Solving It at the Source | Entrepreneur Stories

So could we start with just an introduction? Give me your full names, your company name, and this most concise version of what you're doing. Can help here.

Out of Bengaluru, Shruti Kutmutia and Dr. Pranav Nair. are turning something most industries throw away, agricultural waste, into the next generation of high-performance ingredients through the power of fermentation.

So the day I realized that 0.1% to 0.5% of your toothpastes are plastic, every morning you wake up and you brush your teeth and you think about it. I just could not shake that feeling off. That was just not okay that I start my day like that, I end my day like that. That was something that could not let us sleep at night. And the minute I conveyed this problem to Pranav, the same thing happened to him. Um, you know, go ahead.

Yeah, so in my case, I found that microbes, they can make whatever, it can replace anything basically. You can make vegan leather out of it, you can make self-healing concretes out of it, right? But I was thinking why it is not yet in the market. So the main problem which I come across was, uh, its scalability and affordability. So if even if your product is very good, but if you can't scale it or if you can't fix it at a price which, by which the market is right there, then you cannot actually use it.

So both of us are born and raised in Pune. It's, it's, um, the way to map it in India is next to Mumbai, so that, that works. Um, we met when we were pursuing our bachelor's in microbiology in Ferguson College, and, um, yeah, we have been friends. We were in the same group circle. He was the studious one, I was the one who's always kicked out of class. Teachers Bloody pet, but I wasn't that.

I did my bachelor's and master's both from Ferguson College in microbiology, and after that I pursued my PhD from CSIR-NCL. There I worked in biopolymers, especially polygamma glutamic acid, and the functionalization of these molecules and its application in agriculture, food coating, etc. I wanted to do something with microbes that I knew from the master's— not from master's, from bachelor itself, because There was one organism that is Pseudomonas which could actually turn water into ice.

Beautiful!

That organism can literally turn water into ice. Then I was like, what kind of superpower this microorganism has?

We're in the perfect time to harness the power of microbes because till date, right, when it comes to sustainability or tech or anything, microbes weren't taken seriously simply because their size, right? Every time we go to a client with our products, we don't have to explain them the product. Like, they're like, oh, we've been waiting for this biopolymer, can you give it to me for cheap? And that's all we, we had to work on really, how to really grow them to a scale where they become affordable. People knew about these products, people know about microbes, they've always wanted them, couldn't get hands on them. That's about it.

From cosmetics to home care to pharmaceuticals, Bacol's bacterial biopolymers replace synthetic additives with something cleaner, greener, and built to scale.

My name is Shruti Gudmundia.

My name is Pranay.

We're the co-founders of Bacall Biosciences. Bacall stands for bacterial alternatives. What we do here is we repurpose agro-industrial waste and we convert them into high-functioning biopolymers that can be used to replace plastic or microplastic-causing ingredients in home care, oral care, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and more fields. So we are a small team of 5 right now, and I think every one of us has enough tasks that we work 20 hours a day. So one of the difficult challenges I think Pranav and I faced was to take ourselves out of the scientist perspective and put us in an entrepreneurial spirit. It's very different the way we look at money, the way we look at tech, the way we look at timelines, the way we look at— So one of the funniest things that we learned on our entrepreneurial journey is perfection is the enemy of profit, which is the exact opposite that you learn in science, right? You need perfection. Your data has to be perfect before you publish it. So there's a lot of learning curve that we had to do. There are things that we were so fixated on that really doesn't matter on an industrial level. So we have quite a journey. We changed quite a lot. We learned quite a lot, but there's a lot more to learn. So yeah, we're a small team, happy team. Yeah, very passionate.

So What would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean for your company?

I think the opportunity to work with a tech person who has a very different perspective than biotech, who has the reach in different countries where science is more advanced. So India is rich in raw materials, we can source things, but outside of India we can leverage the tech to do better things. Access to people with the right kind of resources or thought processes is what Tim would give us, which would be very difficult to crack otherwise. Yes.

