Summary

Episode 87 features Saurabh Pandey, Founder & CEO of Eloelo Group, discussing the rise of micro-dramas and live social entertainment in India through their products Story TV and Master. Saurabh explains how Eloelo is building a mobile-first entertainment ecosystem for the next billion users, with impressive unit economics and 85+ minute daily engagement on Story TV. The second guest, Kiran Gopinath of Sahamati Labs, explains India's Account Aggregator open finance framework — a consent-based data sharing system enabling 24,000 crores in monthly loan transactions. Kiran discusses how Sahamati is expanding into AI-powered fraud detection (IKEA platform), cross-border interoperability, and building agentic AI on top of the AA framework. The episode closes with hosts discussing a TON retreat to Darjeeling with Alt Carbon, a climate tech company working on enhanced rock weathering.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners and welcome back. This is our first live stream of May. We are sitting with the founder of EloElo and now Story TV, Saurabh Pandey. Saurabh, welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us.

Saurabh Pandey (Eloelo Group): Thanks Dhruv. Thanks Utsav. Thanks for having me.

Utsav Somani: Welcome Saurabh. So let's introduce the group to our listeners. You have a live streaming game show. You have Master, which is the education vertical. And then you've got the micro dramas, which is of course, Story TV and it's blowing up. So how do these verticals fit in together?

Saurabh Pandey (Eloelo Group): Yeah, I think that's a great segue, you know, as a group itself. So we like to think of ourselves as building sort of the entertainment destination for the entire next billion user set. Sort of like reimagining traditional television for a very mobile first audience. If you think of traditional television, it had two, three very large components. One used to be the general entertainment channels, which was your soap operas, GCs, as you may call it. That for us is micro dramas, because it's the same vibe. It's the same equivalent where you're watching something which is very engaging. It is typically fiction. It will involve family dramas, corporate dramas, many, many genres there. Then there used to be the thoughts and opinions, discovery channels, news channels, which will give you information and opinions and hopefully satiate your curiosity. That's where master comes in. Master is like, think of it as an edutalk product, where within one minute, we are able to land a concept to you. So simplifying concepts, typically through AI generated or human assisted videos in one minute. And we have the interaction side. Think of that as channel V, RJs, VJs, who are communicating with people. That's the elo elo connector side, where there are creators who are streaming and having their own live channels together. We're trying to build like this AI enabled entertainment ecosystem.

Utsav Somani: So I think before we go into the industry and your separate products as well, I think I want to ask the most important question. Your numbers, they're pretty, pretty insane. I mean, 23 million to 230 million in ARR. That is impressive. So what is behind all of this growth? And you started monetization late in your journey as well, I believe 2024.

Saurabh Pandey (Eloelo Group): So I won't comment on the numbers fully because we'll wait for our, you know, reports and our filings to sort of happen more formally. But, you know, the growth has been phenomenal. The team has out executed in every sort of domain. Couple of factors which have contributed to this. One has been really sort of sticking to our competency of understanding entertainment and video really well. We started as a video cross entertainment product and we picked the highest friction as a category. The toughest category to crack is usually live. That taught us a lot about how do you build live IPs? How do you solve for latency? How do you solve for entertainment in a category which is appointment viewing led? From there, we branched out to async, which was through micro dramas. And that really hit a huge inflection point for us. And in the last few months, we've been able to get to micro learning as well as a category which sort of completed the entire tripecta. So the growth has been interesting, but the growth also comes with the really phenomenal unit economics. And genuinely, what I'm really excited about beyond the growth has been some serious engagement and retention numbers. So what's been really heartening is especially on story TV, right? The average user now is spending close to about 85 to 87 minutes per DAO per day. So that essentially shows that you're able to get meaningful mindshare from users.

Dhruv Sharma: I fundamentally believe that nobody, just like none of us now read magazines anymore, right? Do we read magazines? We don't read magazines. I think fundamentally five years later, nobody's going to watch linear television.

Kiran Gopinath (Sahamati Labs): So the account aggregator framework is India's open finance framework. It has been named account aggregator, you know, which went back almost 10 years ago. The account aggregator framework enables consumers, people like you and me, to share our financial information from banks to other financial service providers for services. So it could be for a loan. It could be for insurance. It could be for personal finance management. It could be for wealth management and so on and so forth. The total number of loans that are closed to the ecosystem is about 24,000 crores a month, right? The usage is huge. We are probably the largest open finance ecosystem in the world today that exists. So IKEA is essentially our fraud management platform. So the first fraud that we've been working on is a loan fraud, where we are looking at detecting loan frauds in real time. So the Google Cloud partnership has been essentially to build many of these platforms. So for example, we use confidential computing in these platforms so that we don't see any data, neither does Google see any data or any of the other participants.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next segment. We have Kiran with us from Sahamati Labs. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on our show today and sharing your journey with us, Kiran. Thank you.

Kiran Gopinath (Sahamati Labs): Thank you for having me.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. All right, Dhruv, do you want to talk about the weekend that we just had in Darjeeling with one of the guests who's come on the show, Alt Carbon?

Dhruv Sharma: I definitely want to talk about the weekend. So basically, I think we went to Darjeeling or a town nearby called Siripuri, where we based 20 founders there. And I think the idea was to spend two days with this company called Alt Carbon. You should check them out. Awesome design company doing real serious stuff in climate tech. They've delivered the first enhanced rock weathering mechanisms, carbon credits extracted from that mechanism. And they've got clients like Mitsubishi, Stripe, Google.

Utsav Somani: See you on Wednesday. Bye-bye.