Who Wins the $1,000,000?! | Meet the Drapers India: Finale

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 an 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 US dollars and a shot at changing the world. It's a journey packed with adventure, innovation, And unforgettable moments. Who will rise to the challenge? Who will be India's next great entrepreneur? Let the games begin. Welcome everybody, meet the Drapers! Polly and I have been all over India, and this is the grand finale where we will give away one Million-dollar investment. Welcome, Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail. We funded Hotmail way back when. Sabeer was a very tough negotiator. Sabeer and I were waiting for the Microsoft guys to show up. All of a sudden, they came in the door of this law firm, and there were 18 of them. And Sabeer and I kind of looked at each other and thought, I think they really want it. The rest is history. Sabir, first unicorn ever in India.

That's amazing.

Thank you.

Great to have you on the show. What are you doing now?

I'm working on a couple of ideas, still in stealth mode. Very quickly.

We won't tell.

There is such a dramatic change in the way we marketed Hotmail 25, 26 years ago. I think the next unicorn will come from social media marketing.

Sabir, Actually, he's been on the show twice before, so I think it's Seveer Bhatia, Draper, Draper, Draper. On my left is my sister, Polly Draper, actor, producer, writer, director.

Bon vivant.

Yeah. Most recently seen in Hacks as the psychic, and—

I told you we just had a séance last night.

Anything interesting happen there?

It was my sons and a bunch of their friends.

Apparently that scares away the spirits.

No, it scared away everyone that was sitting around.

3 really extraordinary judges here. We've been really all over India looking for the great entrepreneur that we're gonna back today. So let's bring them on. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

Hi, I'm Stephanie Ellis with Meet the Drapers. We are here at survival training with Rock.

Thank you, Stephanie. I'm really excited to have everyone out here. Today we're going to be doing survival with founders from India. The most important takeaways— first, mental toughness, how they communicate, how they lead, how they work as teams, and then finally, just having fun. If they go throughout this entire day and they don't have fun, then they're probably not a good founder. What I want to do is just welcome everyone here to Dream Farm. We've been bringing entrepreneurs out here, helping them build up their companies. Hopefully everyone here can take one or two things that gets them re-energized or refocused on their company. And if we do that, then I think we're totally successful. Being an entrepreneur is the first step to becoming financially free. It is super important for everyone here to launch their companies, create $100 million or a billion-dollar companies.

Really excited. I've harbored this dream for over a decade. It was a great opportunity, and I just grabbed it. This is the gold variant that we are talking about. It is Plated gold. You can have a look.

Oh, she got the gold-plated. I got the cheap one.

I have to give the gold to the lady.

You came to me with the cheap one?

What the heck?

He knows, he knows.

We live in an era of speed and convenience. Speed and convenience are the bedrock of all innovation. Payments are no different. If you look at the evolution of payments, we started off with the swipe cards, then it came along the dip cards for more security, then the tap card came in. Payments are now moving to wearables. We've already seen Apple Watch do that with Apple Pay, but we are now introducing more products like the 7 Ring, which doesn't require charging, is discreet, sleek, sits on your finger. It's a big, big headache to charge one more device. That's why we chose to be passive. There is no battery. It draws power from the POS machine terminal when you're making a payment. You don't have to have your phone with you. There's no OTP and PIN. You just tap and go. You can use it for transit ticketing and not buy your ticket with the Seven Ring. Your Seven Ring is the Clipper card or the ticket. In India, in the metro, it just works.

And is that actually happening now? Into the train station, hit this, and it goes right through?

Absolutely. We give you a prepaid wallet which is inside the ring. You use our app to just top up the balance into it. You can link any of your multiple debit credit cards on the back on our phone, and you can set up rules that, okay, if I'm paying for gas, debit this card. And you just keep tapping, and we will take care of all the backend settlements.

It's like a Venmo card.

Yeah.

If I've put ten thousand dollars into this thing, somebody will chop my finger off, and then they can use it, right?

No, not as simple, Tim. So you can set up daily spend limits like you would do in any other credit card. So even if you lose your ring and you don't consciously know about it, your risk is only that much.

So how many people have these rings in India?

Roughly around. 6,500.

Why aren't they just taking off? What's keeping you from growing?

India is a price-sensitive market. We started working on 7Ring Air, which is the model that I gave you. That is a $19 product. We're going to launch, uh, in Q1. Very difficult to kind of, you know, come out with a new product in a span of 9, 10 months. For that, we opened up a waiting list which has already got 51,000 subscribers now.

Why would I use a ring When I carry my phone everywhere.

It's all about convenience and, you know, speed.

In a price-sensitive market, you're saying pay some more for some— yeah, some convenience, no question.

