Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there, friends and listeners. Today is a new dawn for new media and we're live streaming our episode number 76. So, what just went down?

Utsav Somani: Dude, the world has shifted like I mean I woke up and I saw this message from you and many others that TPPN has been acquired by OpenAI. I honestly thought it was an April Fool's joke and the numbers were unbelievable man like the article said on a Financial Times article said that couple of hundred millions and it's just fascinating. I think for them to achieve this in 17 months 5 million in sponsorship revenue first year they're apparently a 30 million ARR for sponsorships now and they're letting all of that go. So now it's going to be owned by OpenAI, they're going to be completely independent, no ads business and they're going to report to Chris who's the Chief Global Affairs Officer for OpenAI Strategy Org. So crazy. Are the brothers going corporate? Sorry? I'm saying are the brothers going corporate? Man I honestly don't see them as being corporate communications guy for OpenAI, but media deals, M&A deals have typically not worked out that well, but I mean a crazy outcome for them like hat tip to them for actually pulling this off like in 17 months you created single handedly birthed this new category, live tech shows now there are different verticals like D2C has one, gaming has one, so everyone's trying out this new format where you're going direct, you're creating something on the internet which is live, unfiltered and you get to speak with your audiences without any edits and that's what's different from podcast. So this is not a podcast, this is a proper live stream show and we're heavily inspired by them and I want to like I mean salute to TVP and Steam for actually pulling this off like I'm just pumped coming into this show today. Yeah, absolutely. And why is OpenAI doing this? OpenAI has raised 122 billion, it's the largest funding largest private funding round in history, it closed in March and I mean it's insane, open Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank putting in majority of this and A16Z, TPG, everyone coming in, headline numbers are they're doing 2 billion a month in revenue, 900 million active, weekly active users, 50 million subscribers and enterprise is 40% of their revenue and I mean they've experimented a lot but now they're coming back and saying that let's build a super app, we're going to focus on codecs and we're going to focus on chat GPD, SORA goes away, hardware projects some of them are shelved as well and just when they announced all of this the super app strategy they go out and buy TVPN so it's fascinating stuff that's happening.

Dhruv Sharma: By the space that SORA left but also I mean if they have 900 million I heard like I mean close to a billion weekly actives they clearly don't have a marketing problem on hand so I'm still trying to wrap my head around why TVPN, in fact instinctively the first thing I thought was why TVPN, why not semi-analysis or something more up their alley.

Utsav Somani: Yeah makes sense but I mean TV how do you rationalize this because everyone I mean has been posting on x with their own viewpoints about this whole thing everyone's sharing on John and Jordi were the co-hosts of that show as well but what they're getting with TVPN is a very niche audience and probably the same audience that is already exposed to OpenAI and is already tech forward tech positive so if they had to tap on to new audiences or direct the narrative in a different way to the world that's not exposed or in that x bubble and x tech bubble of ours they would have to acquire something else but Sam Ortman posted that it's his favorite show and he loves it so I think he's bringing the boys home.

Dhruv Sharma: And then when he spoke to Agassiz he did say that they just have a way to explain what's happening in AI in the most relatable fun refreshing way possible and I think the one thing they've proven to through the world is that you don't have to be a cynic to draw attention to what you're saying and yeah and clearly you know we're positive and doing this five times a week not

