The Road to $1,000,000 Gets Real | Meet the Drapers India: Semifinals I

In 1994, my father was the first Silicon Valley venture capitalist in India. He believed in the spirit of this incredible country. 30 years later, my sister Polly and I are on a mission to find India's next unicorn. I'm Tim Draper. I've invested in game-changing companies. Now we're crisscrossing the We're traveling across the entire subcontinent, meeting the brightest minds in the world's most populous country as we search for the country's top entrepreneurs. Thousands applied, but only 28 companies have made the cut for a chance to win an investment of $1 million and a shot at changing the world. It's a journey packed with adventure, innovation, And unforgettable moments. Who will rise to the challenge? Who will be India's next great entrepreneur? Let the games begin. Welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers India. We have been all over India. These semifinalists have cut through. They've come to the top of those 2 from each show. will go into the finale, and you are going to get to vote on the other 2 that move into the finals. Some extraordinary guest judges today. First, I'd like to introduce to you Mohan Lakshmaraju Draper, because as you know, we adopt every one of our guest judges. Welcome to the family.

Thank you.

Mohan actually worked for me in venture capital, and together we created the first India Business plan competition.

The finals was at ISB in 2005.

Oh, right over here.

Yeah, very cool. Great.

I'll bet ISB has become a much bigger building than what we saw. He's built a $130 million education company. He will have extraordinary thoughts for these entrepreneurs, I'm sure. On my left, we have a real challenge because this is the longest last name of any Draper that has ever been on the show. This is Medulla. Deva Hotunni Draper. She is quite extraordinary as an entrepreneur herself. She's the co-founder, CMO of MeWe.

Thank you. I think I need a few more inches in me to be the Draper.

Well, you have the eyebrows, almost.

Almost, almost.

And you need work on your eyebrows.

I do, I do.

Okay, but you can practice.

Yeah.

Okay. This is Polly Draper. She's my sister. Actress, producer, writer, director. She got me as an actor to get into a diaper like a sumo wrestler and take on a guy who was 350 pounds. I thought, well, this will be great. At least I'll be in the front of this movie, a big part of the movie. You just see us in the very back, way behind the real action. Sisters, you know. Polly, what are you going to be looking for in our semifinalists?

Clarify my feelings about them, because obviously they were all wonderful. I think it'll just be really interesting to hone the impressions that I got the first time.

Yeah, unfortunately, we have the crystal ball.

Oh, I know, phew.

And it makes the final decision. Let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. And this is where you practice on your eyebrows.

Hi, my name is Ritu Soni Srivastava, part of the co-founding team at thelightbulb.ai.

Myself, Yogesh. I'm also the co-founder here at thelightbulb.ai.

We're actually a second-time founding team. We've all been together now for 15 years. Our first startup was in the space of health and weight loss. It was a weight loss coaching app called Obino, which we sold to US-based investors. Post that, when we all got together, we knew we wanted to start up again. We were watching our kids study online, or rather not study online, and that was where the idea for the Lightbulb really came. We wanted to help measure learner engagement in online education, and the only way you could do that was by looking at the expressions of students while they're learning. they were learning. Well, we've been around for about 18 months now, and I think what we're really happy about is that we've been able to work with over 12 customers across the top market research agencies in India and 11 key enterprise brands. We have very set structures and patterns. We all catch up for scrums in the morning and then everybody delinks to do their own thing, and then they catch up again to review projects. So it's a very relaxed, decentralized, non-startup method way of working. We're not the typical hustle culture with everybody running pillar to post. And I think that's a function of the fact that we are second-time founders. I think I'm an English literature graduate. I never thought I would be building tech products, and I never thought I would be building in the space of AI. I think we're at stages in our life where we know that work is important, but we also know the importance of pacing ourselves. Because startups are like marathons. They're not sprints. If you burn out in the first couple of years, you're not going to be able to consistently deliver value. We're not really tech entrepreneurs from the get-go. We started mid-career in the startup space. So I think every day is as much a surprise to me as it is to the rest of us. It's just, it's a great trajectory to be in. The environment was very welcoming. There's some really great startups on the line with you. But of course, the stress of the stage is always there. As you know, we are thelightbulb.ai and we essentially help brands bridge the gap between what consumers say they will do and what they actually do. We built a product for the consumer insights market and launched it in January of '23. And pretty soon in 2025, we hope to extend this for the gaming UX testing market. We bring textual AI, visual AI and conversational AI together to gauge what consumers are not telling you when they are experiencing your products and services. And then we amplify that with generative AI to make it queryable so researchers can ask pertinent questions to glean insights from this data. We have over 22 customers. We've been around for around 18 months now. As founders, we're constantly pitching, we're constantly selling. So what you see up there is 3 years of work.