There are a lot of people who feel that they're good with one phone, that's it. And there are other people who would want to shave off a little bit of phone time, screen time. I can actually subsidize and give you the ring almost at cost, which will be 1/3 the price of our retail right now. In fact, Going forward, if we get the right support, we get the right VCs, we can say, okay, the device is free, just use it. Otherwise, we charge you a monthly fee, like $2, $3. We don't have a secondary revenue stream kick in yet. We make money on the markup of the product sale. We also have interchange fee revenue on all the transactions that go through it.

I actually think the lighter, cheaper ring is better. By the way, this is very comfortable.

You know, this is the lightest, Smart ring on the planet because it's just 1 gram. The more lightweight it is, the less intrusive it is going to be to wear, so it's good validation for us.

Thank you, Vijay.

Thank you so much.

Polly, what'd you think of Seven?

I feel like it's kind of an uphill battle getting it here. Maybe it's good there for payments.

The passive thing I'm attracted to.

Yeah.

It's simple and I never really think about it. Yeah, eventually I think that's going to be a lot better. With that, let's bring on our next guest. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

Once the voting started to kick in and everything, we prepared really well. I think we must have showed up at JDEC to probably At least 70 people. At PickMyWork, we are building Uber for financial services. We are working towards one goal, which is financial freedom. Financial freedom has 2 sides to it. People should have jobs and they should have income. So 1 in every 4 youth globally is unemployed today. 46,000 people in India applied for the role of a sanitation worker in just one day. The second side to financial freedom People do not invest in the markets. What percentage of Indians do you think invest in stock market? It is just a meager 7%. Same is the case in all emerging markets like Brazil and Indonesia. This is due to low financial literacy and high customer acquisition cost. There are thousands of products, but thousands of products means it is chaos for the customer. And to move through this chaos, you need humans. For gig workers, we have a mobile app on which they get high-quality training content, real-time guidance to complete financial services sales, and we are providing massive reach through hyper-local trust. Every time we make a sale, financial services clients pay us, we take a 25% margin and pass on the rest to the gig workers. From the last time we saw you, Tim, our revenue grew to $1.4 million.

So that $1.4 million is your work?

No, we get the full amount. We are the ones responsible for paying to the gig workers.

I see. So you get $1.4 million and you've been paying the gig workers 75% of that?

Yes.

Okay, great. Are you using any AI to train them?

For our gig workers, we have completely AI-related, uh, training content developed by the AI, and they're getting trained on the app first and then going and training the customers, telling them about the products. Now we've reached a stage that only 20 full-time employees are managing 15,000 on-field gig workers, and we are profitable. Gig has changed the way ride-hailing, delivery, and professional services work. It is going to change now financial services.

What products do the gig workers sell?

Credit cards, loans. They help people open bank accounts.

There is some level of trust Here, gig workers—you're not going to trust. You're not going to trust because they're just being trained to repeat something that they have heard.

Isn't a gig worker like somebody from your neighborhood? It's exactly that. So that's their link, and so it's like I'm taking all that information, I'm bringing it to my community. And also, like Uber does.

We rate them, we rate our gig workers, we take feedback from customers, and also we communicate on behalf of the gig worker to the customer.

So in essence, they're not a gig worker because they're the expert from their community. You're gonna keep going back to that same—

Exactly.

That's terrific. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

It could be a huge market, especially in a country where people are not Educated rather than learning from just mass media. If a person comes and tells me, it's always better.

You're not giving financial advice. You're not telling them go buy this stock or this—

But it could develop into that. I mean, it could be, it could be really, really—

And then they're going to have to get trained.

Yeah.

So with that—

Should we get dabbing?

Let's bring in our next entrepreneurs. And you might see a new guest judge.

The first challenge we're doing today is people. It is an awesome challenge. I trained a lot with simulation rounds. When you're in the firefight, you get so fixated on one thing, you forget the broader picture. The real thing that you should get out of this is learning how to expand that vision. The other great things is communication and then doing quick planning. Ryan's going to tell us a little bit about safety, which is super important. After safety, we'll start playing.

So we're gonna do a game called the Bomb Game. When I start the game, it'll be a 10-minute countdown. Inside is a bomb. They have to defuse the bomb. You have to find a code to defuse it. The code is hidden right there. They're gonna try to blow the building up. You're gonna try and save it. So you guys can choose how you want to defend based on that knowledge. All right, so strategize a little bit. I'm gonna check on them. There they have to get in here and defuse the bomb. Ten minutes. Yeah. All right, let's rock and roll.

Yeah, one here, one there, one there.

One, two, three, and four. There's an entrance there as well.

Come on! Take this. What's your name?

The left or right? Okay, okay.

