This 🇮🇳 Startup Provides Jobs for Millions — Watch How | Meet The Drapers India: New Delhi

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? India's next great entrepreneur. Let the games begin. We're doing a full season of Meet the Drapers here in India, and where else to open this incredible show? Taj Mahal, baby! This is one of the great wonders of the world, and we're so excited to be here. We're going to see so many great entrepreneurs. I'm looking at a sea of people here, and they are some of the great entrepreneurs.

Some of these people are—

are you an Yes. One of them sold me this for, for 50 of something. 2 of our great entrepreneurs from season 5.

Mike.

And, and they, they did Stand and Pee. How big are your revenues now? Yes.

So it's 300 times better than from last when we were in last 2 years.

So 300 times better. But this is the entrance.

Exactly.

And is the backside also an entrance like that?

Exactly the same, but backside we have a river.

What was the name of the woman he built it for?

Mumtaz.

Mumtaz.

Mumtaz.

So wife name and Taj name is similar almost.

Yeah.

Looks like a Persian crown. The crown completely. What is the original name of Taj Mahal? Crown Palace.

Taj Mahal was created by kind of a great entrepreneur. He built this for his wife and it bankrupted the whole country. He was in the process of building a black one behind it for him, and his son pulled him out, put him in jail, and kept the country solvent. It's, it's maybe not an entrepreneurial story, but it's a really interesting story. This is the most extraordinary place that you will ever see in your entire life. You should all come and see it, but if you don't see it, at least At least you're seeing it here on Meet the Drapers.

A million dollars.

So a million dollars from the show.

So a million dollars worth of investment would mean a lot of GPUs for my team, yeah. So let's go.

Actually, we need a lot more, so.

So a million dollars is enough for us to maybe be the market leader in this space. Currently, there's no market leader.

It will really help us reach out to more gig workers across India, across the world, and that is going to make a lot of difference in the lives of gig workers, in the lives of companies.

We need the money to kind of increase our speed of deployment.

That $1 million from Tim Draper could be one of the biggest validations we get out there in the market.

We are here in New Delhi, the first of all of our episodes that are going to be done And then all here to my immediate left, we have Nikhil Agarwal, who is quite an extraordinary man. He's done a lot of great organizing for us in getting this show going here in India. Dr. Nikhil Agarwal Draper wears many hats. He's the managing director of FITT at IIT Delhi. But how many unicorns have come out of here?

So we are the largest contributor of unicorn from the alumni group. We have 30 unicorns coming from IIT Delhi out of 128 unicorns in total in India.

Fantastic. Okay, and to his left, we have the famous Gautam Kumar Draper.

Okay.

Co-founder of FarEye and recognized social innovator by MIT, has been instrumental in advancing last-mile logistics technology globally. So it's all about logistics for you, where everything comes and goes.

For multiple jobs, you will get multiple people, but we'll see the Indian entrepreneurs, they have like multi-skills, you know, in a single person.

And to my right, I don't actually even have to adopt her, is my sister Polly Draper.

They tried to give me away for all these years.

Absolutely. She is an actress, a writer, a producer, a showrunner, a director. I don't know, what am I missing? A lot of er's.

Yeah.

For lots of different TV shows she created and did all those things for Nickelodeon show, The Naked Brothers Band. Let's bring on our first entrepreneurs. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. Here we go, eyebrows.

It's not that hard to do a startup. Obviously, it is hard to do one, but when you get started on the onset of it, the barrier sort of comes down.

We started before this AI hype came about, and we are set up in 2021 when nobody was talking about AI, so to say. We would go to clients and they would say, oh, this is synthetic media, this is a deepfake, and we would not use this in our business processes. But now, of course, the world has really shifted.

There is this Ivy League level content available on YouTube since more than a decade from, you know, Harvard, and that's practically free, ranging from molecular biology to sort of neurosciences. But then that's not really available to most of the world.

That's not really free education.

Because the non-English speaking world cannot really access it. So that's where we thought that, you know, let's start building something towards it and to make every piece of video content be available in all other languages.

So we were able to work with some of the larger enterprises like HP, LeadSchool, and translate a lot of their content. But while being at the journey, we realized that this is not just an educational problem, but a very broad problem as well.

One use case is kind of very sort of narrow and very specific. But if the technology can, right, then why does it not help us solve any piece of video content? For that, we've been really thinking about scale, right? How do we democratize to this level that it's super easy? Like anybody can just come in with their video in language A and then convert that to language B.