Is there another part of your business model beyond just a SaaS business?

We also work with them on custom data projects where the learning of the brand over decades gets lost otherwise.

How are you collecting the data?

Microphone and the camera of the device. So whether you're on a mobile device or a laptop or a desktop, the permission has to be given by the user. Data privacy and consent is a huge factor. So that's why our first area of insights was always research, because research is an opt-in model.

Would they do their research on their own or would they like to be asked? the customers that are visiting the website, or is it market research for them to figure out trends?

They can actually do both. There are a lot of nuances to research which laypeople don't understand. It's fairly technical in nature. I'm getting the feeling that I wasn't really able to put that across. In addition to analyzing the data, we provide the insights layer. So if I'm saying, you know, I loved your brand, there was this great section you launched, but my UX behavior doesn't match up to it, or when I'm talking to you, my smile doesn't quite sit right, there's a cue for the researcher to probe further, saying, I I know you liked the experience, but did you buy anything? No, actually, I didn't find the variety I was looking for.

You're reading their face?

Yeah.

You're reading their voice, which buttons they click?

The words that they use, the sentiments.

And the words that they say 24/7?

Specifically when you click it's okay. We were extremely careful about that issue.

So I have to do it every time?

So let's say you're doing an ad test. I'll ask you to opt in. You'll click on the ad to play. While you're watching the ad, I'm analyzing your facial expressions.

Oh, it's only while I'm watching the ad? You're not watching me after that.

That's a very dangerous area to get into. Working with this technology for so long, you get pretty good at figuring out how things are going and how people are reacting. We have very strong hopes of taking this forward into sales enablement, mental health, but those are all very far in the future.

What about law enforcement?

Yes, potentially this technology can be used there. We have, however, been extremely careful to stay away from Businesses that have ethical considerations attached. Surveillance is an industry we are not keen to participate in.

How are you training the model?

So we initially started in early 2023 with a 1 million dataset that was manually annotated and tagged with various expressions. Now, from all of the data that we've run through our systems, we sit on over 20 million face frames tagged.

Okay. And is it very particular to India? Because expressions like, you know, nodding ahead means something Different things in different parts of the world.

Our datasets have been trained at 35% Caucasian faces, Latin American, North American, Indian American. All of those have equal weightage. We have, in fact, a lot of international clients that we work for.

I wondered about why you would lie. At least in America, they're like, they love to say what's wrong with things.

This technology is not so much a lie detector as it is about capturing an unstated response. There are levels of insight. So let's assume you're watching an ad, and you've used a very expensive celebrity in the ad. Are people genuinely noticing the celebrity? Is he bringing you value for the money that you're paying him? Or you've introduced new packaging for your brand. Is that new packaging actually attracting the attention that it needs to attract? There's a lot of cultural politeness built into our cultures. You'll see, yeah, it was a nice ad, but was it a nice ad? Was it a great ad? Was it just, yeah?

Are they using you across all of them right now? Are they using you across some of them?

I think Mohan really got it, primarily because he's been a serial entrepreneur. And he's also heard of Emotion AI in the context of edtech. The usage patterns are different for the research agencies and the brands. We typically see very high-frequency usage from our agency partners, almost up to 30 to 40 projects in a year. But then if you come to brands, they typically do larger studies, bigger in quantum and money, but they do it more sporadically, one per quarter.

Each client is paying you about $750 a month. That seems low for the service that you're providing. Are you trying to seed the market a little bit, or—

We actually charge on a per-respondent basis. We actually have a 10x margin. It costs us about $10, for instance, to analyze 1 hour of qualitative content, but we charge $100 per respondent.

Ritu, thank you so much for coming on Meet the Drapers.

I actually was a little more scared stressed this time than the previous one. Now that you're closer in the journey and you really want to make it to the finals, it gets a little more stressful.

Mohan, why don't we start with you?

Sounds useful. It looks like it's something that probably hasn't been done before. The question that I have is how much value perception is there among their clients? How much of the value are they actually able to capture? And so if we are spending $25,000 on a study, what portion of that is coming to them? Right now it seems it's a very small portion.

You know, the perception data that they're providing, is it really making a difference in the research that is being done? Is it really tipping the scales as to the customer's behavior? Because it's repeat that's more important than trying it once or twice.

Polly, what do you think?

I think that was what I was getting at with my question. How well does this work? Because in America I don't see it. I'm just not sure where it's useful, except What she said, people being too polite.