Yes. Can I come here? Get on the wall.

Walk up the wall.

Oh, I'm out. Stop! I'm out.

We're out.

We're out. We're out. I'm out.

All right, so attacking team, you ran out of air at the very end. You had one defense left. What was your objective?

Get people to come out of there.

Get people to come out of there. That's how you're gonna win the game? No, turn on the bomb, right? Turn on the bomb. How are you gonna do that? You need to get in and get the code. So if you would have gotten this, hit the blue, follow the instructions, so it would have been over. So not only did you guys not find this, but then you didn't kill the last defender, and then you didn't get to the bomb. Defense won even though it was still 2 2 on 1, they were searching around like over here, you kept digging in the same pile. There has to be concise communication. You keep doing the same thing over and over, you know, we're just wasting time. Remember, keep your eyes on the prize. It's super easy to get distracted, right? You guys did a great job today. Of course, man.

2 on 2.

Yeah.

We are here with Kaja. She was the last surviving attacking team member.

There are times when you sort of do everything right on the way, but sometimes life surprises you and it's okay. I mean, you, you've got to learn on the way and figure it out.

Now we're here with Shuti, who is the last defending player.

I think we learned very well that more time in strategizing will take us far, and that's what we did. We came up with all these hiding spots, hiding in plain sight, and that worked out.

Welcome, Bill Draper, my father. Mine too. Hers too. Tell us a little bit about your experience being the first venture capitalist in India. Do you know why we picked India as opposed to many other countries? They speak English, and I do too. Our next entrepreneur is Back Alt, and this is Shruti, and she, as was mentioned, won our survival training. She can survive; we know that. So the nervousness was.

Will I, as a founder, simplify the topic enough to explain to them what problem we're solving, to show that it's important, but also it's easy to do, or it's doable, and it's not rocket science, it can happen? We are an industrial biotechnology company with a mission to replace petrochem dependence of ingredients. When we speak of microplastics, we know they cause all sorts of havoc in our bodies. They are present everywhere. But how funny is it that the source, 34%, comes from agriculture, detergents, rinse-off cosmetics, paints. 15 to 20% of the entire oil and gas industry diverts itself for petrochem derivatives. But this can be changed. With simple industrial biotechnology, agricultural waste can be the source of nutrients for bacteria and fungi, from which we can make flavors, fragrances, soaps, detergents, making all the products super green. The petrochem guys are not averse to non-petrochem ingredients. They just care about functionality, cost, and scale more. This is where Bacalt comes in. 0.5 to 3% of our completely edible, biodegradable— you can put it in your eyes and also your open wound— product can replace 8 to 13% of the plastic ingredients in any cosmetics.

Do your makeup artists use your material?

No. Not yet.

In fact, while she was putting the makeup on today, she said, you know, every single product here Has plastic in it.

Oh.

Her interaction with these consumer goods, with cosmetics, is much more deep-rooted than Tim's is. He understands the advantage of our products, but I don't think he understands the depth or the urgency. We're setting up a 10,000-square-foot biofoundry. Our team is growing, and we've filed for 2 patents.

You're taking in agricultural waste, and you're grinding it up?

It's a little nuanced than that. We take the unavoidable waste, so the core of pineapple or the shell of pineapple can never be eaten, there are thorns, right? But it does have a lot of sugar, it does have a lot of nutrients. We feed these sugars and nutrients to bacteria and fungi, which then produce or biotransform it into usable products.

Now, your revenues haven't been particularly large.

I think we're the only revenue-making biotech startup within 2 years.

So you need really You don't need venture money at this point.

We do need venture money because the CapEx that comes in is quite expensive. For global patents alone, for 18 years, we're gonna spend half a million per patent. So that's gonna take venture money.

Is it mostly for skincare?

We started with home care because the regulatory challenge is the least there.

Terrific. Well, Shruti, thank you so much for coming on Meet the Drapers and for Coming through survival.

Always.

I love her so much. She's very terrific, I think.

Yeah.

From $1,500 per kilogram of whatever they produce, it's only $15 per kilogram. And to say the cosmetics business is plastic-free is huge. You put it very close to your body. I think it could scale very well.

There are 8 employees now, and I wonder How fast they're gonna be growing. I think they're gonna just grow organically without it, but they did take in $2 million already. So let's bring on our next entrepreneur, but before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

How many people have shot guns before? Air rifles? Okay. All right, we're not going to count air rifles. So we had 3, which is awesome. By the end of today, we're gonna have 9 more founders that have shotguns before. The reason we shoot rifles first, it's a lot safer.

Safety is paramount around here, okay? If you see something unsafe, what should you say?

Ceasefire.

Ceasefire.