One of the most exciting ones as well is that we've just done some work with Netflix with one of the Hindi series where some of the dialogues in one of the Hindi series is powered by our technology. That was not possible until now, and now it's something that we've been able to make that possible.

I remember Anuja as someone who used to be really pesky to me when we were working together. I used to sort of always wanted someone who can be, you know, pesky to me so we can get a lot of, you know, work done together.

For me, I come from a business background, so it was always on the cards. But what has to be done was, of course, very, very unclear. But when this idea came about, the partnership came about, I thought this is the right time. There were questions. There are still questions that we get from family and around. But I think, yeah, they've accepted in every way possible now.

So we are here in IIT Delhi. It's basically one of the premier institutes in India, in the heart of where most of the academic action happens. One year I spent doing research over here. I was working with a professor. I wrote a paper in computer vision.

I think Delhi really has that charm, so to say, which is sometimes difficult to explain. But if you come here specifically in winters, the celebration here, Usually very, very grand. You go out on a winter evening and you're going to really feel that vibe.

Delhi is, I mean, rich in terms of culture. There's a lot of places that you can catch a play, you know, near Mundi House. I used to do a lot of that.

I spent my college years here, so every day literally would be out on the road because there's just so many things to do. You can go to Chandni Chowk and everywhere you go from a street food standpoint, the food is amazing. So you do end up adding a lot of kilos to yourself, but the fun that you have with your friends on the street is definitely to remember for.

Do you get nervous, or do you kind of feel like you're past it at this point?

I think past it now. It's the flow, yeah.

Yeah. Hi, I am Tim Draper, and welcome to Meet the Drapers. I am having a wonderful time here in India, but I wonder, what if I knew how to speak in Hindi? Um, थोड़ा-थोड़ा नहीं काफी ज्यादा हिंदी बोल लेता हूँ, which means "लो के सिग्निफिका के." No solo un poquito. Incluso puedo enseñar en hindi. This is AI Tim Draper giving the stage to the founders of Dubverse.

Thank you for that warm welcome.

So fun!

And that was the exact reaction I would say that we were expecting. We are Dubverse. Hi everybody, Anuja this side.

Hey, it's Varshul.

And we at Dubverse are building on the generative AI side of audio, primarily taking it beyond just the English language. The idea basically is simple, to make video dubbing or video translation as simple as using Canva, that at a click of a button, any video can be translated into 60+ languages. And we do this with our web-based platform. In today's time, as per the last stat, about 75% of the world does not speak English as their native language, and that's where the primary learning happens. So we are on a mission to break the language barrier on the internet with generative AI. Dubverse delivers a broad, broad range of value to different types of users. For YouTubers or course creators, we enable them to increase about 30% revenue on their prerecorded content and enable a lot of product and L&D teams to be able to reach their audience in their native language. In the last year, we've also seen a lot of pull coming in from the enterprises, reducing their production time by 50% and enabling use cases which were not possible before generative AI.

We've been lucky to partner with some of the big tech and our lead investor Kalari, which invested about $1 million in us.

The early customer here, what are they using it for and are they paying good money for it or what?

So we started on with the audience which was the most early to adopt to new technology, right? So that's where we started with content creators. This basically runs on a subscription basis. Subscription starts at $20, goes up to $200 depending on how much content you are producing.

Who are your main competitors in India globally?

ElevenLabs is one of the pioneers, but they're of course focusing on English as their first language and we are focusing on Indian languages to start with.

Is any patent patentable technology that you have?

Not right now.

Not so all you are building on existing technology.

So we are building of our own, but we we are yet to file for patents.

Like is this like an individual users or enterprise or mix of both?

Sure. So we started with individual users definitely because that's where the technology was. Where we've already done some work which is live on Netflix right now. So we have our name on Netflix already in the credits.

You said movie dubbing. I can't fathom how that could work with what I just heard. It sounded like a bot, like. A computer, how good is the quality going to ultimately be?

Like you said, it's unbearable right now also, so that will get to about a year and bearable maybe in 2 years.

Great, terrific. Anuja and Varsha, nice to have you on Meet the Drapers.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Oh, I feel— still feel the chills, I think.

Yeah, it was a proper setup, like a lot of audience. So exciting.

