This Startup Teaches Dogs to Talk | Meet The Drapers Global: Silicon Valley

I'm Tim Draper, and I invest in big ideas before they become the next big thing. I invested in Tesla, SpaceX, Twitch, all when they were just a sparkle in that entrepreneur's eye. This season, I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. I'll bring these visionary innovators to Hero City in the heart of Silicon Valley, where they'll compete compete for a million-dollar investment. Here's the twist: you, the viewers, can vote for your favorite entrepreneurs and help them secure a spot in the finale. Who will rise to the challenge and secure the funding to turn their dreams into reality? Let's find out together on season 7 of—

The Incubator!

We're here in the center of Silicon Valley, Stanford University. This is like the melting pot of entrepreneurship. Now let's go meet some of these entrepreneurs. Here, there's one right here. So are you an entrepreneur? I am. Well, what I do is I started my own business in consulting. How about you two? Are you entrepreneurs? It's perfect. It's a great opportunity for that. Go, I hope you make it happen. Doesn't take much to find entrepreneurs at this campus. I'm standing here in front of Hoover Tower. It's a center for freedom, that freedom that drives that entrepreneurial spirit here. So this is the big lecture hall at the Stanford Business School, and this is where I gave a lecture about Hotmail and how viral marketing works. Boy, every time I come to Stanford, there's a new building. It's a little confusing trying to figure out where I am. I think this is the business school. Is this the business school? How about you two? Are you in the business school? Oh, you're entrepreneurs. This is perfect. So are you gonna tailor it to the customer?

What would a million-dollar investment be for your company?

Million dollars.

We could do so much with it.

We could.

We can take the market if we have the funding.

What do we do with $1 million? I know what we do.

With this capital, we will be able to go to so many different markets and 10x our business. We need these kind of resources to go to the next level.

$1 million would bring us to the billion-dollar business.

It would be huge for us. We'd be able to really accelerate the mission of what we're doing.

This show and this funding would be very critical for us at this point to really expand our outreach.

That speaks numbers, you know, personally and professionally.

It would bring us to the next level for sure.

This is once in a lifetime opportunity for us.

I would just tell everyone we did it.

Woo!

Welcome everybody to meet the Drapers. Woo! All right. Hey, it's the Silicon Valley. We have some extraordinary guest judges today. How can I say they're extraordinary? Because I hired both of them. Here we have Andy Tang. Andy has been at Draper Associates with me and in various capacities, being a part of Draper University, Meet the Drapers, a whole variety of different activities. He's my Chief Operating Officer. Andy, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What are you going to be looking for here in Silicon Valley?

World-changing entrepreneurs.

In the entrepreneur, is there something that you Are specifically going to be looking at?

Fire in their eyes.

Okay, good. We're going to go for fire in their eyes.

Look for those traits.

On my right is Maxime Bucaille.

Perfect.

And he is French. He got an MBA from Columbia Business School. He is an expert in crypto, Bitcoin, and a variety of fintech exploits. But he's opened his mind and become more of a generalist like the rest of us. Maxime, what are you going to be looking for today?

I think we're going to look for entrepreneurs that really find a problem that they have at heart and a big problem, and they put all their energy and really find the fire in their eyes that they really want to go solve that big problem. That would be positive change for the world.

So what are we seeing in Silicon Valley now? It's really interesting. We all have mixed emotions. Silicon Valley has been the center of the entrepreneurial universe for so many years. Things went a little bit off the rails with the pandemic, and now it feels like it's And the place we are here is a new kind of incubator, Shack 15. And it's kind of a new way to look at what commercial real estate could be. So some real changes happening here in Silicon Valley. Innovation continues. Great to be here in Silicon Valley. Let's get the show on the road. Let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

Dogs are talking to us all the time, right? And we just haven't been listening. What dog is? 2019, I brought home a dog and I decided that I wanted the most connected relationship with the best communication. And we've been working towards that goal ever since.

I started this company right out of grad school. I was a PhD student at UC San Diego studying cognitive science. Coming from a cognitive science background is weird because in A large part of what people do in research is they say, hey, these things that you believe, here are all the reasons why they're not true. I'm very good at being skeptical about everything, and you want to be much less skeptical, certainly about yourself, if you're starting a business.

