Where Every Voice Finds Its Stage | Entrepreneur Stories

All right, let's start with an intro where you guys give me your full names and the name of your company, and then like the tightest elevator pitch, like the most basic A great story is a great story in any language, in any accent, in any corner of the world.

Anuja and Varshul just refuse to let geography decide who gets to hear it.

There is this Ivy League level content available on YouTube since more than a decade from, you know, Harvard, from MIT, 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, right? 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 yeah.

So I mean, I and Anuj go back To about like 7 years, uh, where, uh, you know, we were working, uh, used to work in the startup which was basically building soft like tech and products for restaurants. Uh, there I was looking at the data, you know, data analytics, data sciences, and Anuja was, uh, you know, uh, mostly on the sales and account management side. So that's how we've known each other for the last longest of time.

I come from a non-tech background. I started with KPMG, typical finance accounts in a certain way, but very soon I realized that I cannot be this small fish in a very, very big pond. That's not my cup of tea. So very early on, I think the most random decision I took was to join LimeTree because I did not have a sales background, did not have a tech background, so to say, but I ended up on the business side. And from then to now, I think almost being a decade that I've been on the sales side of technology. And that's primarily what I do here as well. And for me to be able to be a founder of a tech company, of course, was individually not possible. So, I think the right partnership is something that really drove me in to take that plunge of jumping in full-time, and I think it's been a great journey. So, we went a little more horizontal and we said anybody and everybody can use the platform. So, the top use cases that came out from the market as a push, as a pull primarily were Of course, YouTubers, where they create a lot of content that they want to translate. Second largest was course creators. These were not just established educational edtech companies, but anybody who's selling on Coursera, anybody who has their own website that they're selling. ClassPlus is one of the platforms where a lot of users of ClassPlus use us to translate their content and reach more and more audiences. So it's a very horizontal use case that we've been able to do, and that's how we've been able to reach 2 million+ users globally who use the platform and then they're able to solve for their use cases.

One upload, 60 languages, your voice everywhere. Dubverse makes multilingual content as easy as pressing publish.

Hey, this is Varshal. I run this company called Dubverse along with Anuja. What we do is we largely deal in speed side of generative AI.

Hi, Anuja Dhawan this side, founder at Dubverse. We break the language barrier on the internet.

Right now, the way that we structure the team is it's a small team, you know, very impactful, powerful sort of a team where essentially there's like about 15 folks getting a lot of work done, getting a lot of, you know, moving the needle on a lot of fronts.

I think being an entrepreneur really changes you as a person. I think you are way more self-aware than wherever you started. And I think personally it has really transformed me, and I think I would not have been able to achieve this level of personal growth if I was in a usual path, so to say. So I think it unlocks a lot more, and I think you understand yourself much, much better, and you're able to respond to the usual life in a much deeper and a profound way, and not just at a surface level, is what I think.

What would the opportunity to work with Tim mean to your company right now?

I think the opportunity to work with Tim will massively unlock, you know, a more global presence for us. And right now we've been— this kind of ecosystem with which we operate has largely been Indian, right? Which has its own opportunities, has its own constraints. But I think when we look at someone like Tim, then I think that, that global presence is something that could set us apart.

Every language is a new audience. Every audience is a new life changed. From a Delhi startup to 60 languages strong, Dubverse is quietly becoming the infrastructure of a borderless creative world.

What would a million-dollar investment mean to your project right now?

So a million dollars worth of investment would A million dollars for us right now would really mean enablement, and I think that's how we look at the capital. A lot of work needs to be done. We need to do that work, as simple as that. But money and money from the right people really creates a lot of enablement in the ecosystem, and I think that's what we are looking for here as well.

How do you think that, you know, this like success Like having something like Netflix, like how does that affect your own like personal growth? Like is that a big confidence thing? Like how do you guys feel right now? How excited are you about what you're doing?

Yeah, no, I mean essentially when you— at the end of the day, whatever you build has to be consumed by someone, right? So that has to go out in the world, that has to add some business value, and if there is a certain cycle of like validation that the product or the use case is kind of working at someone's— for someone like Netflix, and that's massive value unlock, right? Basis which we're able to see that if this was a problem for Netflix, then this will be a problem for other OTTs, movie productions, gaming studios, and so on and so forth, right? So that's like a big push, right? And I think I remember I used to ping every day to the movie producer that when is this getting out? when is it going live, right? So the moment it went live, we just like sat in a room, we were, you know, we were watching that series and we waited for like good 3, 3 and a half minutes to watch credits so that, uh, to see our names there, right? So that was exciting, that was good, yeah.