Today when I saw— I watch English movie I would be more comfortable in different kind of accents which coming in. Maybe if you are able to provide that humanized experience, it can do a lot more.

And sometimes you just want to hear what they're saying. You don't really care about the quality of the voice unless it is a high-quality movie where you're saying, well, wait, he didn't deliver that line very well.

Which is why sometimes I even prefer subtitles.

What do you think?

Tech-wise, like really amazing tech. Founders are passionate because they have raised like, you know, some rounds as well, right? And Kalari, knowing Kalari, they validate the product market fit. Very good technology, unlike the laptop.

Well, terrific. All right, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. You guys are probably kind of lucky to have You're in the trenches together.

Yeah.

We took a trip together just as friends. We liked each other. We started dating, and at the same time, Vidyarthi said he's working on this idea to change the way campus placements work in this country. And I felt at that moment itself that I need to be a part of it too. And from day one, then from the time we started dating, we actually started working together on an idea as well.

We got into the rhythm. It took a while, definitely, right? when you have a personal relationship and a professional relationship, you need to tune both of them.

When I told my family, they knew that we were dating. She's like, my mother, she's like, all eggs in one basket, Kajal, how are you going to do it? Entrepreneurship plunge in India, and at that time when it had just become cool, just become cool, they were not very happy. However, my younger brother, he's always believed in me. He convinced my mother, he helped me convince my mother.

It's hard to convince families because in my family also, my father had a startup.

He was working for the government and he took a plunge into business and he had his ups and downs and more downs than ups, which is what is typically the case with running a business. Eventually they turned around. Still, I get the traditional questions from my family. How much is the profitability? How much are you taking home? You know, almost 7 years after taking the plunge.

Entrepreneurship is not easy and there's really less help out there. To be honest, when we were pivoting from the previous startup, Recultr, to PickMyWork, and Vidyarthi has seen me through this journey, there was this time when I was lost. You really have lesser people to talk to. So I, I took therapy at that time. I think at one point in time almost all entrepreneurs really need it. On the same day you can have an extremely high high and an extremely low low, all of it together, and you sometimes, sometimes have to just manage it. I'm looking back at this 18-year-old version and then 22, 25. I always wanted to be able to create more impact in the lives of Indian women because they really don't get the opportunity. And I really understand my privilege here in India because I belong to a family where my mother was working, my father was working. It's not everybody in India gets that opportunity. I feel that so many women deserve it. It's one of those regions in South Delhi which is extremely green. It has a park, there's a lake nearby. You can come walk. This area was built in the medieval times, still decently preserved. It's extremely diverse in terms of heritage, in terms of architecture. It's beautiful. It has seen a lot of history.

And also, I think specific emphasis should be on the food scene over here, you know, because there are a lot of states that are close by and a lot of people come over here. So you get different types of cuisines over here and all of them are really good and worth trying. Oh, it's a wonderful, wonderful place to go around running. I mean, if the weather permits. But yeah, I go on marathons. That's how I take my time off and blow off some steam. As entrepreneurs, you keep doing this, right? You keep presenting and you keep pitching.

A little bit of nervous.

Go ahead, give us your pitch.

Before I start, I have a question for you, Tim. What percentage of Indians do you think use a credit card?

Oh, probably 25%.

Yes. So now the stats are going to be really alarming. 3% Indians use credit cards. It is supposed to be a more trusting economy, but people are scared when they see digital ads. People don't know what to click, what not to click. The app that they commonly use is WhatsApp. But beyond WhatsApp in their smartphones, there are no other apps to access the basic financial services. Insurance is at 4%.

Trading accounts or trading in the stock market is only done by 7% of the people.

People, and the credit cards 3%. We have a mobile app where we train a network of gig workers. These are largely underemployed and unemployed people in India. We give them a mobile app. We are available in 6 different languages. They get the training and then they start selling in their local neighborhoods. So they use WhatsApp, they use Instagram, they use Telegram groups, advertise that they are a certified financial advisor who can sell the following products, and they're helping banks increase their penetration in tier 2, tier 3s. We are at a $2 million ARR in terms of our revenue. We are profitable. We turned profitable last quarter. So one beautiful thing that you can see over here is that we've signed up with almost all the top banks in the country. But all in all, I think we drove home the point that we are a profitable company. Last, about the team. So me and Kajal, we met in our college. We did our B-school together.