I tend to be the type of person that like picks a goal and then is like fully committed to that goal. I didn't even know I was a co-founder until about 3 years in. He'd just been calling me co-founder behind my back. I'd been self-employed for a number of years. And then when the pandemic hit, my business just kind of dropped off. So I was able to dedicate all of my time to teaching my dog Bunny how to communicate using buttons. You dog.

Yes.

No.

No, Bubba. I human.

I human.

Yes.

We saw that it was possible for dogs to communicate using these recordable sound buttons.

I just had like a plywood board and some Velcro and a bunch of these giant buttons on it, and I was just sort of making it up as I went.

There was no pre-existing product and definitely no community. We got her some of the first prototypes, and kind of the rest is history.

And I very quickly started a TikTok account because TikTok was blowing up, and within a month I had over a million followers, and I was like, oh, this is a big deal. And it really, really blew up from there. We launched the product and people were just all over it. In like 6 months, we had like thousands of people in the community. My goal is just to create deeper relationships and better communication between humans and their animal companions.

Yeah, a lot of frustration comes from not feeling understood.

Yes.

I think they have these vivid and exciting and super interesting inner lives, and I would love to kind of just like rub the window a little bit and open up a clearer view on exactly who they are, how they think about things, what their experience of life is like. I think it could help us connect with them and discover an entirely new universe.

And there are learners all over the world that are having these incredible experiences with their animals that they couldn't otherwise have had. It's been a really wild ride.

Do you guys think you'll ever get a dog to, like, testify in court?

Oh yeah, 100%.

I would 100% let Bunny testify on my behalf in court.

Interspecies communication.

Do you mind if we use your dog? I don't know if this is gonna work.

All right, Alexis. So I grew up in Canada, and I didn't even know that places like this existed. I kind of thought they were just things that you would see on TV shows. So I remember coming here for the first time over a decade ago, and I was just really taken by how green and lush everything was, but also kind of the— I don't know, it definitely had a magic to it. Well, this is the kind of holy of holies of Silicon Valley. It's where a lot of the biggest deals have gotten done. Sand Hill Road was where every aspiring entrepreneur, at least beginning in the '80s and '90s, would come to try and make their fortune and get funding.

It is one of the most verdant, lush, Amazing places to live.

I mean, there's a trail everywhere.

You can just look around.

There's trails throughout those hills there. I can understand why people love the place as much as they do.

There are just so many things that I want to say. I always want to go into the detail.

Humanity has wanted to talk to animals since the dawn of time. Scientists remain unconvinced And our dogs still just bark at us.

And we're here because the reality of really talking to our dogs is finally a possibility. But in order to get there, we have to get out of the laboratory. I'm a certified professional dog trainer. I've taught over a dozen animals how to communicate using the Fluent Pet System. That is my dog Bunny, and she is using this system to tell me that she has a thorn in her paw.

Bunny pressed a button that had the word stranger on it to refer to I'm not quite sure how thorn and stranger are connected. You'll have to ask Bunny.

She didn't have a word for thorn, so she used stranger and then paw. And then she came over to me and she put her paw in my hand, and I looked between her toes and—

I'm thinking basically stranger is something that doesn't belong.

Yeah.

If Tim were to watch the entirety of the video that we shared without me talking over it, it would paint a bigger picture. If you were just to hear stranger out of context, Yeah, that doesn't mean a thorn in the paw.

I'm a cognitive scientist, and I've designed and launched hardware that's trained thousands of dogs automatically in their own homes. We can combine modern technology with a community of people who are all teaching language. So we've built out a platform that engages enthusiastic users and developers to all search together in the massive space that is interspecies communication. Through 2022, we sold our systems profitably to over 100,000 households.

Wait, so you sold to 100,000— Dogs and dog owners?

Yeah, in the first couple years, yeah.

What does it cost?

Our average order value is like $100, $110, but they range in price from like $20 to $250.

So it's like a $10 million business?

We're at like $6, $7 million a year right now.

And what's your margin on this?

Significant. We're healthy.

Yeah.

Healthy, like better than 60%?

Landed, yes. But company gross margins, it's slightly lower.

And what does it do?

Food.

You can press a button, a sound comes out that the dog knows. Dogs, we know, can recognize hundreds or even thousands of words, but this lets them actuate the thing that they recognize.