Utsav Somani: taking a break and doing this for three hours every day that's a full-time job and curating that guest list looking slick on screen having the coolest merchandise in game they did I mean so many things right that even even the oldest TV channels cannot even think about doing so I think kudos to them I am honestly a big big fan and that's the reason why we're doing the offline network as well to surface stories from our founders in the Indian ecosystem to bring them out and break down the headlines like I think we've all covered the headlines the origin stories the pre-edited the PR pieces everything that you've seen but the aim with the offline network is that this is unfiltered our cameras cameras have conked off in the middle of the stream as a mic doesn't work sometimes and sometimes my internet goes away but we still come back on and do this so doing a live show is extremely extremely hard and we will stay at it and more inspired by this news and hopefully our ecosystem founders operators investors in India will know that you have TON to come on and share your story and the background on so yeah that's the end yeah let's talk about health I'm wearing whoop so whoop is also a company that's exciting there is three companies I think which have taken lead ultra human our Indian company then aura and whoop whoop has raised 575 million at 10 billion auras in that similar ballpark range ultra human is profitable and they've I mean the founder had to face a lot of flack because people say that the subscriptions will go away after people have used this for three to six months because they're not learning anything new but you've had the top athletes of the world invest in this round and they are all wearing it from different sports Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy and then you've got all the big funds in this they've got 2.5 million members 1.1 revenue 1.1 1.1 billion revenue run rate and subscriptions are still growing so these platforms or these different form factors will morph into becoming a health and wellness sort of mass subscription where you have these platforms where they do your blood pressure insights they do your clinical like biosensors with variables and then they do like the blood biomarkers as well so IPO on the card soon as well yeah why don't you wear one Dhruv yeah I don't wear one I haven't

Dhruv Sharma: worn one since the Fitbit which is like 10 years ago and the Google acquisition I think shut that company down I think one in general I'm like surrounded by numbers at all times so I think it's nice to just intuitively listen to what the body has to say once in a while itself and that's that's actually my simple reason for doing this I want to like lean into what my body is telling me and it gives you signs when you need to slow down or rest or when you can in fact afford to push yourself so I like to tune into that yeah I think we've honestly become too attuned to like just

Utsav Somani: tracking tracking tracking and data and that's the thing happening in the world of AI like everyone's building these apps and productive like daily summaries and CEO co-pilots and everything like but do we really need to be that productive guys like I mean honestly is the world a better place when we're that ultra productive I think we're spending more time becoming productive than actually doing the work like sometimes I think that's the difference like I mean everyone's white coding novel posted his screenshot of his app store as well he's making different apps for diet tracking and everything but they're already solved problems like do we need an own app do I need to debug that like all of these I think problems in the world of AI I think we sometimes just need to just step back and actually think about not being too productive also at times I think or the contrarian way would be like go like fully non-productive you know one of the

Dhruv Sharma: things that they're also saying is that sure right now a lot of this doesn't make sense in the moment but also you have to get the reps in because I think the people are looking at this is if you if you're not getting the reps in the difference between someone who is and someone who isn't two years from now be huge and so that's why the stakes are too high for you to sit this out

Utsav Somani: good compound so what you're saying is people should play around with these tools and play around with these different workflows and everything that you can do yeah stay updated

Dhruv Sharma: like I think stay updated that's the key message here and more than anything this is so empowering right imagine someone who is who is not necessarily technical being able to to spur up something I'll tell you I'll share an anecdote from our own company just last evening we were wrapping up our goals for March and one of like we want to do like an you know an AI showcase internally and in fact one of the people who took the lead on this is in fact the youngest person on our team who actually works on the compliance side has nothing to do with engineering or AI and she figured out how to use cloud code by herself and made dashboards and was getting live feed from by scraping the you know multiple websites and it was just like very gratifying to watch that so imagine the difference between her and her peers who are not doing any of this three years

Utsav Somani: from now absolutely love it uh talking about AngelList India you launched a report as well