All right, clear. Oh, okay. You slowly increase the pressure until the gun goes off and it surprises you. Bang, bang! Hey, 2 for 2. Let's move through them. Got it again.

We've gone to the next level. Right, okay.

Have you shot before? No. Okay, you got it. Did you hear it?

Did it hit? I didn't see. I got it. Yeah, did you hear it?

Yeah, yeah, go for the pumpkin. Ammo. Okay, you got it.

Oh!

Once you're on target, if you keep everything the same, You just keep hitting the targets. A lot of people, when they make a sale, will just get off the phone and be like, high five, you know? And then they leave, right? Once you make one sale, you should say, whoa, what did I just do? Immediately try and do the same thing over and over and over again until you get tired. Our top shooter is Taran. So come on up. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

It's just learning a new skill. skill with a very powerful weapon, just stay on target, right? Don't react to the recoil, don't react to the outer surroundings.

Best shooter in India on the farm today.

All right, nice stuff.

When we were pitching in Goa last time, it was really rushed and I was nervous a lot. We woke up at 5 AM and we went to the sets and rehearsed our pitch. So, to get more karma. First of all, good afternoon, Bill, Tim, Polly, and Sabir. I am Purnank, and this is my co-founder Mayank. We have spent more than 10 years working with marketing teams across the globe, and we have seen the same problem everywhere. 3.5 million companies globally spend billions of dollars in events every year to win customers, but hardly any one of them know what's working or how to prove the ROI. That is where Samaro comes into the picture. It's an AI-integrated platform that boosts the attendance, captures the qualified leads, and also helps sales teams to follow up faster so that no potential customer slips away.

First customer is somebody who's putting an event together, right?

Absolutely. We've clocked more than half a million dollars in revenue. That's 2.4x growth since the last time we met. Almost two-thirds of this revenue comes from outside India. We've not spent a penny on marketing yet, but we've still managed to onboard enterprise partners like Deloitte, Boston Consulting, and HCL, who are now taking Samaro to their clients. With strengthening data privacy policies, Google tightening cookie tracking, and the digital media polluted with AI-generated noise, more brands are looking towards events as their number one growth channel.

The thing I'm Wondering is how big this market can get. It's a SaaS business for people who do conferences.

Correct.

Because I, I sort of feel like that's not big enough.

Samaru is starting with events today, but we are going to expand into multiple human interaction marketing channels, and we are going to provide a single platform where you can manage all your vendors, all your team at one single point. And we already integrate with 150 platforms of sales and marketing. That gives us a very sweet spot sitting at the heart of their ecosystem. So it's very tough for them to switch also the platforms once they onboard Samaro.

I mean, am I looking at a CRM? Correct. We are just an intersection of— Customer relationship management software. Correct, like Salesforce or HubSpot.

Salesforce does this.

Before you even attend the event, the sales and marketing team knows that Tim is going to buy this product, so I need to put this salesperson after Tim. Other platforms are looked at as a cost center, but Samaro is looked at as a revenue generation How do you divide up your work between the two of you?

You could say that he focuses more on the product market fit. I take care of the GTM, so I focus more on the sales and the marketing.

And Bill, we have been friends for 15 years and we have been co-founders for the last 10 years.

Co-founders in another business?

So it was more of a service-based business where we were picking one brand at a time and work doing their marketing campaigns nationally and internationally.

Terrific. Well, great. Thank you. Thank you both for being on the show.

I think it's a good idea because usually in, in, in companies, the person who's organizing these events is not the core business of the company. It's a niche market, but it could grow to a few billion dollars easily. I agree with him.

Sabir has this background. He is the founder of Hotmail, the first free mail that we all got in the world. He understands the importance of data in increasing your revenue for the company, right?

I do understand from the perspective of producing a television series that, that there needs to be a there there, that there needs to— that if I knew every single thing that was happening, uh, it would be easier if there was someone to aggregate all the information.

All right, so with that, let's bring on the next entrepreneur. But before we do, you know what we do. We see what's going on. Behind the scenes. Viewers, usually I'm pretty easy to reach. I mean, there are only 300 million of you. I'm making it a lot easier for you to contact me. I have downloaded my brain into this Digital Twin. And you can scan this QR code, you can pitch me your idea, you can talk about your business, anything, and I'll answer it 24/7. Enjoy it, it's great. It's a new feature of Meet the Drapers and Draper TV. I think you're going to have some fun.

This competition was definitely like a northern star and incentive that something we want to see through.

Welcome back to the show and congratulations getting through survival.