All right, let's start with an intro where you guys give me your full names and the name of your company, and then like the tightest elevator pitch, like the most basic version of what you guys do.

You can fake an answer, you can't fake a face. Ritu knew that. So instead of building another survey tool, she built something that watches. Really watches, and finally tells brands what their customers actually feel.

I think right in the beginning of our journey, we had the decision to make on whether we wanted to get into surveillance because it's a massive, extremely profitable use case. So we detect faces, but we don't recognize them. And that's a crucial difference because facial recognition and tracking softwares can be misused. But face detection and emotion recognition softwares are very limited in their scope, and that was a very deliberate decision. And that's something we've stuck to throughout. Everything we do is built in conformance with regulation and with ethical use of AI in mind, which is a very, very tricky space to be in currently. 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. And this was during COVID and we're all parents in the founding team. 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 were learning. So that laid the foundation for what we built at thelightbulb.ai.

So basically, wherever there is a camera engaged and we can capture the videos, whether it is offline or online, so we have the capability to process those videos and analyze it for the analysis purpose. So basically, we, when we analyze These faces. So we put the face ID, there is no name or any other attribute attached to it. So it's a face ID, and that face ID is destroyed once the data is collected.

So there is an example we can share. We did a study for a leading alcoholic beverage brand that was launching 3 different flavors of its semi-alcoholic drinks. And from the qualitative research, which is the stated responses, there was parity and polarity. What that means is Consumers equally liked all the 3 flavours. They didn't dislike one flavour exceedingly for them to be able to drop it. So when they bought in our technology, they were able to see from the actual responses while people were tasting the drink, there was this moment of flinching where the taste didn't really appeal to the consumer. But when the consumer was asked, saying, do you like the flavour? He said, yeah, it's nice, it's very interesting. Would you buy it? Yes, I would. But when the product people actually saw the flinch and they saw the emotion spike, they actually dropped that flavor. Now, these are small decisions in the course of building a brand or a product, but this ultimately is what leads to success in the market.

7 milliseconds. That's how long a micro-expression lasts. TheLightbulb.ai catches it. it, reads it, and turns that flicker into a business decision.

Hi, my name is Ritu Soni Srivastava, part of the co-founding team at thelightbulb.ai. We're essentially a full-stack emotion AI platform, and what we do is we use emotion and engagement parameters to help bridge the gap between what consumers say they will do and what they actually do.

Myself, Yogesh, I'm also the co-founder here at So I'm leading the engineering team there and we are building this tech stack for the Emotion AI platform.

So we're a fully remote team. We're a very small team, just about 20 people spread all across India. We have some wonderful people working for us, all working out of their little hometowns, all linked in via, you know, online access. 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. Also, we're slightly older than the usual founding team, so it's a very relaxed, decentralized, non-startup method way of working. So whether it's testing advertising, or whether it's testing the UI/UX of your mobile application, or whether it's testing the efficacy of a new feature that a bank has launched on its mobile app, we're able to cut across use cases and Prove that this technology adds significant value in capturing unstated responses.

So what would the opportunity to work with Tim Draper mean for the company right now?

I think the opportunity to be on this show and to work with Tim Draper and his team would really help us realize one of our major milestones, which is to break into the North America market. For us, Consumer Insights, about 35% of the market globally sits out of North America. It's a very lucrative, high-ticket size market. We're really looking for venture partners who can help us land safely and promote our business in such an important geography. So this, this is critical for us.

12 million faces don't lie. The biggest brands in India aren't guessing anymore. They are feeling their way to better decisions. Ritu and Yogesh built the closest thing to a human lie detector. And pointed it straight at the future of marketing.

What would a million-dollar investment be for the company right now?

So mainly the setting up the U.S. business. So currently we are mainly we are dealing with clients in India and South Asia. So we want to expand our business to U.S. also.

There's globally about seven to ten companies that do what we do. In terms of the comprehensive suite of products that we have. And we come from very non-traditional, relaxed corporate backgrounds. 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.