Are you dating?

We've been married for 5 years now.

Oh, the dating went very well. It did.

So it's a pretty interesting model, of course. Are you ready to do those kind of compliance to onboard the customers, onboard the banks, or you have to redo the cycle? And what is the cost of doing this?

On one side you have the banks, and on the other side you need to get the gig workers who would go into the markets and start selling over there. We did our initial research about Philippines, about Vietnam, Indonesia, where again the banking penetration is really, really low. And there also a similar possibility where gig workers can go and acquire customers for banks and fintechs. In terms of regulation, what needs to be figured out is, uh, what laws are there around gig work, whether you can earn part-time money, how is it taxed, so on and so forth.

So any developing economy is a right target because underemployed and unemployed people are the right fit to be gig workers and working with us.

So there is no patent possible because there's no technology there?

It's our own platform. The app is ours on App Store, Play Store, and behind the scenes there's a dashboard which makes all of it possible with that smaller So when they sell, how would that work?

What we do is that we convert all our training content into videos of 5 to 10 minutes. They go through that. We also ask them a few questions to test their understanding, and then they start selling. So we also tell them that you go and visit your nearby mom-and-pop store where you've been taking groceries for ages. Try to talk to them, try selling to them.

They're selling to the local businesses, or are they selling to individuals?

best UPI players in India is using our gig workers across the country who are actually doing merchant acquisition for them. So building that trust towards the UPI player for the merchant, all of it is happening via the gig worker. They make the merchant and the customer confident about the product.

Could you tell me your last 3 years of growth?

So from last year to this year, we've grown already 2x, and by the end of the year, we'll be at 3x in terms of our growth from last financial I think the Indian judges got it.

We should have Americanized an example to help Tim and Polly a little bit. We could have done that.

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

It was good?

It was good.

Loved it. It was good. Yeah, irrespective, we would have a drink either to celebrate or feel sad.

I feel like having a cold coffee right now, but yeah.

You know, I think there's something to that. What did you all think?

I think they have to really scale up the business because the fintech is all about the scale and the number of gig workers they can onboard, the number of customers they can onboard. What I like about them is that they are working a lot on the data and the AI. In e-commerce in India, we have seen companies like Meesho who has grown with the social commerce, and definitely it's, it's a massive market for them.

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

So we call it the startup incubator of IIT Delhi. Some of them are students, some are graduates also, and then we are open to companies coming from outside also.

Well, let's go in and meet some of our entrepreneurs, shall we?

This is a flight control system that keeps your drone stable in the air.

That's what we do.

I see. So you don't build— you build the drone intelligence.

Yeah.

Is it a brain for the drone?

It's a brain, it's the muscles, everything. So everything that would be needed to build a drone is what we build.

Using the help of AI, we have detected our objects of interest. So we have trained our model to detect the object of interest on the imagery, which is with us in-house.

So the idea is that you want to put in a huge amount of power in a very small space.

Okay. And how is this different from other engines?

So this is not very different from the engines that you see on regular aircraft. We are just trying to compress this in a very small space.

So this would be better for smaller drones?

Yes, exactly, for drones.

2 in particular look very good to me. Hello there, nice to see you.

Pleasure to meet you.

Great. The reason I came, when you said, is because I knew your father and his first fund, which he did in India, Draper Richards. Right.

I was an advisor on it.

Oh my God, fantastic.

I visited his home many times.

I'll have to tell him. Yeah, that was a very successful fund.

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 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 standards. 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 a new platform called Molly 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, you know, 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.

This is called the heart of Delhi. This is India Gate. Earlier, it used to be Bangalore and Mumbai. Now it's more about Delhi and Gurgaon because most of the talent of the country is here. Everything is so It's accessible, the cost of living is great, the nightlife is kind of vibrant. There are a bunch of places in CP, there's a really, really cool nightlife in Gurgaon, DLF Cyber Hub. And if you go to the Old Delhi, that's where you'll find the authentic Delhi cuisine. You'll get everything from parathas to chole bhature. And if you go towards South Delhi, you'll find some of the best Asian restaurants.

Delhi is a mixture of all the cultures together, so you get to taste everything together.