Shruti and Pranav aren't just building a better ingredient. They're proving that the most sustainable businesses are often built on what everyone else overlooked.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for you?

A million-dollar investment is going to quickly help us show our customers that we can scale to a level that is sufficient industrially. We can set up a pre-pilot, um, and we can show the world that this is how, for the first time, you take the same input raw material and convert it into 2, 3, 4, 5 kinds of products that are highly functional and are so diversified that they can literally mimic plastics in its various models. So this is to show the world that scale-up in India is possible, scale-up to the extent where the costs are still cheap and market is happy is possible.

What do you guys feel is like your, um, personal growth journey from switching from being scientists to entrepreneurs? Like, how has that affected the world around you? What have your friends and family think of that?

I think, uh, Friends were the first people who took a hit because, uh, somehow there was just no time. I got out of touch with a lot of people, but I think they'll understand. I think they'll see it someday. I'll apologize and return the calls when I have the time. But yeah, that's me.

Already I have less friends, I guess. And the same thing goes for me, like I was out of touch from most of them and even with family, but I guess They will understand.

Yeah, no, my family wouldn't take that. If I don't call them every damn day, they end up at my doorstep saying, "You have to talk to us." So families once a month or once a week, I'll just have to call them and say, "Yeah, I'm alive." That's it.

Just your name, your company name, sort of the tightest elevator pitch of what you guys did.

Pritam Dalla and Abhilash Chakravarti built Lark AI around one belief: that accurate diagnosis shouldn't be a privilege limited to well-equipped hospitals.

Nobody knows what the future looks like. As long as you have a confidence that this thing works and you can Prove it at a small scale. So for us, 1 million patients is sufficient data points to say that this works. Earning a million dollar revenue is sufficient data point to prove those skeptics wrong, and also at the same time getting validation from PE funds. At least the first investment of a million dollars proves that we are on the right track. So my background as was I started my career with 3M, a multinational company. I graduated from college and joined them as a management trainee. Then I worked in Philips in Seattle and in Milwaukee with GE as a global product manager, and last as a director of new product development. And in that location, I got to know about the vast global medtech market, came back to India, and then joined Preetam in starting Lark AI.

I started from my college days, so in 2014, I guess, when I'm second year, I I have some idea to incorporate as a product, right? So I started some bits of coding, some architecture development. Then we received— I received first funding from Government of India in 2017. Then 2019, I got some fellowship from government again. And 2020, I formed a company called Larkai, and it's basically the name of a bird. So we are trying to create some bird universe. so that we can promote the sustainability in future. But our core value is to promote healthcare in accessible and affordable manner.

From smart cardiac screening to AI-powered portable diagnostics, Lark AI puts clinical-grade insight into the hands of healthcare workers anywhere in India.

I'm Pritam Dhalla. I am from Lark AI Healthcare. And we are in medtech space. We have the solution of hardware and software that can solve the early detection of the diseases, countering the problem, the misdiagnosis and misdiagnosis at early stage.

I'm Abhilash Chakravarti, co-founder of Lark AI. So we are a team of 25, and the entire technology and the engineering team reports to Pritam. The commercial finance corporate governance team reports to me.

I think majorly misdiagnosis and misdiagnosis is the major segment that we are trying to cater into. And that's why we developed some solutions, you can say, as a hardware product also. We have built world's smallest multi-parameter monitor that can be carried any part of the country, right, across the border also. And that can transmit the information just scanning the QR code, right? So that is making the healthcare equipment very accessible. And now we already have built some SaaS product that is called BlueTail. That can allow radiology to interpret the data for the further evaluation.