Dhruv Sharma: so want to share the key highlights with us yeah absolutely I'll talk about the report we uh so we're calling this flow meter so um what's behind the name what's behind the name is I mean you know this uh better than I do or as well as I do that we've always thought of ourselves as plumbing or infrastructure and so yeah we wanted to think of something which is like a sensor or a gauge obviously the first couple of names that struck us were like a barometer an altimeter didn't seem that relevant barometer actually measures pressure again not relevant but so that's how we came up with a name uh but more than that um over the last uh I think three years maybe we've seen uh we've seen some commendable efforts from our peers like Bloom puts out that beautiful Indus Valley report every year our friends at Oyster collaborate with Crystal and they put out their own report so increasingly there's this body of work that tries to make sense of what's happening in Indian venture through data and we thought about time we made our contribution to it uh for us the problem wasn't the fact that we didn't have data in fact we had lots of data it was just sitting in different places and we hadn't you know cleaned up our pipelines and so on and now we have and this is the first edition we'll follow it up with more and uh yeah it's meant for founders it's meant for people you know for for angel investors both new and old uh and and obviously for uh you know for emerging managers who uh lead venture SPVs and other type of uh you know capital structures um a few things that you can look into the report so for instance if you're a founder and you want to you know you're thinking of raising the round or if you want to like just pace your burn our report tells you what is the what is the average time between rounds these days or if you want to see if you're getting you know uh if you're getting a if you're getting your next round on the right terms we also have valuation data we have data about the different exit pathways that that have gotten created uh you know over the last few years and how secondaries have actually become a very valid exit pathway uh for us to set up positions at an angelist yeah so yeah there's a there's a lot to unpack in there if you look at our socials on linkedin on x you'll see a link through which you can download the report uh read it over this week and tell us what more you'd like to see in the second edition we'll be sure to follow up

Utsav Somani: and how many data points have gone into making this report possible god i don't even know the

Dhruv Sharma: numbers maybe make i think like we probably may have started with like 30 40 narrowed it down but i think we've got five themes in this uh in this particular report but we have enough material i think to even put put the second report out pretty soon amazing nice looking forward to

Utsav Somani: the design is beautiful as well and uh good work to the angelist india team absolutely that is all sure all right let's welcome our first guest for today prateek of craftif prateek welcome to the

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): show thanks it's a nice to be here in the show thanks thank you for giving us the time so why

Utsav Somani: don't we spend the next minute just explaining what your business does yeah so um at craftify

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): what we're building is this ai infra layer for the physical world or by reinventing how the embedded software development is done right now using the agentic uh ai layer that we've kind of developed uh we work with these companies in the physical ai space largely uh developing robots drones autonomous vehicle iot device and we actually try and automate the the intelligence layer that sits between the hardware that is gone inside the devices uh translate translating into into an application or reaction that these you know the the physical devices take so you're actually trying to automate that process entirely which takes you know months of human effort to be able to do into a few hours to a couple of days to just kind of get there uh at the software and then go inside the device and then you actually deploy it in the physical physical hardware

Utsav Somani: yeah sorry i wanted to i mean so i want to just know uh prateek's backstory a little bit so you were uh shipping uh payment devices at phone pay and now you're sort of thinking embedded software with an ai native uh let's do it so what's that uh curve like yeah well uh i mean

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): we have phone pay is actually synonymous to upi and then the payment space but then what i was actually leading at phone pay was these physical devices which are like the sound boxes post terminals dynamic qrs and then my responsibility was to kind of innovate faster launch more devices and i was leading that effort at phone pay and personally this has been my personal pain point in the company that you know we started importing millions of devices from china and then we started doing make in india program and then launch more and more devices at scale so when you think of phone pay it you know at scale is a synonym which kind of comes to it um and and essentially when you talk about the hardware we were kind of you know initially when it was a learning journey we kind of struggled with the software part of it and that that's where that's where i was being questioned that you know why are we being very slow with launches of the products in market and you know we should be doing it really fast and that question kept coming my way and i was trying to think of ways of how can i really do it but then uh and and this went back to 2020 to 2021 um and then a couple of years later when this whole agentic thing came in picture i had my answer in front that you know this is something which could be like a category defining space for actually automating a software for the hardware uh space uh you know which will make not just life of myself in the company simpler but then in general for so many other companies were trying to build these devices and that's it that's what got me to kind of start this with my my friend in batchmate of my engineering college super prateek to make this real can you

Dhruv Sharma: give us some some applications so that we can like start to imagine what these things look like