Generally, people are trying to avoid seeing any ads at all. If any ad captures you at all, then it would be quite valuable. You know, if you can get it right, great skill set. Let's bring on our next entrepreneur.

I grew up in Bangalore. When I was in high school, Bangalore had not seen any of this development. So houses were like this, people walking on the streets. After my high school, I went to the US. I went to the University of Chicago, spent 13 years in New York. Within investment bank Credit Suisse doing mergers and acquisitions advisory. Came back in 2012 back to Bangalore, started a real estate development company. That's how I met Arun, Shrawan, and Mukund.

Mine's very different. I grew up, I would say, in Bangalore but outside Bangalore in a very rural place. I was doing my PhD in France in machine learning. I quit that in between to come back to India because I had 2 cousins, Shrawan and Mukund, who are other co-founders of ToyStack. We decided let's do a startup together now.

So, you know, I'd say there's 2 aspects of being an entrepreneur. I think one is you get a lot more control over your life while you have all the risk, a lot of tough decisions. You also have a lot of control over your timings, your time, your life, etc. Until you actually scratch that itch, you don't know how hard it is. I think people thought I was a bit crazy, but I think everybody has their— has to make their own decisions for themselves, right? You can't live somebody else's life.

I think for me it was inevitable. My dad's an entrepreneur. He's an aerospace engineer with— he has patents in biotech. Even when we were kids, me, Shyaman Mukund, we played games together and we always thought, okay, we should do something together. You know, we got to just build stuff. Like, I don't know a life other than that.

Success is personal. So I looked around my investment banking colleagues, fancy apartments, fancy cars, but they were miserable personally. It looks sexy from the outside, But it's a very selfish existence, I would say. The one thing I didn't like about it is, as you come up and become a managing director, there's only that much food that's on the table, right? There's that many clients, there's that many deals. So there's a— you start seeing a bit of, you know, people cutting you away. And I said, you know, let me try something else. The way Mukund, Shravan, Arun have really built this product, they've actually created something incredible in such a short period of time.

It was always, you know, this Really cool tool that allows you to take away the complexity of the cloud. That's, that's the reason we called it ToyStack. We thought it'd be a toy, and we never actually thought of this as a replacement for a cloud when we started out. It wasn't such an ambitious goal to begin with at the start. We were just building this for ourselves. It just started to look like we built something of value for these people because instead of going to everybody else, they started coming to ToyStack instead.

The cool thing with all of us is we're very close with our families. Arun just got married. I got married 10 years ago, so I got 2 little kids. My parents are also close by. Everybody brings a completely different skill set to the table. I think that's the very cool part of the 4 of us have really come together.

Yeah.

Like, we were confident in how we're gonna deliver this pitch, but then when we looked at the others and thinking, oh, this is a really good idea, I think we're at a stage where we're pretty confident of what we're trying to do.

But, you know, competition is competition. ToyStack is a cloud platform like AWS, but simpler, cheaper, and smarter, driven by AI. The founding team has 3 brilliant engineers who've built AI and ML applications at scale. They've worked on technology together for, I'd say, 10, 12 years, and they've built a live data center for a healthcare AI company. I'm a simple investment banker from New York, and I complement their technical expertise With traditional cloud deployments, you need an expensive DevOps team. It takes days to weeks to configure the cloud, and then at the end of it, you still have a bill that could be really expensive. We've simplified this whole process to a couple of clicks. You connect your code to our platform, AI reads the code, and deploys it to the cloud like that. Time-cost savings are huge. For one particular client, we've saved more than 50%. It's like an airplane cockpit, right? So when you get in there, You better be a pretty good pilot to figure out all those keys, whereas with us it's autopilot. We host these applications on a communal Kubernetes cluster. For layman's terms, think a coworking space. So if a company needs maybe 5 cubicles, we'll give them 5 cubicles. They need a floor, we'll give them a floor. And then we have AI, which, which looks at all the efficiencies, right? Is the compute being used effectively? Say 100 different steps along the way, AI looks at each of those AWS does that same thing.

They optimize. Why are you different?

So AWS or Azure, they're like basically a hardware store. So if you want to build an office space, they give you the plywood, the materials, the paint, everything. You got to go set up that office yourself. He'll give you a load balancer, but you got to know how to connect that load balancer. What we do is basically we give you a ready space.

And that ready space might be on AWS?

Yes. There's a huge cost difference between the top-tier players like AWS. You can get like 60%, 70%, 80% discount on the same compute. The only reason you're not using AWS or Azure The reason startups don't go there is because there's not enough piping between a data center sitting in a private cloud and the startup consuming it. The only way to get there is for somebody like us to kind of do the piping for them.