So personally, of course, losing a good friend, a class friend, or an old childhood friend to heart attack was the trigger. He had come to Goa over the weekend or for the New Year's Eve on 22nd, and then on 4th of January had a heart attack and he was no more. So that was easily avoidable because We did have insights, but— or we had information, but nobody had insights. In many locations, many primary healthcare centers, villages, there are no radiologists, no cardiologists. All you have to do is just hook this device up and somebody who's thousands of kilometers away can see real-time monitor your patient. So it's like a window to your heart and lung. At that moment, real-time, the patient's vital signs are getting transferred to a specialist and immediately a treatment can be given. As soon as we can transmit the data, immediately the prompt or the region of interest gets laid out, and it tells you not only how the patient is doing but also predicts, saying that the patient might be going into a trauma, might be going into any kind of a cardiac arrest, and gives that with a high level of confidence so that even every caregiver knows today what the patient is, but also 5, 10, an hour later how the patient is likely to progress. That kind of an insight from information is something which AI enables.

So what would the opportunity to work with Tim mean for your company?

So the opportunity to work with Tim Draper and his company would primarily mean that we would get access to the ecosystem in West Coast. We are looking at bringing high-tech medical care in high-risk markets like North America. So we get access to contacts, friends, and also mentorship. Which helps us in establishing our company in North America. This would what mean working with Tim Draper?

When the right tool reaches the right moment, lives don't just get better; they get saved.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for your company right now?

The era we are living right now with the intelligent GPT and LLM large language model, so the million-dollar. can be used in a way for the next decade or next 20 years, can be ready for the solution that we're building right now.

And I know that anything which comes with the passion and which has usability in the market generally generates money over a longer period of time. So, uh, my true belief in the fact that we have a solution which works gave me this confidence that even if I jump into a wide-open ocean, I will swim through it.

But now I am believing that if you really trying to do something, and I think the universe is there for you to help you out. And every moment I'm getting validation of that. So this, this is also a surprising thing, but now I am habituated of the process that if you are really trying something and you have the honest intention, and the universe is there to Make it done for you.

You start us off with your full name, your company name, and like the elevator pitch, like the most concise version.

Isaac Matthew John knows that the brain needs training. just as much as the body does. And with Ivory, he's making that a reality for everyone, not just those with access to specialists.

I had seen the problem in my own home. So my father suffered from Parkinson's. I have seen how not having medication for a serious neurodegenerative condition, what it really does, you know, to the latter end of your life. And it kind of just began as a project out of curiosity. Wherein I just wanted to make something for, you know, people who are 45 or 50 years older and above. Because if you look at the world around us, it's almost designed for the 25 to 45-year-old, you know. It's, it's not a— like they say, you know, no country for old men, you know. Not too many digital products for, you know, retired folks. I resonate with this problem because I've seen my father suffer through it. And, you know, if I can reduce that even to like 10% for the rest of the world, I know it would be a big impact on on the world in general. So the thing was that even in the corporate world, I actually kind of, you know, trod my own path. How do I say it? I treaded my own path. I walked my own path. And I've always made like contrarian choices. People actually valued a lot of consultancy jobs, banking jobs, FMCG jobs. I chose media. That was a contrarian, you know, choice upfront. After that, you know, there was this sports wear brand you might know called Puma. And after that, given that, you know, I would anyway spend a lot of time in the sports industry, I was very much intrigued by this idea of, you know, health and fitness. And I joined HealthifyMe, which was, which was again a health tech startup. So I think every choice that I have made has always been about what works for me at that point of time in my career. So my family, my friends were not surprised Because my reason to start Ivory was a lot more personal than, you know, let's say sort of, you know, the other startup reasons that I think everyone has their own reason, but it came from a very personal space in terms of why I wanted to do this.

Through gamified neuroscience-backed assessments and personalized cognitive training, Ivory helps people track, strengthen, and protect their brain health before decline ever sets in.