I think that's why it's called the heart of the country. We do pitches and we get shot down. Sometimes it's a yes, sometimes it's a no. So it's kind of like we've grown into, you know, how pitches happen. We've been building category-defining products in the creator economy space that are used by almost a million people. We've run thousands of marketing campaigns with over 200,000 influencers, 5,000+ brands, and 2,900+ agencies. While running these campaigns, We discovered a key insight.

Even with great tools and resources, brands don't get expected results because of a very basic problem. People aren't sure of what to do and when. To solve this, we created a drug that's so powerful we made it into a separate product.

And 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. 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.

You can You can also give your reviews to Sales Data to make Mollie even more capable. Because of Social Intelligence, you can ask Mollie to monitor your social profiles, hashtags, keywords, and competitors. Using Smart AI, Mollie can give you insights, spot trends, anomalies, and fix errors.

Using contextual learning and seamless integrations into your Google, Meta, Amazon Ads, and Influencer consoles, Mollie can independently run marketing campaigns for you and optimize ads on the fly.

So how do you make money?

We charge subscriptions and we charge commissions on every marketing spend.

And which has given you more money, the subscription or the—

Commissions.

The commissions?

Yep.

Already?

Yep.

Interesting. How big is your business now?

We are doing close to half a million dollars in ARR. Very recently, in less than a month, we've made the waitlist live. We already have attracted 11,000 businesses. The kind of work that 20 people take 20 days to do, Molly can do in less than 5 minutes. So that's a lot of cost saving. It's a $500 billion industry that's ready for disruption. And within a month, we've attracted 11,000 businesses, signed annual contracts worth over $100,000.

How much cost it will reduce in terms of marketing spend?

We've seen return on ad spend go from an average of 3-4x, go up to 16.8x globally. We've helped certain brands achieve even 100x ROI. The average that we've seen is about 16.8x.

10% is the marketing cost for most of the companies.

We've seen close to 25-30%. The kind of ROI that they were getting with that spend, we've increased that 4 times.

How have you been able to be this kind of aggregator?

Right, so we started with an influencer marketing platform 3 years ago. We've run thousands of campaigns, we've done lots of marketing services. Over time, we understood why brands don't get the right results, because people aren't just really sure of what to do and We tried to solve this problem by building a feature within our platform, but the problem and the solution was so big and so grand, we made it into a separate product.

And what is the lifetime value of your customer?

The product has been launched for like less than a month.

Oh, okay.

So yeah.

How do you market to your customers?

Very honestly, we haven't spent a single penny on marketing of any sort. The need is such that people come and find us.

By the way, the, the right answer to that question is We use Molly.

That's right, that's right. We actually do internally.

Yeah, terrific.

Great, it's great.

Awesome.

Extremely excited, super happy. It went well, though we got interrupted, we couldn't finish the pitch, but I think it went well. There were great questions by all of the judges.

I think it's a pretty interesting product, certainly. It's— there is a need for it. So I think like 25% savings in the marketing budget is a huge number.

Who is your satisfied customer that will say, you know, this is just like taking Molly. This is such a great—

Will you take it again?

It feels really— I'm very happy.

Now that I think about it, it's probably a great name.

Pissing it on, it's kind of like—

Supercharges your company.

It gets you going. Although, is that what Molly does?

I mean, it could work.

I don't know.

I think Molly kind of makes you feel just like really happy and relaxed.

I don't know.

But I guess that could because—

Do you, any of you know? Okay, so with that, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