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): yeah yeah so think of it uh that you know uh take an example of a robot or which kind of which you take an example of a humanoid or a industrial robot which is deployed at uh any manufacturing site uh the it has camera element to it you know these cameras see something and then the robot is supposed to take an action right now what goes in behind a camera seeing something to taking an action uh that intelligence layer of translating what you see converting that to the final binaries or the final code of how the robot is supposed to act uh is something that our platform automates as one of the use case similarly when you see of a you know i'm sure you must be wearing some smart gadget or you must be having some smart iot devices in your home uh so what software is going in that uh you know which actually makes your hardware to show something or do something uh that software or the firmware is what we call in more technical lingo is something that our platform automates in the iot segment of things so anything with respect to the intelligence layer or software layer which goes in these hardware devices which talks to the underlying semiconductor or the hardware peripherals is something that we're trying to work with and that's where this whole hardware or the deep tech across ai is the segment that we are trying to kind of tap into

Utsav Somani: and you're silicon agnostic and you've got some good pilots uh lined up as well one with the u.s listed firm as well so can you uh more about that yeah yeah absolutely so uh yeah good that we

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): gotten some early traction in the space the kind of at least three four categories that has worked for us well is you know in general the robotic companies now that the entire from ai to physical ai is kind of uh kind of evolving so we've gotten good traction from that space we've gotten traction from the uh the semiconductor ecosystem because for them the larger problem has been that the the chip is out uh all the effort going into getting the hardware or the chip out but then software has always been an afterthought so now that more of these every company not just enterprises but the semiconductor as well is thinking of how can they possibly use some part of agentic uh layer to you know develop this software beforehand and not just as afterthought so that's where we were able to kind of crack a couple of uh engagements on the semiconductor side as well and then there are different uh categories in the iot space or uh ai cameras cameras which are being installed traditionally these cameras were just you know kind of recording but now a lot more is expected from this camera to tell you more intelligent things that you could kind of figure out because you know at the end they can act actually as a surveillance uh system for a wide variety of the use case as well um so yeah these these early engagements have kind of you know really helped us shape our product in general um how how enterprises think and how they would want to deploy our solutions which comes out of the platform and when you say surveillance you clearly

Dhruv Sharma: don't mean just surveillance strictly in the security sense even in industrial applications sometimes you've got to see if things are moving right or if a manufacturing process is being

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): followed yeah yeah absolutely so you know given example we were having these couple of conversations early this week itself wherein the you know traditionally there are a lot of lot of people deployed across these assembly line manufacturing processes and because in india we are doing things at scale pretty much you know whether it's a consumer first industry or a product or whether it's an electronic product uh these it's humanly impossible to kind of uh you know for them to assess and validate uh where the process is breaking or you know it's humanly we also make mistakes and even you know similarly assembly line people who are working in these manufacturing lines they tend to miss out on things but then the downstream effect of these small misses can be as big as you know you just kind of missing out on big chunk of revenue or cost pillage that's what these these machines or the automated systems using the cameras could kind of really control of how you can actually automate a large part of this monitoring uh aspect and not just rely on a human to do it and just to give you a stat right of the space that we are operating uh we are saying and then you know all the biggies of the world like Elon Musk and so on they say that we are going to operate a billion plus intelligent devices globally in the next two three years but then the number of engineers who are supposed to do this or develop this is merely 2.5 billion globally right so how do we how do we kind of uh not not eat up their job but rather augment or support them in this development process is something that we are trying to work on across these industries.

Utsav Somani: Interesting but all like NVIDIA um any other large chip manufacturers spending billions on uh developing or building their developer ecosystems and doing huge R&D spends there as well so what is your right to win like specifically if we were to highlight that

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): uh major yeah yeah yeah no absolutely that's a good question uh specifically if you look at these uh big companies of the world I think largely uh one thing that they are kind of focused upon is that how do they uh so there's a there's a soft there's a term called software development kit which comes with every silicon tape out which basically talks to your underlying uh peripherals hardwares and drivers so they kind of specialize on building that layer which can actually uh do a lot of uh you know talk to that hardware layer and give you one layer which can actually be used by the end customer but then for the end customer this layer alone is still not uh a implementable and that's where we kind of come in we hold the hardware uh knowledge or you know we are building our own models and building this agnostic layer which can kind of work with these chipset companies and we can support them augment them in getting the end applications for the customers really out um and and in general for end customer it doesn't really matter which chip are they working on uh how can you make their life simpler to uh develop the end application and deploy for their devices is something uh you know it's always been a question for a silicon company to kind of work with every customer has been a pain point so we want to give a tool to every company who can actually use it to develop their own application by themselves.