And do you have any customers yet?

Yes.

10 seconds, he can ask you a question and you're gone, and you've not been able to give to him the things he's looking for. Ensuring that we stayed on track when Tim asked those different questions was important. In less than 7 months, we got to 9,000 users.

We—

each of these—

Are they all paid?

When it comes to dev tools, trust is the biggest thing. We're giving out a very small amount of compute so they can try it out, and when they feel like it works, then that's when they convert into enterprise clients.

How many of those are coming to you because you are cheaper versus because they find value in the automation layer that you're providing?

Most of them on the automation, but pricing does give us a benefit. If you go to AWS today and you want an EC2, You can get something for less, about $5. In our platform, if you were to get the same thing, you get about— it'll cost you $2. You're getting the DevOps automation, you're getting the CI/CD automation, everything included in just that $2.50 price mark.

We just started this maybe a month ago. Since we last spoke a week ago, we've already had 5 conversations, 2 with very large enterprises.

So you get a new customer like that and you give it to them for free for a while.

No, not the enterprise guys.

So enterprise is paying?

They're paying.

So the maximum we're at is about $500.

Wait, $500 one time?

No, every month.

Every month.

And is it tied to how much data is stored?

It's tied to the compute they need. It's tied to the storage they need. It's tied to the data transfer that they do. We've simplified it so that they can actually project stuff. So AWS is by design opaque. You really don't know what it's— what your bill is going to be 6 months down the line. We actually give them a very clear plan. Okay, in 6 months' time, this is what it's going to look like. Done this for so long that we're very confident in how to make this work. We're very clear on Uh, how to run this company.

You don't use the big companies, you use the smaller companies.

I built AngelList India, and AngelList India, though it's a platform that's used by pretty much every investor in India, requires just 0.15 CPU. That's how little it is. It's going to be scary if it fails, etc., and then you'd buffer it with 8 CPUs that cost you at least 10, 20, 30 times. So the only way to predict is to use data.

Can business owners make the decision themselves? Can they predict from this model that how it's going to The top-tier DevOps engineers know this already.

It'll cost a lot of money to hire these guys, and you need to give them the space. Instead, we are doing that work for them, right?

Your cost-based advantage, is that really a sustainable advantage?

Cost is just one fraction, like I said.

What is it that you're doing that doesn't tomorrow become a feature on Azure or AWS?

What surprised us was the technique to pitching to a VC is actually to make things much simpler and then talk big picture. All other tech companies are building cars. We're building roads. AWS is going to come to us and say, guys, can we partner with you?

Can we completely do away with the DevOps team, or is it reduction in the team?

I wouldn't go as far as to say that because I'm a developer. I would never say that. There was a time when content was very hard to make. Video cameras weren't that good. YouTube came along and it became very easy to distribute your video content. Now with Claude and ChatGPT, people are going to start making apps. They need a distribution layer, and that's what ToyStack aims to be. We've actually spoken to Polly last time and she said, can I code it? We told her that you got to go to ChatGPT. And then connect to ToyStack. But instead we were like, okay, let's just integrate it.

That's great. You, you improved their product.

Yeah, yeah, you've gotten us to market much faster.

The prompt was basically, hey, can you make a website for PolyDraper? And it did. So it's launched right now.

The energy that Tim and Poly bring to the table, it's, it's a contrasting energy, a bit of yin and yang. And also I think they both make you feel at ease.

Arun, Arun, thank you so much.

You know, this time was a lot more It was good seeing Tim and Polly again. Love their energy.

I felt a lot more confident this time. It is a complex problem that we're solving, but it doesn't have to be complex for our users.

Polly, what did you think of ToyStack?

I really shouldn't say. It's— I'm too prejudiced now.

You're biased.

I'm a little biased.

Did it work when you did it?

So it was cool. I liked them anyway.

Madhula, what do you think?

I loved it. Medium and small-scale enterprises that don't have a DevOps team can almost get away with not having to hire a team just for DevOps.

I like it as well. It all comes down to how good the product is and how well it works.

You would make the complete switch from AWS to this?

No, I think they are on top of AWS, right? So today we are an AWS shop. It has gotten very complicated. If they can actually simplify all of that, it would definitely reduce our complexity of managing that.

They were saying they would go AWS, but they could also use Snowflake.

That I'm not sure. You know, I trust AWS, you know, so I don't know if I'll go to somebody because they're cheaper.

Trust to the data is the key.

Absolutely.