We're an agentic AI platform that helps companies automate workflows and solve complex data problems. So one of our customers is a state police department. They had about 20 years of messy data on multiple Traditional consulting firms said it would take years to put this right and then make sense of it. Our agents went to work four weeks, cleaned up all the data, understood the relationships, poured it into a modern database. We've built them a dashboard and recently given them a ChatGPT-like query interface. You literally put in a telephone number or Aadhaar card equivalent in India; they can figure out the criminal network. Where that person is, it's kind of unbelievable.

So this is our code generation platform.

You just give it a prompt, the AI generates the code, and you can see the trail of thought here.

Are you getting all this, Polly?

We've built a technology platform. It's got 3 engines: enterprise code generation, enterprise-grade high-security system, agent generation platform, and cloud deployment. So we can scale this up and down very quickly.

And all thanks to Polly using agents, we had built our first website for her.

Polly actually took us on this journey. When we made a statement, hey, you know, even you can use our cloud deployment tool, Shraman spent a couple of weeks to build out a website for her.

That was the most inspiration for us to continue in the same direction.

What benefit do you have moving to the enterprise?

What we're doing now is solving the entire software development lifecycle.

Right.

From the business use case, we leverage AI to understand what the PRD is, what the requirement is. Then you generate the code for the application. The system generates agents which have to be created, and all that has to go on the cloud. So you need an entire DevOps team, which you'll see on the right. It does the work of 25 developers and saves about 3 months of time with every new client. I worked on the SBC AT&T deal. Team didn't go home for 7 nights straight. If we had ToyStack agents, Tim would have been home for dinner every night. That's the power of what these agents can do.

So in a big organization, you could be listening to all the different meetings and then the AI can say, hey, here's our recommendation, Mr. CEO.

We are building for them agents that will take all that data, put it into our data lake, have a dashboard which will give them real-time analysis, for them to make sense of all their sales input. We've come a long way. We were a B2C company. We barely had about $500 of revenue. We listened to our customers and realized agentic AI was the way to go. As a startup, if you can survive a year, you're clearly making progress. We're now a B2B company. We have $20,000 in monthly revenue. Our largest contract value is about $70,000 with a fund in the United States, and we have about $2 million in the pipeline.

Thank you for making the trip. Nice to meet you. Dad, what'd you think of them? I wasn't wild about it, but it was okay.

Everything is turning into being an agent now. Their biggest issue is going to be how quickly will they scale. There's nothing new in the technology over here because it's there everywhere.

Anywhere.

I mean, I took a course on how to write agents. Ten million customers have all switched over to Salesforce. It's a marketing problem. Hire salespeople, build relationships, but relationships take years to build.

Holly, what'd you think?

I love those two guys. They're very go-gettery. They created a whole website for me. I mean, they're making everything more easier for. Let's move on to our next entrepreneur.

But before we do. Let's see what's going on behind the scenes. Hey, startups, your next challenge. You have 1 hour to build a boat and get your entire team across the lake, off the boat, back on the boat, and back here. You get points for being first, and you get points for dry. Who can't swim? Okay, make sure other people around you You can use anything you see except the kayak. Can't use the life jackets, those are for you. Ready? Go! 1 hour. Yeah, find your resources, they are here.

Our team was divided. There were— there was a part of the team that only wanted to work with flags, and there was a part of the team that only wanted to work with drums.

Where I felt a little lost at sea, no pun intended, is when we were building that damn boat.

We develop underwater robots, but building boat was the toughest because we didn't have sufficient raw materials for build one. Yeah.

Okay, okay, let's let's yeah yeah let's just three things.

Five minutes.

Building a boat is similar to building a startup, you know. You don't have much time. You need to get things done and you need to go out in the—

Not showing good signs for your startup. When things get tough, Team Gamma.

Maybe I was proving something to myself. Never in my mind for a split second it occurred that, oh, I'm— I should not. It was not an option. It was a task. I had to do it. I did it. So. We did not think we're going to make it, but we did eventually.

When I was swimming, I realized there is no end to this lake. You can go on deeper and deeper.

Like, you have to keep swimming.

In startup also, once you get inside the lake, it's not like you can come back. You have to cross the river.

Anything you learned?

We can't build a boat. Fulfill your mission. Yeah, this too. Yeah, they did. Team Gamma, what? When a startup starts getting tough, you gotta get tougher.

Definitely less nerves. This was way more in our wheelhouse than you know being in the wild building a boat. Afternoon, everyone. As someone whose own father suffered from Parkinson's and saw neurodegeneration in his later years, this biological truth about our bodies. Became the cornerstone of our company's mission. I'm Isaac, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ivory, where we help our users assess, track, and maintain their cognitive health. Now, the fact is that 9 out of 10 cognitive impairments are diagnosed too late, by which time medications are either prohibitively expensive or clinically ineffective. Ivory helps you take that first step towards assessing your brain health, just like how you would measure your blood pressure or, you know, your glucose levels. It's an assessment which is based off cognitive tasks that captures digital biomarkers like reaction time, accuracy rate, reaction speed, and we are able to draw up a cognitive profile which tells us how your cognitive skills are doing.