Dhruv Sharma: Prateek, I maybe want to ask the same question a little bit differently and we'll try and extract some lessons for founders out of it so I'm assuming when you go pitch uh what you guys have built to large customers they've probably heard similar pitches from from other companies maybe just as bright as you guys but you also win and when you close why do you think that like what's what's the theory for closing sales with these large customers?

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): Yeah so uh you know I think the conversation I would say that has kind of evolved from just using a SaaS based tool to actually how do you control the deployment of the solution in the physical spaces uh you know we've seen this conversation shift from just using a tool to finally control the deployment as well and that's where I think we have kind of been some of these uh customers and the engagement especially because we were working early in our stage as well we were working with with customers in mind deploying at their solution so our solution was largely available in these factories robots and and you know different physical spaces and that learning has gone even further where we are talking to these enterprises we don't talk about just giving them a platform it's mostly about uh we will work with them until they deploy the end solution and they use the platform or whether we use the platform internally to deploy the solution at their physical site uh it's something that has been uh really you know uh the win for us because these big enterprises not really just want to use another co-pilot or AI tool into their stack they actually are looking at some solution which could which could actually work in the physical space so right now people are not just looking at how AI is able to save some you know fraction amount of time but then they what what actually matters is that uh how do you make these systems work in the physical environments of where their machines usually exist so that's how we have been able to kind of leverage our previous experiences our own data set our own models to be able to come up with a solution which can actually work directly in their end outputs.

Utsav Somani: Awesome as a final closing question before we let you go uh congrats on the new three million dollar seed round uh from Ankur Capital you've got IvyCap and uh I think Antler as well uh what do the next 12 months look like to you?

Pratik Sharda (CraftifAI): No thanks I think uh that that's a good validation for us in general at an early stage that we know investors have kind of shown interest in investing with us um the next 12 months uh it's kind of just doubling down on uh you know our R&D spend uh our teams uh are platformizing this you know at a faster pace a faster pace and scale that we essentially wanted to and then just uh you know kind of ramping up on our GTM motion as well trying to grab even more of these partnerships customers in the India as well as the US market these two markets are the focus for us so yeah we are just trying to now expedite on our R&D as well as GTM.

Utsav Somani: All right thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story with us. Thanks, thanks Utsav, thanks Utsav for sharing with you. All right let's move to our second and the final guest for today uh and we're welcoming Pranit of Univest onto the show. Pranit welcome to the show. Thank you so much Utsav. Hi Dhruv. So let's start with something that's personal your origin story uh you said your returns were better than your father's and most brokerage houses I think tell you when to buy but not when to sell so you took this upon yourself to solve this with Univest so tell us the story.

Pranit Arora (Univest): Yeah so the story I mean I've been trading into markets for last 19 years and inspired by my father who was who has been who has been trading into markets for 42 years. Back in 2022 I still remember the one fine day I was looking at some semi statistic which came into public in 93 percent of the people are losing money in options trading and then I actually you know look back upon my 2010-2011 era when I started my trading journey into options for the first time when I lost money and then started learning from my father then learned about the discipline and so on and so forth and then actually started making money from the markets. So I realized that if there are about 20 odd crore DMAT accounts in India and there are about five and a half odd crore active traders in India and if you know 75 percent of cash traders and 93 percent option traders are losing money very simply put if I solve the problem of them so that they can start getting empowered better to make money from the markets I will I'll be able to charge them and make money for myself so that was a very very simple thought process shared it with my team members shared a long-term goal and yeah it started from there.

Utsav Somani: And you've got four lakh plus clients who are paying you over five thousand dollars five thousand rupees in subscriptions but there are free tips on telegrams on twitter everywhere you go like I think the news is just flooding you CNBC is running 24 seven zero that has free sort of tips and like I mean news as well so what is the secret sauce for you at CUNYbest?