So this package is $20, and then if you add more—

This is our most advanced system. It's got a purpose-designed speaker and it's connected hardware. So you actually get a push notification on your phone when the button's pressed.

That's really fun. Where are the other 2 buttons? Pets.

Pets.

Play.

Play. You can record them with whatever words you want though. They're not prerecorded.

And it can be my voice.

Yeah.

Yeah. Bitcoin.

Is it kind of spoiling the dogs because all the messages are needs and asks?

We are seeing anecdotally evidence of them being able to express all sorts of interesting things. Lots of dogs have been able to express pain before it's physically visible to guardians. Lots of guardians. Now being able to understand more specifically what their dogs want, they can go over to their board and act their agency and say, I would like to go for a walk in the park. They can get more precise about what they need in the moment.

We're looking at another company where a dog can smell cancer. That could be one of your buttons.

Absolutely.

So then it can benefit the person.

Yeah, it's very— it can be very reciprocal.

There's a lot that needs to be figured out. I think of ourselves as a deep tech company that has to recruit a large number of people in order to get the data, in order to get the experience, the know-how.

Hey, do you mind if we use your dog? Can we go ahead and give it a shot? It's so cool. I don't know if it's just a coincidence, but we happen to have a dog here in the audience that looks just like Dogecoin.

It might go extremely well for them or terribly wrong for them.

Right.

Either way. Maybe we can test the dog on your whatever this is.

There's a dog. There's a dog over there. Can I pet that dog?

All right, Alex.

Did you set this up before, right?

You don't know them?

No.

We have no idea. We've never seen that dog before.

Never met that dog before in my life.

You set this up? Oh my gosh.

Do you happen to have any treats with you?

I don't have treats.

You don't have treats or a ball?

So, okay, we can— Come on over here. Here we go. Mossy, Mossy, Mossy. You want to push that?

Yeah, but we don't have any food.

No, maybe we don't have any food to give.

We can give you pets.

Oh, okay. Hip pet.

Some dogs will press the button instantly, and some dogs honestly will take too much. So it's like there's a large amount of individual variability.

I'm a stranger to this dog, so I don't know what motivates this dog. This dog doesn't know me. I could be like a scary person or whatever. But right here we are building the association. This dog hears this sound and receives the pets. That is learning.

Okay, well, I don't know if this is I don't think it's going to work.

With maybe a few more minutes, we could have seen them pressing, and treats, we could have seen them pressing.

Yeah, for sure.

Although we do have a new friend.

Anytime there's a dog in any room, I am that person who's like, I'm going to get on the floor and make myself a friend.

That was a good demo. Most demos don't work anyway.

Especially when they involve animals.

Yeah.

It's essentially a training, but I think every dog is different.

If we had had a dog there, That dog would have been dialed, would have known buttons, like, would have dominated that whole presentation. We would have already won the finals.

Thank you so much for coming and being a part of Meet the Drapers. Great to meet you.

Likewise.

Come on.

You want some scritches?

There we go.

There we go.

Did you aim for the eyebrows?

I thought that might have been a bit much.

A dog's life. Gotta love that. Andy, what'd you think of Fluent Pet?

I now remember I've seen a video or something similar. I actually wondered if it was Alexis. So I wonder about competition. I also just wonder if it actually works. We're seeing the positive feedback. Are there any negative? I cannot deny the revenue, and I think this is interesting. I, as a dog owner, I would definitely go buy one and try it. But as an investor, not sure. Keep an open mind, and I rather believe that it could work.

It'd be interesting if you buy 2 or 3 of those and then you realize the dog's already learned 3 words, right? You move on, you start getting into, you know, very obscure concepts.

I think they're great. I'm not a big pet guy, but if I had a dog, I'll definitely want to buy it. I think like she can build a pretty good brand moat. Many people can replicate the products with different sort of forms, so you gotta really hammer down marketing and have a strong moat there. I hope we'll find a technological way to have two-way more conversation.

Most of it would be for the benefit of the dog, but if they can smell cancer, they hit the button. Yeah, that would be kind of one cool thing. This was interesting.

I think the revenue was $6 million and the profit was $400K. So I think it's a business that you need to pour a lot of cash into marketing, TikTok, putting it everywhere.