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

I'm sure like a lot of the people who are watching probably know what Molly is, and our product was named after Molly because it has supercharging capabilities. It can really, really supercharge your marketing efforts. It can streamline things to a level where something that 20 people take 20 days to do, Molly can do in a couple of seconds.

So I have around 15 years of experience working in big companies such as Times of India, MakeMyTrip. So my father has been a businessman, but then I worked in a company. I started as a job, but since the last 15 years, I've been trying to build something on my own.

I've never really been part of the corporate kind of culture, never done like proper jobs. I started my first company, Nelson, that I scaled that to about $1 million ARR before it was acquired by Oliver Wyman. I was actually trying to help a couple of people market their YouTube series. And they wanted to do influencer marketing. So we set aside a budget. I was helping them with marketing, but then came the problem. We couldn't figure out what to pay, how to get in touch with these people, how does the process work, what— there's no standard, there's no platform for this. Then we dug deeper and it was like a blue ocean. There was so much of scope, no solutions in the market. We started developing the product, and from then to here, it's been like quite a You know, up and down journey from becoming the 7th top, top 7th app in the country to having days where we felt like quitting.

So I take care of the product and the technology part of it. So all the back office thing, building products, trying to understand, talking to the user, building features, improving them. And he takes care of the sales, the marketing, and other functions of the company.

We were at the onset of an opportunity that was worth $25 billion. But now with our new platform called Mollie AI, we're looking at half a trillion dollar opportunity. In terms of numbers first, we are the biggest influencer tech company in this space in terms of aggregation. We work with close to a million people across demographies, geographies. We have about 7,000 brands, 2,900+ agencies on our platform.

So every person who is not building a startup wants to build a startup, but they don't understand the kind of persistence or the kind of problems that you have to face. It looks very rosy from outside, that it's very nice, you're doing so much, you're building that value, everything is there. But the kind of struggle that it takes to build that value, or the kind of never-give-up attitude that it requires, for that to come up, it should come up from within. Nobody can teach you this. Nobody can tell you or explain or make you understand this. If it is not from within, it's not there.

Viewers, usually I'm pretty easy to reach. I mean, there are only 300 million of you. I'm making it a lot easier for you to contact me. I have downloaded my brain into this digital twin. And you can scan this QR code. You can pitch me your idea. You can talk about your business, anything, and I'll answer it 24/7. Enjoy it. It's great. It's a new feature of Meet the Drapers and Draper TV. I think you're going to have some fun.

Really excited getting the opportunity to pitch to Tim and the other wonderful judges again. The energy was really, really good.

Really excited to be here. I would request you to open the pill up, put it in your mouth, and bite into it when you hear the word supercharge.

Not a chance.

Molly is disrupting the marketing industry.

Yeah, Molly, but not the one that you're thinking of. We've run thousands of marketing campaigns with over 200,000 influencers, 5,000+ brands, and 2,900+ agencies. We discovered a very key insight. We're thrilled to introduce you to Mollie, the world's first AI marketer. Now, what is Mollie, you ask? Imagine a marketing assistant on steroids. Now imagine one that's better, stronger, and faster. One that is supercharged. All you need to do is give Mollie your website and it audits your entire digital footprint, scanning the internet through your website, social media, articles, industry reports to tirelessly train itself.

You can also give your sales to reviews data to make Mollie even more capable. You can ask Molly to monitor your hashtags, keywords, profiles, and competitors using deep contextual learning and integrations into your Google, Meta, Amazon, Shopify, and Influeso consoles.

Molly can independently run your marketing and optimize ads on the fly.

$500 billion industry ready for disruption.

Are you optimizing ads on, on Google or Facebook or Google, Facebook, Shopify, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok?

Tim obviously is very I don't know how he's able to kind of listen to a 2-minute pitch and come up with questions that make you think as a founder about your business.

Are you optimizing ads? Are you creating a marketing plan? Are you creating the strategy for the brand? Are you creating the positioning for the brand?

Think of this like a 20-person marketing expert team that can tirelessly work, knows everything about your brand.

But what is the output of it?

It provides you exponential intelligence. So think of strategy, Your marketing strategy and media buying to execution of your marketing campaigns, be it influencer marketing.

It will do the execution?

Yes.

Can you give me an example?

So if you wanted to run influencer marketing ads for your new product, if you wanted to suggest media buying techniques for your audience in Bangalore, it will do that for you.

How will it run the ads?

It's integrated into your Google Ads, your Shopify Ads.

Okay.

What about all the creatives?

It understands everything that your brand has put out on social media and then suggests As well as generates the right set of creatives for your marketing.