Pranit Arora (Univest): I think two major problems still exist like still existed I would rather say till 2022 and we are also working on it like with every single day passing by we have we are not saying we have started completely but we have sorted to like a decently good level too. One first problem of selection for example if Utsav is a good friend of mine and he says that buy ITC and Dhruv says buy Colpal you know both are good friends both seem to be educated both have been very successful in their respective careers in the past but how I do get confused right imagine if hundreds of sources are telling you hundreds of things and I being a normal retail investor who has lack of financial awareness still thinks that okay how to select the right option that is a very big problem because I have limited money so I cannot be investing in all. So that existed and second was problem of exit which I talk about like in India it has been a traditional habit that when people earn five percent in two days they will gloat around with their friends boss I have earned five percent but if they lose 25 percent for the entire year they keep on holding to it having an emotional bias towards it so they don't rotate their capital though don't take money exit from the bad investments on time and that actually major these two problems combined with the siloed experience which was prevailing in India for the retail investors that you know telegram and friends were telling where to invest research was happening on trend line ticker tape stock at some beautiful platforms investments on zero and exit on ram dosa basis so we were like okay why not bring that one single layer which is solving from discovery to exit and then reinvesting at a single most powerful platform and that's how universe kind of came into existence and you know now it is we are generating almost 15 crores a month amazing

Dhruv Sharma: and Pranit what are you telling your users at this point in time given everything that's happening

Pranit Arora (Univest): around us just carry limited risk as much as possible because honestly no level seem to be working I mean it depends on Donald Trump's breakfast at what what kind of a mood he has today and he says something else and you know suddenly the world markets are down by two percent and someday he for some very fine day he has he had a great night so he'll just say in the market that you know everything is coming to an end and markets are up two percent so I think it's very important that one in this volatile markets one you have to stay very very cautious carry very limited positions and three you have to be very very particular about hedging your positions whichever side positions you are taking so if you're not hedging you're out of market and it can go nowhere it's just like a toss of a coin right if it's heads and you over you are betting

Utsav Somani: on head you will make money but why do you want to do it but if I'm not a trader like suppose through when I don't trade actively in the public markets and do you still recommend dollar cost averaging or just sip as a recommended mode of entry into the market yes indeed at this point

Pranit Arora (Univest): in time should you increase your sip by 25 percent of whatever you were doing on a monthly basis in my opinion 100 percent yes but should you be going rampantly like completely go out and suddenly start investing completely if you have a lump sum amount maybe no

Utsav Somani: all right so univest is basically positioned as an advisory first brokerage so you have I mean the layer which makes it smart for people to take these calls when the market is going up going down like you mentioned why can't zerodha or grow come into this category as well

Pranit Arora (Univest): okay so honestly if you look at zerodha as an ecosystem they have been doing it for years now it is not like they have not been doing they have been integrated with almost they have created a very massive ecosystem and I have the deepest of respect for Nitin and Nikhil but at the same time I think being advisory first is a very very different ball game like on a bad day when nothing is coming when it's a completely sideways market but you know as a transaction first broker who has 100 percent of the monetization linked to the transactions and if you are a full-stack broker you are bound to kind of still say that okay these are the over pot stocks these are the oversold stocks there's a breakout observed in the stocks etc etc etc because they have to monetize the transactions for me it is not the case I am already charging 5500 rupees as an yearly LTV for any particular consumer on the research basis so I'll stay silent when the markets will bounce back I will I know that you know you know I'll make money for the users so that's a very different psychology as a whole that's a very different go-to market as a whole when you are just being a broker the execution becomes very very different right and that that's what makes all the difference because shifting from the one side of things which is fetching you like 1500 crores 2000 crores and profits every year to this side of things which you will have to build it completely differently and also at the same time at a second level you will be kind of penalized or punished by the public when you will go wrong on some cases so how do you navigate that path that fear of getting penalized sometimes when you go wrong in a different way or the other how do you navigate through that also becomes a challenge so I think these are the two three major challenges because of which lot of brokers do not move to this side of things primarily as a monetization technique and that's what kind of made a different path for universe tough one to follow but thankfully I think it has really proven to be a decently okay

