moment, if I'm a mom-and-pop, I will know that Jane Doe who just walked in is a returning customer. That's the benefit?

There are so many much more benefits.

Tell me, tell me, sell me on the benefit.

We start using AI. We use it with beauty salons. So this is a very nice one. So a beauty salon wants to understand when is the customer probably going to come back? Is my hair too long now? Yeah, let's send him a push notification, so on and so forth.

You're getting more into habits, I guess.

Yeah.

Patterns.

Patterns.

And then who pays you? The retailer?

Okay, so the 3 revenue streams. One, the deal we've closed with Ingenico and Network International, etc., the payment acquirers, they pay us a commission per transaction.

Per transaction.

What she was looking at as well Was potential on a global level, just because of the amount of funds I'm sure that she's managed per transaction. Because we have value-added service to their machines. Because all of a sudden, this machine is going to process way more.

So who pays you? The bank pays you for that?

Yeah, the bank pays us for that. We've actually white labeled this to about ten retailers now.

Oh, be careful about white labeling. I tend to like the brand.

Yeah, we always have like a cheeky powered by Z.

Yeah. Did you have any women on your founding team?

Thank you for asking that. So actually, at the core of what we do is diversity and inclusion. 60% of our team is females.

60%! Love that, bro.

I love that.

You guys are gonna do better. These guys are gonna do great.

I know Jesse is mainly on the VC side that invests in women in tech. I was very happy that we were ticking all the boxes. We actually have disabled people on the team as well, so we have opportunities for people with disabilities.

Omar, great to have you on the show.

Thank you.

Thank you for being on Meet the Drapers.

Thank you, Jesse.

Yeah, okay.

Thank you, Rosie. Thank you. Yeah, it was super cool. Great experience. And I love pitching to the Drapers and Rosie. By launching and growing Zeel on a global level, I believe Zeel is definitely changing the world.

So what do we all think of Omar and ZilPay?

Well, I mean, I think it's fascinating. I think if it's all true that he has this proprietary technology, these exclusive contracts, he might have something here.

I think that this could be huge. I was thinking there is something like it in Square, so I was wondering if this had a short lifetime.

Are you just kind of backfilling for the non-Squares of Or when Square wakes up and says, we can do this. Yeah.

Now is the big moment. The crystal ball will have to take all of that feedback and all of your feedback, all of your feedback, and let's bring out those entrepreneurs and we'll see what the crystal ball has in store. Will it be Andre with Musiversal? The strength of this is that I can't wait I'd like to win my own Grammy. The weakness, I think, is that the market size may be smaller than what we're looking for. Cumulus. It's a great idea. It's a great utility. I think I'm going to want one. I'm concerned a lot of companies end up being a one-product wonder, and I'm wondering if you've got an encore beyond that. Greta, we would have liked to have met your mom too. It's something that I think We're all going to do eventually. We're going to use our fingerprints. But we also are concerned that there are a lot of other alternatives out there and a lot of competition, and the patents alone aren't going to do it. Ian, we love the idea of Yamgo. The concern that we had there was all in competition. So much competition out there doing very similar things. If you can somehow rise above the the competition, you got a big shot at doing something extraordinary. And Omar, with ZealPay, the big concerns here are whether the banks are really going to let you do it and whether Square is going to really let you do it without jumping into the business themselves. But clearly, very large market. This data is really valuable and you can do great things with it. So with that, there's a lot of payments going on in the crystal ball.

Yeah.

And there's some water, and we're singing about water, and we're feeling it, and the vibe is there. Payments, water, music, water, payments. Okay, okay, okay. Seal Pay. Seal Pay moves on to the semifinals of Ethan Greenberg. Congratulations, Seal Pay.

That's super amazing. It's amazing to get the support of the Drapers. They've got an amazing network, they've got their experience. I'm going to learn a lot from them as well and the portfolio companies they invested in. So it just makes a lot of sense.

It's amazing.

They can come back. So go to meetthedrapers.com. Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you. And being a part of Meet the Drapers.

It's amazing to have won Meet the Drapers. It gives us great exposure. It's great to get the support of the Drapers family and Rosie as well, being one of the judges. I think we're super lucky, but it's also a great sentiment to all the hard work we've put in, and hopefully we can inspire so many entrepreneurs from the region.

Our mission is to create musician jobs, to monetize music, to create more music. What's not to like about that? If you think we were one of the best and you want to give us a shot, If you like us, vote for us. If you don't, don't vote for us. Oh man, I don't know.

Should they? If we fast forward 10 years from now, our dream is to be sitting in our headquarters having a very big screen with millions of machines everywhere in the world to bring this water to the people who need it the most.

This business really is a unicorn, and they don't come by often, and I think missing the opportunity to have us on the show again, that would be very sad and tragic.

And, uh, I do hope that we will be again with you.

Yes, you should vote me back in because I believe Yamgo is going to change the world. We're going to be the best because simply we're putting the consumers first. We've got the right tech, we've got the right team, we've got the right platform.

Cheers! We come from different places, different lives. We all run different races, different minds, yeah. We keep promoting freedom through every twist and turn. We'll start a revolution and watch the old ways burn.

We're funding heroes, heroes, heroes.

Here to shake your brain.

We're funding heroes. Heroes on Meet the Drapers. Meet the Drapers.

Heroes.

Heroes. Heroes and champions.

That's what we do on Meet the Drapers.