So you're saying the entire marketing team can be replaced by Mollie?

A small marketing team can be easily replaced, and it can empower bigger marketing teams.

Actually, her company is in the waitlist for Mollie. Their marketing team has been in touch with us, uh, something she wasn't probably aware of, or we were not able to communicate that well.

This is the kind of product that can not only assist you but actually work on your behalf.

Is there any brand right now that's using Molly?

Boat, Dharma Productions, Zepto.

And what exactly is Boat using?

We've been able to help Boat get a return on ad spend from 4x up to 16.8x with the same amount of money.

Through optimizing campaigns or?

Yes, optimizing all of their marketing efforts.

And what was the strategy that Molly gave out?

It identified that where the physical events needs to be done. It suggested that we do a comprehensive event in Bangalore. What should be the tonality of the messaging that needs to be put out to even generating and Helping them with what the messaging should be, and what were the results of that particular campaign? 16.8.

That's performance marketing.

It started to mess up a little during the pitch, and then things just went downhill from that moment.

So in totality, that's the global average.

Ad spend does not include their physical partnerships or where they are launching. Did go up by a certain number.

The results that we were they were able to achieve by spending let's say one million dollars, they achieved. 16.8x of that.

So are they now a paid customer that are using this for all their campaigns?

We have a waitlist of about 11,000 brands. We've launched almost 1.5 months ago. Smolies, our newest and grandest product.

So it's too early to tell if somebody is going to continue to pay.

It's been working with 11,000 businesses, like I mentioned.

I'm trying to understand, like, after the success of that boat experiment—

correct—

what did Boat do with There are users now.

80% of all influencer marketing and PR that you see happening in India happens through one of our platforms. 3,000 agencies use our platforms.

When you mean your platforms, is this something additional to Mollie?

They started with other platforms, right? And Mollie got more sort of sexy.

Polly understands Mollie.

Polly is a special judge. Kind of resonated with her when we were pitching in New Delhi.

Who has churned out and why?

We have a repeat rate of about 80%, and usually because of seasonal changes, not spending on marketing, or they've changed their strategy, or they've shut down.

What are your revenues?

We're doing upwards of half a million dollars in annual revenue.

For Molly or for the overall business?

So for Molly, we've got $150,000 USD annual contracts, $54,000 annual contract being the mean average.

$54,000 is the average?

Contract value annually.

Wait, you said you had 11,000 businesses. How could $54,000 be your contract?

So we have 2 different things. One is the company, which is already running, and Molly is the product that we have just built.

Actually, we haven't really decided pricing yet.

You're saying you've got 11,000 businesses paying and your contract value is $54,000?

That's for Molly.

On Molly, how much are those 11,000 businesses paying?

They're yet to access the product.

Molly is kind of putting it all together, and all of their other stuff is what they've been doing for the last three and a half years. Is it actually the case that that is a waitlist for Molly, or they're just your customers to whom you're going to sell?

No, no, there is a waitlist. You can check it out: molly.influencer.ai.

What's stopping you from opening it to all of them?

We need to scale up. There's a bit of a privacy issue as well. So to consolidate and secure that further, we need more money, more scalability.

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

It feels surreal to be back on the stage again, pitching again to Tim and Polly and the wonderful other judges.

We make it to the finals or not, I think we did a great job.

Polly, what'd you think of Molly? Did you want to take one of these?

I like the name, obviously. It might be— turn out to be great, but it's hard to make the commitment.

It's happening a lot. People are AI-ing their existing business.

This was a very exciting business for me. I still have a lot of questions. There are agencies that have over 50 years of experience. Is it to that scale? Is it to that expertise?

I think it's too early for me to evaluate its efficacy, whether it's actually working or not. At this point, I would wait and watch.

They could use some coaching on how they present it. You don't want somebody who obfuscates the truth. Let's bring on the next entrepreneur. But before we do, Let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

In the early days of our project execution, we did an inspection of a dam. We were able to send our robot and get the data from that and find out the issue. That did give us a big moral boost on how to handle risk, and it also got us recognition In our environment of the people around us. Somewhere in another corner of the world, a very great thinker is trying to get people on Mars. Now we want to get people under the ocean. There was an expedition to see the Titanic underwater, and the vessel that was carrying a few people, it imploded, and it was a catastrophe. It was just 4 kilometers, but we know that the deepest point is 11 kilometers. There are a lot many things, a lot many marvelous things under the water which we want people to see. We want to take people there. It would be definitely a very big boost to us. Whatever we are innovating, whatever we are doing, we are doing in a limited geography. So he could give access to us to a very large part of the globe. We are just 14 people. There are many projects that are coming our way, but we are unable to handle those. So a team expansion is one big thing we would do with a big investment coming in. The competition felt tough in terms of the teams that were competing with us. Of course, We are nervous, though confident about our product.