Utsav Somani: one so far what's been the revenue journey for you like there's some 3.5x growth year on year almost yeah so uh during a public anything that's publicly available yeah so I mean first year we

Pranit Arora (Univest): generated 72 lakhs in revenue second year we were at 9 crores third year we were at 44 crores this year we are closing about 130 or 120 to 130 crores next year we are gunning for 400 crores

Dhruv Sharma: impressive yes thank you and to do this Pranik I mean advisory first to render advised scale or personalized advised scale how do you build an organization how do you build systems that

Pranit Arora (Univest): even allow that in the first place uh I think to be very honest we are the category creators in this market uh despite being just 0.1 0.5 percent of the market share so far in terms of the number of active users uh or in terms of the number of actual retail investors like if you take unique investors we are 0.5 percent of the market uh I think and then also if we are saying that we are the largest in India in terms of a single largest RA who is having these many clients so we are creating the rules of this particular journey and I think that really allows us to kind of do certain mistakes which somebody else has not done it right so I think what we have learned over the period is one remain transparent with the users to never compromise on quality with the research calls the day your north star metric starts going away from average returns per number of days to let's say number of transactions and revenue and everything you will be penalized big time because you will be playing a short-term game versus a long-term bet which you have taken on the advisory market so I think staying consistent with the performance consistently improving your research quality because every week there will be new things there will be new imagine like a you know contest of Goldman Sachs getting democratized at as low as four rupees per day now for public so if you have to do that then you have to behave like one that you have to keep on constantly improving that research quality again and again and again and again and I think that's really helped us in kind of creating the entire playbook of democratizing

Dhruv Sharma: the advisory services. This is reminding me of a quote from Ken Griffin of Citadel Pranath which I think he says that you know we're a research company trading is how we monetize our research. Good quote.

Utsav Somani: And talking about trading F&O forms 60 to 65 percent of your revenue and in volatile times like these people must be preserving cash or just doing a wait and watch approach or do they enjoy the volatility that's the first part and second what does the business look like for Univest when I mean these F&O traders go away what we've seen according to at least data that Nitin puts out regularly on his ex as well.

Pranit Arora (Univest): Sure one do the trading volumes to answer your first question do the trading volumes go down during the tough markets the answer is yes obviously the data is available in public too right at this point in time what has really helped us and probably in the next 12 months also the F&O volumes continue to shrink down what we have in the last 12 months we really followed one single approach which is the problem you know the approach of diversification so within the last 11 months we have diversified across five new products so just from just being an equity F&O advisory company to launching commodities advisory much before the silver gold rally actually started and obviously we did not predict this much amount of rally which we saw in silver and gold but yeah I mean we clearly saw that when the markets are going down commodities will go up that was a commonsensical thing and we kind of launched it so that became 20 percent of the revenue within no time we also launched long-term baskets basis again what the consumer said that boss now the risk reward ratios are good we are sitting at 19p multiple forward 12 month looking what is the attractive you know small caps can you suggest a sum and we don't want to look at your app day in day out it pains us because a lot of losses are already there so I don't want to open a stock market app so that came that that's when you know the basket product came into existence then we launched brokerage app within the same super app and finally the mutual fund advisory so I think the key has been to diversify across different products and when some products are going down as a business you kind of start pushing the other products which are relevant for a consumer at that point in time so yes even if fno goes down we are I think decently enough prepared to diversify the revenue streams from a to b because of the multiple product theory which have you made any public claims about what

Utsav Somani: percentage of your calls are profitable for your users yeah so I mean as per SEBI we cannot

Pranit Arora (Univest): you know put it on our social media platforms or put it on advertisements so we'll never be doing that but on the app once you sign up you can clearly like read the terms and conditions and you are doing a one-to-one thing so obviously those percentages are available for you to see till date it has been over 83 percent of the overall calls we have produced over 3300 plus calls so far in the last four years and out of them 83 percent of the calls have been closed in profits so and it has it is like publicly vetted it is like every single second what price did we close at it is available for the users to see and to confirm I think we've shared some stuff