So when we started, actually, I met Ritu in Airtel. So we were working on new products there. So though there was a technology involved there, but it was at a very slow pace. And after joining the startup environment, so what difference I felt that basically all the development, whether it is related to some particular idea or enhancements, those are done at a very fast pace. So that is one thing which basically clicks with me and I really want to do it again if we're given a chance.

So we're just going to start with like an intro. Can you give me your full name, the company name, and like the tightest elevator pitch, like what you guys do with one sentence?

Utkarsh and Bharat. Watched good marketers burn out on bad processes, endless decks, pointless meetings, campaigns that took weeks and performed like afterthoughts. They didn't want to fix marketing. They wanted to free people from it.

So it was very easy and convenient for me to, like, give up. I played basketball, gave up, played football, gave up, studies, gave up. With Influeso, I made it a point like, okay, this is my calling, this is my opportunity to actually make it big. And going through these 4 years of work, ups and downs, I've kind of learned, kind of instilled in my personality how not to give up. Even in the worst of situations, how to find that one reason to just keep going, right? Just go one more step, go one more day. I think that is something that I've truly, truly learned with my time at Inflowsow. Back when I started Inflowsow about 3 and a half years ago, That's when I reached out to Bharat. We had a professional dating period for about 3 months and things just clicked. I'm everything that he's not and he's everything that I'm not. I'm kind of like the extroversion of the company, he's the introversion. He handles tech, I handle everything that's people, marketing, business. Kind of really fits well together.

So we are 2 sides of the same coin.

So I provide that stability which is required, you know, running a company. It provides the agility which is required to run the company.

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 have sold products on Amazon, I have had a cloud kitchen, I worked on an edtech product. So I've been building multiple products since then. But then once I started working on Inflowso, that is when I realized that we can build a product where people will pay for it without you even talking to them. Just build the product in such a way, build it so nice that people understand the value and then come and pay. So since then, I've been working on Infloso.

I actually started pretty young. My story goes from trading Beyblades to selling Amway products door-to-door, not for the money. I just like the process of sales, having the ability to convince somebody and then get the reward after. 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. And after that, I kind of got into Influso. 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. 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. Uh, it's been a very colorful journey.

Yeah, and with AI coming in, it has changed it completely. Creator economy has been changed. You can generate content Whatever content you want to generate, there are multiple things which we can do now which was not possible earlier. Earlier, we had to hire agents to scan the profiles, to look at all the content, approve the content. All that can be done with AI now. So it has become completely scalable. You can scale it fast without any adding any human resources now.

Brief Molly, walk away, come back to a full campaign— copy, targeting, Execution done. She doesn't assist marketers. She replaces the process entirely.

My name is Utkarsh Khandelwal. I'm the founder and CEO of Inflows AI, and we make marketing awesome, simple, faster, and efficient.

I am Bharat Krishnani. I am the co-founder and CTO of Inflows.

Most of our workforce is completely remote. We are a team of close to 50 people now, and we work in async but very cohesively. So that's the kind of culture, and that's how we want to scale as well. This is the only word that we could find that relates to influence, and there's no other product in the world that's called Influeso. So if you go to Google, you go to Play Store, App Store, anywhere, and you type in Influeso, you'll not find anything, just us. But if you're asking about MOLY, I'm sure like a lot of the people who are watching probably know what MOLY 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. Our literal tagline is supercharge your marketing with Molly.

So what would the opportunity to work with Tim mean for you guys right now?

It's a big opportunity for us. Tim has been the person who has that context, who understands startups, who has worked on this industry since a long time now. So it would be very amazing for us, I know, to get an opportunity to work with him and to get the support that he can provide us.

They didn't build a platform. They built a person, one that scales infinitely, learns constantly, and never once asks for a timeline extension. Inflowsso isn't the future of marketing software, it's the end of marketing software.

What would a million-dollar investment mean for your company right now? Like, what would that, uh, where would that go for you guys?

A million dollars is enough for us to, uh, maybe be the market leader in this space. Currently there's no market leader. We have already found the product-market fit. We already have the product, but now just we need that money to grow and be the market leader. Then it looks very rosy from outside, that it's very nice, you're doing so much, 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.

I think my younger self would say, smile, you're on TV. But yeah, I think I'd be pretty happy with what I'm doing today. Take it slow, live your life. There's, there's, there are things besides work as well. I think that would be the only kind of advice that would come from my younger self.

So can we start with your full names, the company name, and sort of like the most concise version of what you guys are doing, like a kind of an elevator pitch?