Now, how long is that test?

So the test today is 30 to 35 minutes. But the new IP that we're developing will break that form factor to 10 minutes.

Does the doctor have to be there the whole time?

No, he doesn't need to be. So it can be self-assessed. It's like the first step of a screening process. It's like the treadmill test for your heart, if some of you have done it. Like, you need an ECG, but the treadmill test gives the doctor a lot of information as the first step. But the real magic in this, if let's say, Sabir, Tim, Polly, or Bill, you could talk to me for a minute and I could pick up speech signals and your temporal parameters and tell you as to whether you're norms, are above average or below average. This is the real grail that we are going for in this trial.

This one tests me to assess. Yes. So then I think the next step is, hey, you are falling behind. Absolutely. Start doing something like Impulse to bring it back up.

Absolutely. Sabir, I know, is one of the most vocal supporters of innovation. Because he is from India, he understood the problem that And to Sabir's point, what we are doing is a little more clinical grade than what Impulse and Elevate does. They are after the consumer market, and what we have learned from our counterparts in the US is that you can make a consumer product, but you would not have any differentiation. Our differentiation lies in the 2 layers of IP that we're building, and of course we want to build the ACT as well, but this will go for low to medium risk users. Everything gives you a measurement, right? But there is no measurement for how my attention span is. And everyone is worried about ADHD, for example. This actually gives a clinician something more than a questionnaire. A questionnaire is extremely subjective, and a pen and paper test takes away their time. So we help save clinicians time and provide, like I said, an extra data point which they can now track longitudinally. So the clinician is also interested because clients want to come back to him.

Okay, Isaac, thank you.

Thank you.

So much for coming to meet the Drapers.

This has been a pleasure.

I mean, surviving survival.

Thank you.

Nicely done.

Thank you.

Subir, what'd you think of it?

Obviously, it's a good thing if they can detect it early and do some interventions, because people don't know. They don't think they're losing it, right? But they are. For me, it's okay. It doesn't matter. But for a doctor, you know, an intervention where they have to give you some medication, that question of to give or not to give, if they can take the guesswork out of it by doing a test, I think it helps all of humanity, right? Let's move on to our next entrepreneur.

But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the AI.

It was like a good experience. It would have been better if both of us are here. But give our 100%. Hello, I'm Vishwesh Swain, co-founder of Coracia Technology. We develop underwater robots and we are the leading startup in India in this underwater segment. Every unmanned robot can be used for carrying out inspection of the dams and bridges because till now people are using manual divers. They come with their own limitations. They can dive up to a certain limit and it's a time-consuming process. Many underwater infrastructures remain uninspected, which leads to catastrophic failures. To address this issue, we have developed underwater robot that can dive deep. It has greater stability and higher accuracy. Our product can be used for inspection and monitoring of dams, bridges, and it has application in studying the coral reefs and underwater habitats. It has a great use case in defense, and it can be used for border monitoring. Underwater mine detection, and search and rescue operation.

Do each of those applications require a different product?

The robot can be used in different verticals, and we are not limiting ourselves to only one thing. No, the same robot with different payloads, a set of payloads, can be used for carrying out different operations.

You said your last round valuation was $9 million, and now you're saying your current Valuation is $60 million. Why?

When we raised the last round of funding, there was no contract signed. So post that, we signed a contract of around $8 million USD, and we have a pipeline of $11 million USD. And we see after 5 years, we will be making revenue of $25 million USD. still the compact and lightest robot in the world.

Terrific. Well, Biswajit, very nice to see you. Thank you for coming on Meet the Drapers. Congratulations. Thanks for being on the show. Dad, what'd you think? I guess I don't know enough about delivering what they want. The service. The service. How about you, Polly? What'd you think?

I guess their main taker is the Army.

Oh, the first one.

I'm the Navy, the Navy, Coast Guard.

There is a need for something like this. And if he claims, like I said, I don't know enough of the latest in this business, but if he claims they are the lightest and perhaps one of the lowest-cost robots, it's just a question of them marketing it.

Then he will have a good market for it.

A very good market for it. I have a boat in the city. There's a diver who comes to inspect the bottom. All that can be replaced with a robot.

Oh yeah, that's amazing.

Let's bring on our next entrepreneur, but before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes. All right, welcome. Come on into my office.

You're put in an ice bath, you're half naked, you're extremely uncomfortable, but still you've got to give your best pitch.