I'm Isaac Mathew John. My company's name is Ivory, and Ivory helps detect and arrest early cognitive decline. We qualify as a very early-stage startup, which means that we don't have a large team. It's about 6 people, a couple of people in engineering, a couple of people in content and marketing, and we essentially run the ship. It's a national, pan-national product now, has been tried across close to 20,000 users. So that's what the team is like. Day to day, includes working on what the next 3 months look like and, you know, what products are we going to build for that. It includes working on revenue channels and, you know, speaking to partners who can help give Ivory a big boost. And it also includes, you know, telling great stories about, you know, why people need to adopt Ivory. I think the biggest win has been like 12 months ago, I did not know what shape this startup would take. And today we have a clinical-grade product which has been accepted in hospitals and diagnostic chains. People are picking it up on our website, getting their cognitive assessments done. And interestingly, we have identified, you know, people who are at risk, and we immediately put them in touch with the right neurologist or the right specialist who needs to take care of their, you know, sort of accelerated decline that they are going through. I'm so proud of that, that even if, let's say, Ivory were not to remain in existence for another day from tomorrow, I think, you know, it was still like such a big net positive into the world. So I'll speak to one who actually came to us because her mother was actually, you know, sort of repeating things to the cook that they had at home, and that became a trigger for them to understand that this is a little unnatural, right? She would go and tell the cook that, you know, you need to make ABC, and then after 10 minutes would again go to the cook. So it's actually a pretty alarming That this person was sort of suffering from some kind of cognitive impairment. So extremely gratifying to have, to have, you know, done that. So what would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean for you? Ivory is positioned as a global product. You know, this condition that, you know, of cognitive accelerated cognitive decline that Ivory is solving for is not something that's limited to a geography. I think Tim, with his immense, you know, network of obviously so many startups around the world, could open up doors for Ivory that, you know, do not come to us when we are sitting and, you know, working out of our, you know, homes and co-working spaces in Bombay and Bangalore. So I think he would open up a huge network of potentially, you know, global stakeholders, institutions, healthcare specialists who can come along you know, with us, with us for the ride. And I think he's at a very, very specific vantage point to help Ivory do that.

The future of healthcare isn't just about treating illness. It's about building minds that stay sharp for life.

A million-dollar investment at this point of time for the company would mean that we'd be able to attract, you know, the best talent potentially that's available to help us solve these hard problems. And these range from both clinical professionals, neuroscientists, and product managers around the world. Number 2, it would also enable us to enter international markets like USA a lot more earlier than, you know, we would do in our existing sort of journey of growing the startup. What would the sort of younger version of yourself who was at these big Think about what you would do. Would you need some graphics? Would you be proud? Was it inevitable? I would actually be very proud. Like, you know, you're taking on a hard problem, like, you know, sort of telling people what they need to do to stay away from, you know, a very serious condition like Alzheimer's. I would be— I'm just thinking that, you know, if I were at my desk at Puma where I would have just, you know, given an approval for like a marketing creative for an IPL team or sports person and, you know, somebody told me that you're going to be doing this in 10 years' time, I'd be like, wow, that's a cool problem to solve. Yeah, so I'd be proud of myself.

Yes.

So could we start with just your name, your company name, and like a tight elevator pitch?

Shruti Singh spent years reading risk for some of the world's biggest institutions, then turned that lens on the planet itself and founded Terra Bioware to tackle methane emissions and plastic pollution at once.

I think what keeps me on every single day when I wake up in the morning and I go to sleep in the night is the fact that I know this is a tough problem to solve. to solve, and I love tough problems. When you're talking about all of these concerns in, you know, what we call normal society, it's very anxiety-inducing because what we're essentially telling people is that if we don't fix this right now, this is the last 2 generations of human beings that we'll have on this planet, and then that's it. So I've worked with a lot of private equity investors or multilateral institutions that were investing in Asia-Pacific. And my expertise obviously is in risk analysis, prediction. That's what I focused on. I've worked on a number of assignments as part of that. During that journey, I was writing a white paper on ESG risks. Actually, this is again during COVID and that's the time that I realized that there is this wide gap between climate change and the technology solutions that we need to bridge that gap. And I could relate it with what had happened during COVID where you can't see the virus, but it's still killing people that are close to you or damaging their health in the long term at the very least. I felt a very similar way about microplastics. So the same skill set that I had as an intelligence consultant is the same skill set that I deployed when I was figuring out the right kind of biopolymer that was natural and fully biodegradable. And figured out how we can convert it into specialty biochemicals that have anti-aging properties or, you know, other properties for either nutraceuticals, food, beverages, cosmetics. So product development is also now complete.