Because I don't think the price of the hardware, the margin on the hardware should be paid. Let's move on to our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

This is my first entrepreneurial journey. Getting into this startup, this was really starting from the ground up. Taught me so much. I have a personal story behind it. In 2016, I still remember the day when my mom called. That my dad could not go to his boardroom. 4 months back, his scans were taken. Everything looked good according to the doctors. They had to take him to the hospital, and the scans— his scans did not look good, and they found out it was grade 4 glioblastoma. So 4 months back, when we looked at the scan, it was quite obvious. I could not believe that this could be so easily missed. My dad passed away 6 months later. He held my hand and said, I really want you to be a CEO of a company, a company that would make an impact. And his words resonated. It changed my life. I did not know my path. I came out, went back to my job, but something changed. It took me 6 years where I could become a CEO and co-founder of WellMini, and I knew there was nothing in the company. We had to start from scratch. I literally turned the lights on for WellMini. My husband is very supportive, so he was behind me. But some of my family members thought, what's wrong with me? And at this stage, I could have done so much better and I should have been enjoying my life, but I had some other plans. I work around the clock. I have promises to keep and the promise that I've given it to my dad. I have miles to go before I sleep, and I have a path. I have found my North Star. I know this is what I was born to do. I eat, live, and sleep Palmini.

So what's the aha moment here?

Literally plug and play in a dental office.

So this is a feature or is this a platform?

How do you sell me?

So we're in the most prime area of Palo Alto, University Avenue. Love the whole energy here. Silicon Valley brings blend of people who have done so well as well as people who aspire Inspired to do so well. It's so easy to meet people here, and anybody and everybody you meet has something to offer. My first meeting happened here, and my first investment in Wellmoney happened here. It ended to be here on the street. I've had so many coffee chats here. I met so many VCs, investors, supporters, friends. It's a very nice ecosystem. You have founders, top VCs. Everything is all sort of in the same vicinity. It just brings a lot of motivation, a lot of inspiration. It's very hard not to love Valley's ecosystem. It just makes me feel at home. I'm pretty comfortable. I've done a lot of public speaking. So I just felt alive. Did you know that 30% of cavities and oral conditions get missed by your dentist today? There goes early intervention, early diagnosis. It's not that your dentist don't know what's going on. Pain gets the priority. Your patients lose trust and they seek second opinion. With Welvene's AI, we really want to build global learning to the local dental So what's the aha moment here?

What, what made you say, I got to start a business here?

I think it was a good question because he wanted to know and he wanted to understand what was my aha moment. Most important was early diagnosis. My dad's scans were missed. Within 4 months, he was diagnosed as stage 4 brain tumor, glioblastoma.

And that came from his teeth?

Oral health is Connected to general health. Gum problems can lead to Alzheimer's, heart attacks, diabetes. In oral health, if we are able to do early diagnosis, not just of the cavities, gum problems, there are so many other conditions, oral cancer.

So what's the technology that does the early detection?

I felt that I didn't go through my pitch really well. I think the questions kept coming in. Deep tech AI, computer vision. These are flat X-rays, which is what you see in a dental office. Or cone beam CT scan. If you pass through our AI, within seconds, if you see these color-coded conditions, now you as a patient can really understand what's going on.

So you're saying the dentist isn't just about the teeth, it's about overall health. Other things can be detected in your teeth very early.

Exactly.

Or your gums.

You see, this is all on the oral side.

What's your background?

My background is technology. I'm an AI geek. In full disclosure, not a dentist, but now I understand enough dentists.

Is there a dentist on your team?

Yes, we have the best of the best dentists on our team. We have the past American Dental Association president, Dr. Maxine Feinberg. We also have Dr. Alan Friedel, and our key advisor is Dr. Ed Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's dad, who's a high innovator as well as a dentist.

Is the dentist your customer? All the dentists Okay, have you sold any of this yet?

Yes, so we just got FDA cleared and we got into revenue and now we have a strong pipeline of $50 million.

Any cash revenue yet?

We got FDA clearance a month back and we are already cash positive in revenue.

Give me a sense for why a dentist is buying. If I'm a dentist, how do you sell me?

Increased patient acceptance, increasing the trust when they see the radiographs which they can understand. Second, there are a lot of findings that the doctor miss today. Hard-to-see conditions. There's a lot of money left on the table for them.

So does the dentist make more money with this?

More money.

Every time they run a scan?