So it was a mixed feeling, a bit nervous and excited.

We are Koreshia Technologies. We build unmanned underwater robots. So the problem statement that we're trying to address is the— are the issues associated with the inspection of submerged infrastructures like the bridges, dams, intercontinental undersea cables, pipelines, oil extractions, vast kind of damage that the climate has on our coral reefs Exploration of rare minerals under the sea. While devising a solution for all of this, we have to keep in mind the balance between cost, time, and quality. We have designed the underwater robot that can be remotely operated, autonomously operated. This has been first time built in India that can go to the deepest.

What is deepest?

Deepest is more than 1,000 feet. Apart from that, it can carry a lot of payloads for variety of applications. In fact, this can replace a human diver underwater. For inspections, surveillances, installations, everything could be done by this, and the results are faster, more accurate. If you want to dive underneath, if you want to go under the oceans, we can take you there.

You rent it to the different facilities?

We aim to rent it. The people who we will rent it to, they need to be properly trained to operate the machine. We believe in giving our best.

The rest is up Does the robot also actually fix things? Does it— can it be trained to do things?

The primary is for identifying the issue, finding out what is the issue and the location of the defect. That is most important. And after that, some minor kind of operations can be done.

And you have $5 million booked for fiscal year '24-'25. How much of that is military?

We have an assured contract from Indian Navy worth $8.4 million.

Over what period of time?

Less than one year. More than 60% of 8.4 million will be encashed, and the rest is for maintenance over a period of eight years.

And what they're trying to do is detect bombs.

I mean, there are many confidentiality there, but yes, it is to assist in warfare, to carry out safe passage, to detect any hurdles or obstacles.

Who hires you for coral reef?

There are researchers. So what usually happens in coral reef is that they lab-generate the corals, then they are placed at certain locations, predefined location by divers. It consumes definitely a lot amount of time and effort, plus monitoring them. Everything for this process can be done by the robot.

You said it can do anything a diver can do. Can it find dead bodies?

Yes, we have.

So what is the Navy buying from you? Is it the actual equipment and the training that goes with it? Or are you providing an ongoing service as well?

We're happy that Tim got to saw it in the regional round, but yes, if the road was there, the other two judges and the new audience would have had a look. So we provide the product, we provide the maintenance for a longer period of time, and we provide the training to their personnel.

How is your response from the infra corporations?

It's pretty huge. In fact, as of now, we are not able to handle all the projects that are coming our way.

Why did you get into this? Why did you care?

It was by accident. The National Institute of Ocean Technology, they launched a competition calling for engineering students to devise a solution for underwater robotics. The robot has to run fully autonomous. It has to do many tasks. As college students, we got something interesting to work on. We dived into it.

Now, what of doing this is hard? Can I just create a drone and put some water protection on it?

A lot of engineering goes into it.

Give me an example.

There goes a saying that we know the surface of Mars more than we know our oceans. As we go from aeroplanes to jets to space shuttles, the air becomes thinner and thinner, less and less resistance as you go up. But as you dive down, water becomes thicker and thicker. Anything to rotate, anything to move, anything to send signal and receive the signals is definitely a whole lot of physics.

Completely agree with you, but you are saying that you operate up to 1,000 feet. We understand up to 1,000 feet pretty well. What's the competitive dynamic like?

They're really good at their job. If somebody misses out something, they were quite pertinent in finding that out. There is very less competition in this field, difficult in the technologies. But if I give an example, the communication out of the water is simply by remote in the speed of light, electromagnetic waves. That is how fast a remote operates, how fast a satellite can be operated. In water, it is at the speed of sound. If anything happens underwater, there's a whole lot of Artificial intelligence, onboard intelligence that goes into it.

Will an investment from a non-Indian firm hamper in your government projects?

Only defense has some restrictions, but in particular to the product that we're selling it to them. Apart from that, they have no hold on us.

Are you going to be able to sell the same thing to the American government or the Chinese government or the Pakistani government?

So the last two names, I'm not sure. The other countries are absolutely no problem. In fact, we have defense collaboration between U.S. government and Indian government, and we have many U.S. VCs. We could have elaborated the same with some examples and some change in policies that have happened in recent times. We have two kinds of business lines: one is service, another is providing the products. Providing the products, Navy is our first customer.

So you haven't delivered any yet?

No, we have delivered services to our.