Using microbes that feed on methane and convert it into fully biodegradable bioplastics called PHAs, Terra Bioware is making climate-positive materials that can actually compete with petroplastics on price and scale.

I am Shruti, and I'm the founder of Terra Bioware, a deep tech startup where we build circular and affordable biomaterials. So we operate out of this place called Bangalore Bioinnovation Center in Electronic City, which is one of the most premier life science R&D centers in the country. And we have a team of 5 people right now. So there are 4 more scientists and it's me. We have 2 principal scientists. One comes from an industrial biomanufacturing background and the other one comes from an advanced synthetic biology background. So that's the team for now. We've sent out samples to a number of companies in India that are willing and are motivated to adopt the chemical, not because of the fact that it's circular, but simply because of the fact that it has these high-performance properties that are In demand in the current market, based on consumer trends that we are seeing in India right now. So we have an asset light model where we work with a contract manufacturing organization that already has all of the equipment that we would require for production. We just go there. We have our own process. We run the same process in their machines, get the product, deliver it to our customers, and yeah, that's where we are right now.

So what would be after day one? What does Tim mean to your company right now?

I think the opportunity to work with Tim means that we would have somebody on board with us who has backed a lot of deep technologies in the past, including Tesla. So he is somebody who sees through and understands futuristic technologies, which is something that we are also building at Terra BioWare. In terms of his personality, he's also somebody who's quite independent. He thinks for himself and has opinions of his own, which I think aligns very closely with the ethos of what we do at Terra Biotech.

She didn't come from biotech. She came from intelligence. And sometimes the sharpest solutions come from exactly the people you didn't expect.

A million dollars in investments would mean that we would be able to file our IP, get our regulatory approvals in India and the US, and be able to commercially launch these 2 specialty biochemicals for cosmetics and for nutraceuticals in both India and US. And apart from that, we'll also like to use that capital for, at least small part of that capital for R&D, because the next segment that we have is medical-grade biopolymers. I come from very humble beginnings. So I had to work very hard to get into the right colleges, then, you know, get a good job, all of that. So I was following that good girl path till that time, and obviously it was, you know, beneficial for everybody around me. But to me, I knew that something was missing, and I knew it just 3 months into the job that I was working. Then money was hitting the bank account, I loved what I did, but there was no connection between the two. I think there were a lot of people who told me that this will not work, that I should not be doing this, that this is foolish, that I'm taking up too big of a problem, that I should stick to, you know, something small or solve a problem that is easier. I think that is something that I've heard a lot, especially for myself. We have this story from Mahabharata, which is one of the epics that we have in this country. It has a character called Arjun, right? And Arjun is a sweet character because he's being guided by God, and, you know, he goes through the same things that we do. So he also, you know, asks Krishna, the God character in this epic, that, you know, I don't want to fight, this is too much, you know, why do I have to do this? Why do I have to go against my own people? people, all of that. So he goes through all of those questions, and then Krishna tells him that it's okay, look at the big picture, it's fine. And another thing about Arjun is that the reason why he was chosen, I think, to run the chariot, to drive the chariot into battle, is also because— and you'll see this in his origin story, in his character arc, right— that there are many tests that he goes through. In every single test— And he's an archer, He's an ace archer, right? In every single test he passes simply because of the fact that he was looking at absolutely nothing else but the target. So whether it was the fish's eye that he had to shoot, whether it was the bird sitting on the tree that he had to shoot, he was only looking at that, nothing else. Not the tree, not the, not the bow, not his guru. He was just looking at what he had to do. But to me, I don't think it ever mattered because as long as I was sticking to science and getting the results in the lab, that's the only thing that I cared about. I would say that.