Exactly.

How much do they pay for the whole?

We run through a subscription model. It's about $500 a month. And if we go into insurance side, they pay us per claims that we process for them.

How many dentists are there in the world?

So the market is pretty large because it impacts everyone. There was a little bit of disconnect there. In the United States, we have about 206,000 dentists. Worldwide, there are about 2 million.

I want to check on one thing. The image processing— I'm always trying to decide, is this a feature or is this a platform?

The way we integrate is with the imaging software. When the scans get taken, within seconds they get uploaded on our cloud and we are able to give the Addictions Pack, literally plug and play in a dental office.

Dental care is strongly linked to, uh, developed countries, right? In some way, could you make something at home or something that can really democratize access for people to get more dental care?

This is the only way we can reach out to 1 billion people who really are underserved and have no access to oral health. We don't have enough dentists. We don't have enough dental staff to go around the world. Even in the United States, there are pockets where there's one dentist serving 20,000 or even more.

Terrific. Well, Minnie, very nice to have you on Meet the Drapers. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All the questions that were asked were really valid, and I hope I have done my job of educating not just the judges, but also the audience.

Andy, what'd you think?

As a patient and a customer, I would definitely want him or her to use it. But I do see this potentially getting integrated by the hardware manufacturer, the X-ray machine makers. As an add-on, it might be hard for a new entrant to come in, especially they have all the data. There's a lot of training, but I think it's a much-needed product. Somebody should do it.

I'm in line with Andy. I don't trust my dentist. My willingness to pay is super high. I have no idea what's going on in my teeth. So education would be great. I think innovation would be either find a way to have this at home where you can prevent it faster and you can open it for more people, or if really there's insurers or dentists that could pay for this, I think the big hardware companies will implement it.

I think globally you could imagine a world where you don't need to train as many human dentists. You could go to a clinic—

Oh, so this starts to be AI for the whole thing.

You just need a—

Teeth cleaning.

Teeth cleaning, and then you need the hygienist just run an x-ray, and the AI doctor tells you cavity, cavity, cavity. Come back; we'll drill some holes and fill them up.

Terrific. So let's move on to our next entrepreneur. But before we do, well, you know what we do: see what's going on behind the scenes. Behind the scenes here is gorgeous.

That's the Golden Gate Bridge.

No, that's the Bay Bridge. That's the San Francisco Bay Bridge. That's Treasure Island.

How long have you lived here, Andy?

How long have we been in the building? I'm disoriented.

What was your first impression of each other? He's a younger version of myself.

Are you half the man here? Yeah, what does that mean? Yeah, exactly.

When I was looking for a home back in the days, that journey was just difficult, stressful. You couldn't find the right home. We were like, we gotta fix this through AI.

And here we are today rolling it out across the planet, actually getting the business off the ground. Countless hours It's just incredibly challenging, but the people around me personally are incredibly supportive around that.

I say my rock is my wife, kids. Having a family that supports you, you can't do it without it. This journey has been amazing. I mean, there's things that you thought you'd seen it all, but in fact you learn all the time.

Yeah, I think it's just like, yeah, go get it, right?

Get out there, give it a go.

Why not?

Can I breathe now?

Can I breathe?

You know?

It's great to be here at the Computer History Museum. And of course, being in computer science and especially AI technology, it's great to see the history and the evolution of computers and computer technology. The advancement in machine learning and artificial intelligence is definitely coming to fruition Here in the Valley, it's the pinnacle of entrepreneurship. I mean, you know, all the greats. I mean, it'd be great to visit the Apple campus, seeing the development of Apple Computing come from the Valley. I mean, it's, it's all inspiring to be here. You're starstruck, but then you're trying to get in the zone. This is it. This is the pinnacle of entrepreneurship. I mean, it's Silicon Valley. Hello, judges. We're PropTechs, and we're revolutionizing the home buying experience. Experience for real estate. The property search is outdated. Buyers and renters spend hours searching for the perfect home, and real estate property platforms fail to provide an engaging and seamless experience. Uh, trying to rehearse 2,000 words in the last 3 days. Off.

What do you do? Yeah, so let me help you with this.

Our solution to solving that problem is an AI platform that plugs to websites. We allow the home buyer to search for the perfect home instantly using semantic chat. We have the ability to provide a photo editing function so they can customize the real estate photos in real time. So that means that you can—

So this sits on top of Redfin and the likes of— Why is it better for me than just going to Redfin?