I'll enjoy the pitch.

I can do man versus wild, but this was the task. I had to do it.

I did it. So why don't why don't you give me the first pitch?

Awesome. Oh, my name is Shruti Kuchmutia from Backhaul Biosciences. We do manufacturing of biopolymer. We have a great potential for AI and computational biology.

All right, you're up. All right, I'm Adyati.

I'm from Pick My Work. We enable financial freedom at Pick My Work.

We're building gig for financial services. All right. Hi, Tim.

I am Vishwesh Jain, co-founder of Kurasia Technology. We develop underwater robots. So till now, people are using manual divers for carrying out inspection of any dams and bridges. So there is a lack of technology know-how, and the people have limitations. They cannot go underwater. Terrific.

You three are welcome.

Ice bath. Definitely, I thought initially that okay, that's going to be challenging. But once I did it. Then I like realized that okay, no, this can happen again.

Okay, everybody in. Tony in. Welcome to my office. Oh, we forgot everybody was supposed to duck their heads.

I'm Isaac. I represent Ivory. We provide you a score across key cognitive functions like attention, memory, and reasoning, and tell you whether you're doing okay or not. So my name is Vijay Kuchandani.

I'm the founder and CEO of Seven. We manufacture and sell We sell smart rings with which you can do payments, you can use it as a metro ticket, and the best part, it doesn't require charging. It is fully waterproof.

Does it work now? Yeah, it works.

It's 100% waterproof.

Oh, very nice. I'm Vikram.

I'm from VikPeep. We are using AI to train a million people. We already employ more than 10,000 people and generating $10 million in revenue.

Okay, so for spiritualness here, everybody's had Goes down one, two, three.

All right, good job.

Wow, wow! Look at that. All right. How are you holding up? Oh, that's very nice of you. Oh wow! You gotta worry about yourself right now.

We saw a second eye. We didn't.

We are a generic AI company.

We help companies automate workflows.

For US healthcare, and we have automated 90% of the US healthcare.

You look back and say, hey, you know, we did the cold plunge.

Now look back and see it's a sweet memory. Something which pushed me beyond my boundaries.

Breathe through your nose.

It'll make a big difference. Breathe through your nose.

So I am Purnank. I'm from Samaru. We are an AI-integrated platform. That helps you understand the attendee behavior and get you the customers from the attendees that are joining your events.

Everybody head down and then we get out. Ready? Go! Whoa, whoa, whoa! Oh my God, that felt great! I think everybody should do a little bit of a plunge.

Whoa!

Ha ha ha! That was fun. Now I'm cold.

There's always the stage pressure when you're there and such distinguished judges in front of you. Very happy that we made it through until here. So we are— we feel we are using AI to unlock India's demographic dividend. Most people think that AI is taking jobs out, but it's not soon that AI is going to do the job of a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician. And the number one problem most businesses and people face is you can't find people who can do the work. So we use AI to make people more ready for the job and also improve their incomes. The first focus is home improvement, which is a $300 billion industry in India. Unlike the US, India is not a DIY country. And so, so that means if consumers buy anything for their home, whether a home office or furniture or appliances or even a door lock, brands have to send somebody to do the installation at the home, and brands struggle to get that done. So what we have done for the brands is we have done APIs with IKEA, with Amazon, with 100 brands, and we provide them the post-sales installation services to the end consumer.

How many people have you trained?

We have already got 5,000 people working with us, and we have enough work now to employ more than 100,000 people. So that's why we're raising funds to be able to train and deploy more people and build more tech.

Why are you doing this?

So this is something which really makes a difference to the lives of the people, help them improve their income and livelihoods. It's going to really make a huge impact to Indian economy and also eventually has a global expansion possibility as well.

Why did you pick the name Wifey?

All right, so this is an acronym for We Install and Fix For You. We actually changed the spelling of our company, so we decided to just add an F. Extra F to make it clear, to solve the phonetics. And it also jives very well with Jiffy. Wiffy, work done in a jiffy.

What's your biggest problem?

The biggest problem is to scale. We need to train people, so we want to accelerate the use of technology to skill people and upgrade them. And we need more capital.

What do you need the capital for? I mean, you've created the course, you just Rinse and repeat.

So while we have no customer acquisition cost, we have a supplier acquisition cost. So we need to take people, keep them happy, engaged, employed before they become productive.

Terrific.

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

Thank you.

Good job. All right.

I think it's a huge opportunity in India, just given that Consumer markets are growing, and he's right. Here we do everything by ourselves. We were taught to do that from the very beginning, you know, but not so in India.

India, it's more service economy.

There's a huge labor pool available but untrained, so they can— he can train them and find them employment with quick gigs like this. I think it's useful.