So are you a rocket scientist? Used to be. Okay, that was your sort of training? Training, yes, yes. I was making really good money, um, and I was stationed here in India, and absolutely there was no need for me to start up, except I couldn't live with myself knowing that this is something I can do easily anytime, and I'm not pushing the boundaries as I used to. We are at that crucial point where petrol, diesel is giving way to electric, hydrogen, hybrid, other forms. When you've had a very large calorific value of fuel, you didn't worry about efficiency because there's enough fuel, there's cheap fuel, and you can burn and you don't care. And that's the era that we have seen specifically with American automobiles, right? Big, heavy, muscular. As we transition to EVs, we suddenly found out if you have to maintain the same path, you need a lot more battery than you had thought of. Well, one thing aerospace engineers don't like is weight. If I can shave off 50 to 60% of the weight, why shouldn't I? If that technology is applied to all automobiles out there, you are looking at a potential So 50% reduction in battery across, which means upfront carbon footprint really drops down to almost 2 to 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. And that's huge in our climate goals. So yeah, keeps us passionate. First and foremost, we're engineers, so we, we just want to tackle the toughest problems. And since the last 5 years, a lot of us have been exposed to the effects of climate change, with El Niño coming in, the hottest years over the last 3 years, understanding how technology can perhaps get us out of this if we, if we develop that in time. All of those Those push us to actually make that happen. But of course, being a for-profit startup, we also want to do that in a space which has a big enough market and returns. Otherwise, deep tech startups like us mostly don't make it. So we are hoping we make it. So we are near the Qutub area. This is a fairly happening part of the town, like the best parties are here, and it is also a place where you'll find a lot of historical monuments, one of which we're standing right here. You'd see a lot of business bottom line focus in Delhi, which is not available anywhere else, which means when you're building a business, you're building for cash flow and not just for valuation. You get the pulse of it, whether this is going to work or not. What's very special about this region is it is today the beating heart of new India. The new startups, whether it is on consumer, whether it is bringing application deep tech to the industry, auto or otherwise, the heart beats here. Tim's personality, of course, is amazing. He comes right at you. it's, um, sort of storytelling in your mind. Okay, okay, how is it, how's it going to be? That's why some butterflies. It's fun. 4-wheeler EV opportunity is a $500 billion opportunity annually, yet we see most vehicles built with structures that are extremely heavy, which means you get much lower payload, much lower range, they cost a lot. What we're doing is 70% structural weight reduction, so that is what get like a carbon fiber on a sports car, but with 0% additional cost. The materials used are very similar to what you use in wind turbine blades, yachts, hulls, etc. And we are bringing for the first time to land mobility. These are called composites. We have 3 layers of IP. The main advantage that you get out of this structural mass reduction is that you also get 40% entire vehicle mass reduction, which means you use lower battery Which means you have a lower running cost, and which also means you have a lower carbon footprint. Very, very critical. We took the first bet on last-mile deliveries. So the first product is a one-tonner delivery van. We prototyped it and showcased last this July twenty-four. We have about two thousand six hundred pre-orders. These are customers like delivery and others who understand that they are not able to get EVs that can make them money. Yet. We intend to customer test with them next year, starting April, and then go into production with partners.

We also have—

So are you kind of at the mercy of a few automakers?

Potentially. So 2 business models. One, put the vehicle together, go out to the logistics players yourself. But then again, you can't make millions of vehicles yourself. So ultimately, yes.

Do they squeeze you down by saying, we have another alternative? And play you off against them, and then your margins go down and it gets to be a tougher business.

It is a tougher business to be a supplier. You're absolutely right. We're talking about 20% margins typically on the supply chain.

You guys have a question?

I think it's a great technology, but what you're doing is extremely high capital cost. You're building up the bodies of the trucks or the cars you're talking about.

Yes.

It does not make any sense because you require maybe 10 acres of land to set up the whole—

Not really. Sorry. Okay, generally how? With metals, it is all about an exponential curve that flattens at the end, which is why you see at 50,000-unit scale you get profitability with metal factories. Composites, on the other hand, are repeatable processes. So if I have to put a 4,000-unit factory, which we plan to, the entire CapEx outlay for that is about 33 crores. So that's about $3 to $4 million. We struck out with many VCs, to be very honest, and everybody is like, you're thinking too big, think small.

Why you are targeting a courier company like a delivery and all, or to manufacturing companies, right? I think that would be a good idea. Absolutely.

But when you see the delivery van business, right, you have 4 players who really dominate. They are such big behemoths that just to have that engineering conversation go to the end line, it takes about 2 years, and we really don't know whether our IP is going to be protected in that line or not, no matter what NDAs you do. So we have to do something as a startup to get out there.

Well, Gagan, thank you so much for coming and being on Meet the Drapers.

It went well. I think many of the questions I've heard before, so I had many of these answers. Very valid questions. We are in a space where we haven't seen this done before, so very realistic apprehensions, but then we also have the answers on how to overcome What did all of you think?

What'd you think, Tom?

Amazing technology, uh, and definitely like from the tech perspective, it's, it's an amazing solution. But, uh, from the adoption and creating multiple SKUs would be a bit tougher with the, uh, amount of money that Nikhil was talking about. There are 2 parts of it. One part is a science part, another part is a business part. So if you just focus on the science part, because composites and reduction of the cost to the vehicle Uh, it's a great idea. I think he focused more on science part and licensing. He will have a better, uh, success rate than building a huge CapEx base.