When you arrive on these sort of platforms, you're going through a very sort of static search, going through basic filters and nitpicking and trying to find the perfect property there. What we're doing is with keyword search, even image search, saying this is exactly what I'm looking for. We would return those listings that are suitable to that search term and then also help you make comparisons.

Do you think that the existing groups will eventually do this and this will end up just being a feature on their sites?

Well, that's a good thing. Our customers are real estate platforms, so the more there are, the more money for us. Right. For us, that's good. It just shows the rest of the world that they need to plug in as well. We get more exposure. Since we have plug-and-play solutions, they tend to take our solution easy. It is cheaper, it's faster, it's more accurate.

Tell us a little bit about your pilot with Home Depot.

We've built a data pipeline that can ingest furniture, so it could be anything from living room, interior, exterior, and we can place those objects within the real estate property photo. Basically, you can style the home based on retail catalogs. We're not only tapping into a $7 trillion global market, there's a $4 trillion retail market. We're at the intersection of combining that into a seamless experience.

How many platforms are there that you can sell to?

There are 2 aspects to our business. One is real estate and the other one is naturally retail. The biggest part is to build up the real estate part, and then you bring in the retail part.

Who's paying you and what are they paying you for?

The tool itself is a plugin. It's a SaaS-based business model and it's B2B.

So who's paying you the B2B?

One of our clients, the 4th largest global platform based out of Germany, ImmoScout. We're in talks with another 3 in the top 10. These are the kind of big channels that we secure on the SaaS revenue model. And then we look to monetize that distribution channel with the retail approach.

You guys are Switzerland. Is that the idea? I bend to you.

We're the central piece that everybody plugs into. That's what we aspire to be. And I think he got that. Retailers are looking at real estate as an opportunity. So you could imagine Amazon looking at this as an opportunity for them because it's a very, very interesting audience. They're buying. It's the perfect moment.

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

Thank you.

Great.

The typical nerves, you know, kicking things off, but the guys are great. I need a beer.

I think like one thing we could have asked them that could be funky is they're probably the one that are streamlining a lot of the homes. So what can you do in 5, 10 years with all this data? Are there new business lines that you can build around it? They're gonna have to find ways that use that data to find new businesses and sell more on top of it.

This was a 2021 startup that was formed during the pandemic. And in fact, during the pandemic, people couldn't visit homes. So everything has to be done virtually. Front end of doing discovery has value, but may not be as much determined during the Okay, with that, let's bring on our next entrepreneur.

But before we do, look out the window, see what's going on behind the scenes.

I grew up in India. I came to US after my undergrad to do a PhD in genomics almost 20 years ago. I think that transition worked very well for me because I was working some of the best places, best people in the industry, especially the research side. US is at the very bleeding edge. So after graduating, all my friends went west to the Silicon Valley tech companies. I went east. I joined a Harvard Medical School cancer research lab. We were one of the earliest labs to use genomics for cancer research, and I saw the data explosion happen firsthand. So that was the motivation for me to leave academia and build the software that I wish I had, that I wish my colleagues ahead, and that is the future we are building. I don't come from an entrepreneurial family, so nobody really understood what I was doing, but they knew that they need to support me, and they did support me a lot without understanding what I was getting myself into. They have been a huge cheerleader all along the journey. Every time we get a little win, they are more happy than I am. What would that previous version of yourself think about you now? I think that guy will be extremely surprised proud because the things I've done in the last few years I had never done before, like hiring a team, raising capital, building products, doing sales. So looking back, that learning has been very important for us to be where we are today.

On the one end, you have Illumina that runs the sequencing, right? Why do they need you in the middle?