I liked him for he Well, he's been successful 3 times before.

Yeah. That was pretty solid.

I mean, that's just a tough call as to, you know, and he's already got $10 million ARR. He's got revenue. Okay, so let's bring them all out. But before we do, I think there's more going on behind the scenes. This was a sculpture created for Burning Man, and you know, at Burning Man, they create the art, they disassemble it, and they take it away, and the desert stays clear. And I said, okay, this This will be a part of your survival training. So this is another challenge. It is to go right up and around on these rocks, and they're a little unstable. Roughly 1,000 people have been up and around it, so I think you're gonna be okay, but who knows?

Oh, good.

Here you go. Easy there. Easy though.

Keep going, keep going. You got it. Let's go. Yeah, this is good.

Okay, okay, my leg won't stop shivering.

Why is this relevant to your startup? It's always shaky. It's always shaky. I like that.

It's lonely at the top.

Sometimes you just have to go.

Sometimes you need a helping hand.

Yeah, and sometimes you need a little bit of help. Lean on your team when you need to.

So I just want to say thank you for coming out here to the farm. It was my pleasure to watch all of you face all these challenges.

We've never had 8 contestants on the show before, so this is a lot. For the crystal ball, we're gonna go through each of you in order. Seven, are you unique in being able to do it without ever charging?

The Air model that you saw, we are the only ones who do it. There's nobody else who's done that.

Backalt, are the people gonna use the plastic one so that their face shines better?

We first solve for performance. Only after we've solved for it do we have to get the price point.

PickMyWork. I was very impressed with the progress you guys have made.

One question that came up was the revenue recognition. 25% is our take rate, but banks and fintechs, they pay us. Which is 75%.

Yes. And our take rate is 25%.

Good. Samaro, the concern I have is getting notoriety and why people who already do the event management wouldn't just throw in AI.

Someone who is looking to do it today, it will take them years to train that model.

It's not easy to plan an event. Trying to build the entire ecosystem in-house is not going to be easy.

ToyStack, the challenge you're going to have is competing with Salesforce. How are you going to rise above that?

Enterprises have spent billions of dollars. 95% of these AI implementations have failed. The reason being is it has to be custom.

Ivory, you're going to have to break into all the physicians' offices. and try to get them on board. What is the incentive?

When they throw in our product, they're literally doubling their revenues.

Coratia, you said something about looking for mines. Or is that just a camera?

Robot has sonar as well as camera.

Wi-Fi in a jiffy. You have been successful with 3 other companies. Are they all related to this?

Unrelated. The first 2 companies, I was not the owner, I was the CEO. The third company was doing it for mechanics. Now it's for carpenters, electricians, plumbers. Polly, go ahead.

Pick a winner. I have to be first.

Who are your top two? My top is Shruti. It's a great wish that all products could be made without plastics. ToyStack because they did a whole website for me.

Easily bribed judge.

Ivory because hell, I'm probably. I'm going senile. All the ones that felt personal to me.

I'll make it easy for you.

Okay.

I'll pick 4. All of you guys are great, but Backalt, Samarro, Wiffy, and Toystak.

I leave it all to the crystal ball.

That's right.

And the crystal ball is so confused now. Dad, who's your winner? I'm not gonna pick one. Okay, that didn't help. Crystal ball's gonna give me Feedback one at a time. It's all very clear now. Back alt. You're a winner. I'm excited at early seed valuation. I would offer $250,000 at a $2.5 million valuation. Pick my work. I think there's something. I'm gonna do something kind of special here. I would do $500K at a $5 million valuation. Ivory, I would do something for you that would be $500K at a $5 million valuation. ToyStack, you're the winner. This is gonna happen. I think you guys might be able to do it. It's a deal.

Congratulations, India.

Thank you. My mental math was seven startups are gone. Last wow. This is it. So I the euphoria was for like maybe a couple of seconds, and I think this is going to be a game changer for the company.

So it's taking time for me to sink in.

Excited for the next steps. Amazing, amazing, amazing.

Positivity, good karma manifestation.

Whatever you want. I still remember.

I think me and my dad, we were talking a little less regularly. He was like, "How much are the words right now? What do I need to do?" It's not just because of what we did; it's because of everybody's faith in us, their blessings in us.

So you know, you've traveled 24 hours one way, 24 hours one way for like a 10-minute pitch. Literally, just felt relief that the team would be would be happy with this. That was the instant reaction. Wow! That feels great, and thank God.

That was extremely. It was extremely validating. Even if 3 different judges understood 3 different aspects of the business, they all agreed that it was important enough or useful enough to bring into the world. So that meant a lot to me.

See you next time on Media Makers!

All right!