You are operating it yourself?

Yeah.

Yes.

Terrific.

Nice to see you.

So the queries were a bit different than the last time.

We are waiting for the result to be announced.

So let's see what happens.

Mohan, I'll go to you first.

The use cases are all real. I'm surprised they didn't mention oil and gas. Those are the guys that spend the big bucks.

They did the first time.

Assuming that their technology works, this is a technology problem. The business is there to be had.

For me, the main question is, do they have to build a custom product for every client's requirement, or are they able to build a mass product that can be used across?

I got the feeling that it was sort of a mass product. Maybe they're tailoring it a little for the military.

Military, yes.

Holly, what'd you think?

I was just wondering if there is any comparable thing in the US. So really, they would be setting up in India. That would be their market.

Okay, we'll have to ask the crystal ball when the time comes. We need to bring up all the entrepreneurs, and then we're gonna figure out which way the crystal ball flies. My first question is for the light bulb. Some of the concerns that came up were about the customer. Would they really get great information here?

Recently, a very large e-commerce brand retained a very expensive celebrity. The campaign did really well, but on closer examination, the new revised UX and feature set introduced overshadowed the presence of the celebrity. They had unnecessarily made their advertising campaign almost 4x more expensive. What this solution helps you do is drill down to what customers are viscerally responding to.

For ToyStack, would it make sense to start out as saying you're a backup to AWS?

For the large, large set of customers, customers that are coming into the tech landscape, we are a replacement for AWS. For a customer, we can say, you know what, you want AWS, we'll give you AWS, but consider what we're saying, right? This could be much cheaper for you.

The end goal is, is we're not a replacement, right? We want to be AWS in 10 years. These 3 guys in 6 months created a POC which was as good.

Okay, Molly, how can we at least have some faith that your 11,000 businesses are going to Flip over to Molly.

We're doing half a million, that's from Molly, from the 5,000 businesses that are already our customers, and $150K is just subscription from the 11,000 businesses that are in the waitlist.

You have 5,000 that are actually using Molly.

Correct.

How much are they each paying?

On an average thing, about $100 in pilots.

In Croatia, the thing we're the most concerned about is competition. Are you going to just focus on India?

We are in discussion with many companies from Southeast Asia, Europe.

What are you better at than the competition in the US?

The stability that we have provided in turbulent water conditions, the rapid ascent and descent capabilities, and the powering.

Now it's a very difficult thing we have to do. 2 of you will be moving on to the finale. We need to move 2 of these forward. Polly, who are your 2?

I want to pick you because I think you're amazing as a human and an entrepreneur, and you're a woman.

But—

Oh, there's a but.

But I think my favorite is Croatia. They're basically saving lives.

So you get 2.

I get 2. Oh, done ToyStack.

All right, Medulla.

4 terrific companies, but My pick would be ToyStack and Aquasia.

Crystal ball is starting to light up.

Mohan, all of your companies have potential. I think we're going to probably be unanimous here. I pick Aquasia and ToyStack as well.

Thank you. Well, before I see what the crystal ball has to say, Ritu, you are the best presenter we've ever had on the show. Yeah, I think the business has great potential. Breaking in is gonna be tough. ToyStack, if you really do have something that's that much better, that's a great opportunity. Molly, I think the potential here is really extraordinary. Your presentation of it was not as strong. Boreasia, the biggest concern I have with you is the competition that might be coming out of the US, but I like your confidence It's about your engineering ability. It just comes out. I think we're gonna have to go to the crystal ball, see who goes to the finale. Crystal ball, crystal ball, give us vibes. Come on. I think we need you guys. This is a very confused crystal ball. The winners are... VoiceJack and Coratia, you're moving to the finals. You get to come on out to Silicon Valley and pitch in the finale. Thank you all so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

We're super excited. I think it was euphoric. I don't think it's fully sunk in yet, but super excited, super pumped.

I was actually happier for my colleagues who were screaming louder than most other people.

The feeling was really great. It's a chance to show our technology to a global audience.

If you were to vote us back on the show, I think Molly will change how marketing is done very soon. Like it or not, you will be using Molly.

We really do believe that we stand a chance in the finals and that we can do better. We would love to be voted back. We believe this technology has a lot of application, and we believe this technology. energy deserves to grow, so it'd be great to get your support.

See you next time on Meet the Drapers!

Welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers India! We are in the semifinals. We have been I've been all over India to find you these extraordinary entrepreneurs. She works for you, or you work for her?

I work for him.

That doesn't work in marriage. Does it have to be green methanol? Because you could probably get free methanol. This of all says—