Summary

Episode 89 features three founders across distinct deep-tech domains. Abhishek Sahu of DreamSpan introduces adaptive health technology starting with sleep — the DreamSpan Lucid Pro, a smart mattress system that uses contactless bio-sensing, temperature regulation, and anti-snoring elevation to optimize sleep without behavioral change. Naman Shah of NowPurchase discusses building India's largest B2B metal procurement marketplace serving 200+ foundries, recently raising 80 crore from Bajaj, and insights on India's manufacturing story. Awais Ahmed of Pixxel, a returning guest, discusses India's first orbital data center satellite (Pathfinder) in partnership with Sarvam, the Gigapixel manufacturing facility expansion to 100-satellite capacity, and partnerships with NRO, Cosmoserve, and ExoTrail in a landmark week for Indian space tech.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners, and welcome back to the Friday stream of the Offline Network. Today's show is the kind of show that Utsav and I absolutely love. The reason for that is we have three founders building in, you know, absolutely distinct domains. We've got sleep, space, and then the world of B2B procurement. Before we introduce our first guest, we actually have a video from his company. So our first guest today is Abhishek Sahu of DreamSpan, and we have a video of his company.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): For billions of years, our biology evolved in response to our environment. But in the last 300 years, technological progress changed our environment faster than evolution could ever match. The gap between our slow evolving biology and rapidly changing environment is what we call the evolutionary delta, and is driving many of today's greatest health challenges. DreamSpan is an evolution research and product company. We build technologies that bridge the evolutionary delta to advance the human health span. The foundation to a great health span starts with sleep.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I mean, I have to, I'll ask you separately off-air, how much did it cost to make this Apple-style launch video, but Abhishek, welcome to the show, good to be connected again. Let's start with the atomic unit that you're discussing here, sleep. What are we Indians doing wrong?

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Great to reconnect. To answer your question, you know, I don't think Indians are doing anything wrong, right? Like every health influencer, every wearable company just tells you, you know, go to sleep at this time, you know, wake up at this time, take like, like, I'm just fed up of that personally. We will build technologies that will, you know, automatically improve health and in this case sleep. And that's the view that I take. You know, I don't like to tell my father to eat less rice because he's like biologically wired to, you know, enjoy the rice because I mean he's like literally living in an ancient body, right? His reward system is like millions of years old. At that time there was no rice, there was no agriculture revolution, right? So it's like nobody's doing anything wrong. We are just, you know, living in ancient bodies in a futuristic world and we will build technologies that that will fix this.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next guest. Uh, the second one for today, Naman of Now Purchase. Naman, welcome to the show.

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): So sure. You know, everything around us in the physical world is made out of metal, whether it's cars, whether it's electronics, whether it's data centers, the ability to procure raw materials, which manufacture these metals, and the technology which goes behind making these metals is still very primitive. It has not gone through much change in the last few decades. And Now Purchase is sitting at the intersection of procurement and production for the metal manufacturing industry. In India itself, it's a $140 billion metal manufacturing industry. From a business perspective scale, we sell over 50 crores worth of raw materials every month on the platform. We have over 200 factories who are using our technology today.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, to top off the week, we have our final guest today, Awais, who's a returning guest and he's coming out of a week, which is a very big week for the India space tech industry. So Awais, welcome to the show. Always glad to be back.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Absolutely. And I think as they say, right, there are years where nothing happens and then there are weeks where years happen. Seems like one of those weeks for the Indian space tech ecosystem. So the Pathfinder mission is India's first orbital data center satellite. AI is the word everywhere. You can see all the hyperscalers and the major frontier labs clamoring for more and more compute. And building data centers is getting more and more difficult on ground, right? You need more and more power. There are different regulatory concerns. So where do you go when you need more power? You know, there's no more power than what the sun provides us. And once you go into space, we have almost unlimited amount of it. Booking a launch has become as easy as booking a train now almost earlier. I think, you know, let's go back 10 years, maybe booking a launch meant either you had to book, you know, a base amount to build you an entire Ferrari or an entire rocket for yourself.

Utsav Somani: Perfect, Kavesh. Thank you for coming on our show and inspiring the next gen of space tech entrepreneurs throughout India, wishing you all the very best on this journey. Thanks. Cheers. Awesome. Dhruv, I don't know why we do this, man. It is just phenomenal. The kind of learnings that we get in a particular week, like just the show itself. We've had three founders, space tech, manufacturing metals and of course, Greenspan in the beginning as well.