Sure.

Yeah, it does not make any sense. You have invested in Tesla, you know about it. How much money does it take before Tesla has earned even $1 as a profit?

Well, they had $400 million loan from the government. I mean, probably a billion dollars. What do you think, Paul?

I think your idea is the best route for him to take. The other just will put him right in the mix of people who have been getting whatever you just said, million to billion dollars from the government.

Let's bring back our entrepreneurs and let's ask them a few more questions. So first, Dubverse, we kind of get that in social media this will be very interesting. But we're also a little concerned about the quality. It sounds like a robot coming out, whereas you really want real expression and excitement and whatever. How are you going to do that? Or, or is there a market that's really valuable to you that wouldn't require that?

We start with that, but of course the idea is to make it more mainstream and have that energy go in.

All right. Now, PickMyWork, you know, it took me a while to really figure out what you guys were up to. That's actually pretty interesting that you're, in effect, Uberizing the insurance business. I'm still a little caught on how you get these people recruited. Is there something that you're doing to have them spread the word to other people?

We pay people on a weekly basis, and that was a lot of excitement. People were just talking about it.

And you pay them in—

In rupees right now, but whenever we have tested any international market, I think the way to go there Whether it's through Bitcoins or through some crypto.

Moving on to Molly. Have either of you ever tried Molly?

No, no. We're too busy working, so that's not an option.

Good.

That's actually a good sign. You guys claim to never have tried it, yet you described the feeling from it in a very interesting way. How can we be sure that it works? If you've only been out there for a month.

We've been working with customers for slightly over 3 and a half years. We've got a customer retention rate of 95%. We just don't have Mollie. We've got more than 7 products. Mollie is the newest and the grandest addition that we have that we expect will completely disrupt how people access digital marketing because we feel like we're moving towards a future where nobody will use tools as they are. Everybody will use tools and technologies through a very easy Terrific.

Okay. And Planet Electric, what did you think of this great idea to maybe just be a licensing business?

We'd love if you could arrange those partnerships.

Have you pitched any vertical takeoff and landing vehicles or drone companies?

Not yet. It's, it's a very interesting segment. It's a growing segment, probably in the next 5 to 10 years. Realistically, 5 to 10 years down the line, yes. Today, the biggest opportunity for us is in auto. But yeah, that is coming up.

Okay, audience, I'm gonna give you the 4 choices and you're gonna applaud. It'll either be polite or yeah, baby! Dubverse. PickMyWork.

Molly.

And Planet. The audience was more helpful than usual. Usually it's just like polite applause for all 4. Okay, did that help?

I'm holding her hand. I'll go with Dovers because of the content creation and size of the market. I'm a little inclined towards science, the energy saving and saving the planet. So I think I'd go for the Planetly.

I think I'm gonna pick you guys because—

yeah, I think I'm gonna pick you guys. Okay, so Molly, if I could get everybody's help, send the vibes. What's it gonna be? Ooh, I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it really big. It's Molly!

Let's go!

Congratulations.

How do you guys feel?

How do you feel having won tonight?

Pretty fired up, ecstatic, all the good stuff.

Yes, it's awesome.

Congratulations. And the other 3 can skip all the way to the finale. They're counting on you to vote.

Vote for us. We are here to break the language barrier on the internet.

The internet promised that the world will get more globalized, right? So we are in that journey, and vote for us to make internet multilingual.

Thanks.

Go Dubverse!

Across the world, there are a lot of countries which are facing underemployment, unemployment.

If you look at Africa, if you look at Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, not everybody earns through a full-time job and a full-time salary.

We democratize earning opportunities and we believe that millions of people can be a part of this. This is where we are and we need your support to make it possible.

Vote for us because for the first time, apart from the powertrain, whether it is diesel or electric or hydrogen, we are actually attacking a problem that has not been attacked. If we can solve this, we can lower our global emissions by 2 gigatons per year.

That's huge.

And that's just from material change.

Okay. See you next time on Meet the Drapers. All right, good job.

All right.

We are going to film the next Meet the Drapers episode at IIM Bangalore.

My previous startup was acquired by NetPratik.

Do founders make money?

Uh, they—

no, this is— the answer is no, but—

no, but—

here, pass it down and try to avoid getting high smelling the one on the That was not intended.