Utsav Somani: let me just disclaim everything by saying that guys anyone who's listening in none of this is financial advice please do your own research and make sure that you're aware of the risks of the instrument that you're participating in and be very very careful I think there's a lot of financial scams and everything that's going around in the world I think it's always good to be careful and I think what's just it's just a scary world that we live in it's digital but it's also scary at the same time so yeah throw any final couple of closing questions

Dhruv Sharma: right what's in the pipeline I mean we are like one calendar year one quarter into this calendar year what's in the pipeline for the upcoming three and it's a new financial year also

Pranit Arora (Univest): now nothing I think today just very interesting app we are also launching a multi-app theory so we are launching a new app for the premium users just one thing which I can reveal right now in which is a trades app app where you know it's going to be a basket of algo products depending on everyone's risk profile so you just need to click once and stay busy with let's say the podcast also and the money will be handled by univest in the form of basket of algos depending on your risk profile so we are launching a new app primarily for the upper middle segment and the hnx and yeah I'll target you guys too in fact a related question Pranath would be I mean how do

Dhruv Sharma: you guys think about segmentation maybe let that be a closing question for you yeah I actually have

Utsav Somani: a fun one after that oh yes because our names were mentioned and AI was mentioned so yeah

Pranit Arora (Univest): sure um so we okay so as a mission we were very very clear that we are going to target the masses and uh you know the masses the mass retail segment of the society and everything is you know stuck around that since day zero um it's we target typically annual income of 5 lakh to 50 lakh that is what the target segment is today the major problem is all the wealth-related solutions if you look at be it aifs be it pmss be it so on and so forth all the solutions are meant for hnis and the ultra hnis of the country but what about the middle segment even a bank rm calls them once in a year and just says boss I'm your bank rm that's it right nobody helps them so we were the ones even the pricing if you will look at a person spends 20 rupees a day in buying one cigarette we are charging them five rupees per day for creating their health so at one point he's losing health by paying 20 and he can create wealth by foot charge giving five rupees to us so that's what we target um males unfortunately in india are like more traders and investors so 97 percent of our target audience is male so far a group would be 25 to 45 years of age uh like that is what is coming on the platform but i believe that every demat account holder should be the one who should eventually be targeted and we should have solutions for

Utsav Somani: and in this world of ai like i keep spending time on x and i keep seeing these i mean i don't know how much of ai you've played around with and maybe you've gone deep as well but people are creating these bots which are given like thousand dollars and then they end up trading for them and somehow they wake up with like three million dollars i don't know how much of that is real or hypothetical people are creating these poly market bots people are creating these public market bots so what's your uh theory in all of this because you mentioned algos and you mentioned ai so i thought um i'll ask you this question have you played around with stuff like this and do you see a future where ai might be learning and algos and like doing these trades

Pranit Arora (Univest): for you so um okay so i'll break this into two parts one will ai play a significant role i think it has been playing a significant role in the last one year and without technology and advancement this i think it would not have been possible for us to kind of democratize advisory at one level i mean can you imagine one rnr company is catering to over 50 000 clients it would not have been possible without technology and our gross margins are to the tune of 97 all right i mean i don't know whether i should be saying that in public or not but yeah i mean that that's the case now whether this putting three thousand dollars to making it three million in overnight i mean it's like you know that dream 11 thing which is like so i mean it is like the only cases which get highlighted are these ones so you can imagine well imagine there would be no shoe cobbler and vegetable vendor in the entire country because everybody would have been a millionaire then so it it practically doesn't exist net net it's a zero-sum game so we have to stay cautious from all these bots and other scammy activities yes bots to help but if utilized in the right way not the three three thousand

Utsav Somani: dollars to a three million journey all right that's a good word of caution to end this uh segment with and thank you so much for coming on the show pranav all the very best thank you so thank you dhruv for having me here all right dhruv uh new day for new media let's wrap this up it's a good friday and easter on sunday and anyone who's celebrating wishing you a wonderful wonderful weekend and stay safe thank you bye