Torun and Arun knew the feeling. The idea is ready, the code is done, and then the cloud gets in the way. They built ToyStack because that gap between done and deployed was costing the world great software.

It wasn't such an ambitious goal to begin with at the start. We were just building this for ourselves, right? And then we were like, okay, no, this can be something big. We had that hunch and then we started building this out. We built this great product, like he said, in a very short period of time. And then it got better, better, better to the point where one day we We kind of presented ToyStack at a Docker event and somebody picked it up. And then immediately we had 200, 300, 400 people deploying in just an hour. Instead of going to everybody else, they started coming to ToyStack instead. So that actually boosted a lot of morale for us. And then from that point on, we haven't looked back.

I grew up in Bangalore. My family is originally from a town called Mangalore, which is on the coast of Karnataka. My grandfather moved here about 50, 60 years ago, so dad's grown up here, I've grown up here. And then after my high school, I went to the US. I went to the University of Chicago to do my undergrad in economics, and that was the time when technology was just disrupting your traditional media with the internet and consumption of media per se. And then came back in 2012, back to Bangalore. and started my foray as an entrepreneur. I started a real estate development company, and I reached out to Shravan Arun and Mukund because I'd known them, and I said, we need some support on tech. We said, let's do something together, and the focus was on pure tech where you'd have the world as your marketplace versus targeting businesses traditionally in India, or tech for business. So this was tech for tech. And as they brainstormed, they thought this was a very unique solution based on the issues they had faced down the road. That's, that's my background.

I grew up, I would say, in Bangalore but outside Bangalore. I then went out to Manipal where I studied engineering. Then I went to UK for the studies, and then I went to France. I was doing my PhD in France in machine learning. And I quit that in between to come back to India because I had 2 cousins, Shravan and Mukund, who were other co-founders of ToyStack. And the 3 of us, we grew up playing Age of Empires and Dota, and we decided let's do a startup together now. And our first startup bombed really badly, and then we went back to doing other things. Then I joined this company called AngelList India. It is like AngelList but for India. It's It's a subsidiary. There I built AngelList, the entire AngelList platform. I replicated for India from scratch, more or less me and 2 others. And then, yeah, and then now ToyStack, again, we're back together trying to do something interesting.

Write the code, ship the product. No DevOps, no cloud rabbit holes, no 3-day setup. ToyStack quietly handles Everything in between.

I'm Arun Kumar Gandloor.

Torun Gerard Mathias.

We're ToyStack.

The team is— it's about 10 people. It's primarily, of the 10, Ada technology. The team is coming up with incredible products that are features, I would say, that are coming out of this NeoCloud, like a virtual laptop, command line interface that we were talking to Polly about, which is a one-line deploy an AI application. So we're there, we're trying to figure out how to— whether— what to focus on and how to get to market.

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

So working with Tim for us would be an incredible validation of what we're trying to do. And just given Tim's ability to see new technology advancements, whether it's been Bitcoin, Tesla, whatever it is, if, if, if he sees some aspect or some scope here, for us, it would be a huge validation of what we're trying to do and probably give us that impetus to push forth even harder.

The best software in the world never got built because deployment got in the way. Torun and Arun are fixing that one developer at a time across every corner of the globe.

What would $1 million mean for your company right now in terms of investment?

More than anything else, if somebody like Tim Draper invests in a company, whatever the amount, it would actually boost— it'll open doors for us in different ways that we didn't even think about. That's one. And 2, obviously it accelerates our dream of building the next big cloud or a much simpler, more modern cloud for the AI world. I feel like it'll be a great enabler for our path forward. I think that's how we're thinking about this. Yeah, for sure.

Like, you're at Credit Suisse as a managing director, you're working on a PhD in France. Like, would that person think it's inevitable? Like, how would that person see?

I personally have had way too many startups that some did well, mostly did not. So for me, my trajectory has just been all over the place. So for me, I know that person would look at the current me and say, you know what, you took your time, you should have done this sooner.

That's about it.

For me, it's the opposite. I think, you know, Credit Suisse was those expensive suits and those Hermès ties and know, the black chauffeur-driven cars and, you know, fancy hotels and Michelin-star restaurants. I think that persona would be like, you're mad. I don't think there's— I don't think there's— it's like chalk and cheese, oil and water. I think that personality would look at this and be like, what's going on?