Today we are at Buck's Cafe in Woodside, an iconic place for many VC investments. Many checks have been written on these tables. I've been usually coming to Silicon Valley to meet investors, and it so happens that for us we have many customers in the space as well. The concentration is so high that network effects Worked very well. Just yesterday I was in a grocery store and I ran into an investor I was speaking with. So we had an impromptu update call while we were picking up our grocery. So that can only happen in Silicon Valley. Once you're in the zone, everything just blanks out. It's just you, the pitch, and the judges. Just forget in the moment. Uh, if there's anything else in the world. Hello judges, we developed data analysis software for genomics data. I have a PhD in genomics and AI before it was cool. The application of AI that we found most meaningful was in the medical domain. I worked in Harvard Medical School in a cancer research lab using genomics. In the red line, we saw the exponential decrease in the price of genomics, making it more accessible than ever. But in the green line, we see an exponential increase in the amount of data. This is now the bottleneck. So many possible discoveries, insights are all stopped by this massive data that we cannot make sense of. This represents a $10 billion market opportunity ready for disruption. While data analysis is always hard, it's even harder because most biologists, physicians, they are not trained as programmers. So we created a data analysis platform so easy to use that any scientist can run complex analyses without any coding. They can go from raw data to insight within a few minutes. This is a truly transformational product, and we are democratizing genomics and unlocking all the power. Basepair is not finding the cure for cancer, but that's what our customers are doing, doing the data analysis on Basepair. This is the future of medicine.

What does the data tell you about genomics, and why is that good for people?

So it depends on the disease or the application area. If you take the example of IVF, right now the doctor only looks at the embryo With genetics, we know which embryo under the hood has normal DNA versus DNA with defects. And then you pick the normal DNA and the odds of pregnancy goes up higher. In cancer, it's a genetic disease. But again, the doctor, they do a biopsy, look at the tissue under a microscope. We need to know what is the actual genetic defect which caused the cancer. Once we know that, we can have a drug which is more targeted.

Who's paying you? Who's your big customer and why?

So my only concern was that he may not like how we position ourselves in the market. He may have a better liking for a more vertically integrated play in genomics. Yeah, we are B2B. So one big segment for us is pharma. They use us for internal R&D. The second big segment for us is diagnostics. Once the raw data comes out, then the provider will use Basepair to do a PDF report in a few minutes.

Which of those 2 is getting you the most revenue?

They're about even at the moment.

Really?

I believe our answer was very clear. We were B2B, and once I described that to him, I believe he was on board.

So on the one end you have Illumina that runs the sequencing, right?

Exactly.

On the other hand you have Pfizer or somebody who has all the data.

Exactly.

Why do they need you in the middle?

Yeah, that's a fair question, and it is very clear to us that rather than being the one making the discovery, we want to be the tool that all the discovery companies use? Exactly. That's a great question. So Illumina, you can spend a few hundred thousand dollars, buy the machine.

Yeah.

The machine runs for a day and now you have all the raw data output.

Yeah.

And then you need the insight and that is where you need Basepair.

You don't think you'll be squeezed by Illumina and Pfizer or whoever?

In fact, the market is growing so quickly, we are seeing more and more opportunity.

Do you need some sort of privacy settings, you know, to aggregate this data and Of course.

Our—

that's one of the benefits of platform. It's completely secure. We have HIPAA, GDPR, AWS, a whole bunch of certifications.

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

I think it went well. I stayed on script. We got all the important points out. I'm happy about the talk. It was a little bit nervous. I've not been on TV before, but in the end, I think I would say it went well.

Maxime, what'd you think?

Sharp guy, able to build an efficient business, is already breaking even. I think data scientists are gonna go away with all this AI revolution. Being able to provide just the software to aggregate the data might not be fully enough. How can you harmonize the data and multiple sources of data very well to then put it into some AI that will do your data analysis? Kind of wondering like if you can only do one piece of dynamics data today, or if it can integrate with multiple hardware, multiple different sources. And that's where you really have a true value unlock and you can work with all the different hardware providers. Would be interesting to see how you could integrate it more globally, I think.

Clearly a large market. I just don't know how much we could capture.

We have to decide which of these 4 amazing, amazing entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley that we're going to move on to the next level. Is it Fluent Pet, Valmimi, Prop Tax, Base Bear? So I have no idea, but the crystal ball always knows. Put your vibes on the crystal ball.

Winner is base pair.

Congratulations. You move forward.

All the effort we put in, like years and years of heads down work, and then you have like a few moments under the spotlight. It felt good.

See you next time on Meet the Drapers.

All right.

Woo! We're finding heroes.

This is perhaps one of the most exciting things that we can pursue as a species, and that's why you should vote for us.

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You should vote us back because it's going to improve your home buying experience tomorrow. Get us back in.

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