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Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, I mean, it's a, I think under the circumstances, this is just as best an outcome as anyone could have expected. It's also consolidation in the sector. The company has found a new home, looks like Gaurav is going to stay on. I think we know from his tweets that he's been spending a lot of time on this company called Airlearn, which is more like an everyday learning app. You can learn a language on it, but you can also learn how to play chess. And that product also lives inside the company. And hopefully, Chapter 2 is going to prove to be just as great as the first one, with its ups and downs.

Utsav Somani: And then we've got Peak 15 alumni launching another fund, 250 million, with Shailesh and Harshit Shetty being joined by Mayank to launch this fund. The focus is digital sovereignty. That's the philosophy and backing Indian founders building for domestic and global tech, basically. I mean, a lot of spin-offs have happened. And this, I think, is exciting to watch because we've got two senior people from Peak 15 coming together to launch. So, of course, they come with their own credibility, their experience, and their time in the ecosystem. And they've all backed solid companies before, Sarvamiya, Minimalist, Zetwork, Xego. So they've seen seed to IPO stories as well play out.

Dhruv Sharma: They have. This is the beginning of the Peak Mafia. These guys are calling themselves Ambition Capital, right?

Utsav Somani: Ambition Capital, that's a pretty awesome name. Let's talk about something non-AI, but I think he has this element of physical AI going for him. Travis Kalanick is back. He renames his company City Storage Systems to Atoms. And he came on TVPN to talk about this briefly. But he's put out this nice manifesto, which I think you've spent time reading up on.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. In the manifesto, he basically says that when we look around us, everything that we see either has been, you know, it's been grown, or it's been mined, or it's been manufactured, or it's been moved. And all of those things require human labor. And his new thing is about, you know, slowly and steadily removing human labor from, you know, these four things. And then he talks about another interesting concept in the realm of physical intelligence, which is not general purpose robotics, but really, I think he calls it gainfully employed robots. In other words, you know, you don't need one of those guys who do like swivel kicks to be making pancakes, you know, in an industrial kitchen. All you require is a robot who knows how to make pancakes in an industrial kitchen.

Utsav Somani: And he talks about, I mean, the interesting part is that he owned the full stack. So he started off with owning real estate when he did these food delivery kitchens. And he wants to go full way up, like manufacture, control data, control software, control real estate, every single thing in that stack. And that's why he makes a claim where Tesla is the Google of this era, because Tesla is literally collecting human world AI data at scale. I don't think there's any other company on this planet, which collects that level of human and real time.

Dhruv Sharma: And it's all real data. It's not even synthetic data or anything.

Utsav Somani: And now they're repurposing some of their lines to manufacture the humanoid machines as well. So I think it'll be interesting to see how the physical AI world plays out, because he thinks that AI software, I think, will be commoditized. What will remain is how you actually translate that to move atoms. And that's why the name atoms of this company. Atoms. Yes.

Dhruv Sharma: Do you see the clip on TVPN?

Dhruv Sharma: He's like, yeah, the viral clip. He says that someone told him that he asked someone, hey, how do you how do you raise? And he's like, I throw them a deck. And I said, no, that's not a thing. You know, what's the thing is you go really far. And then when it hurts is something like that.

Utsav Somani: But he talks about his fundraising strategies so nicely. Like he said that the masa money era was too easy. So he wants to make it hard. Like he wants to like, I mean, his best time fundraising at Uber was when he put like these different VCs in different rooms and like basically made them bid against each other and crazy times and crazy times. I mean, what are you doing? The tables single handedly willed this industry into existence. Like I think most of the delivery apps that we have like are probably because somebody figured out how Uber can do all of these things on the fly on demand deliveries. So all of that, I think, is birth of.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, from a very polarizing leader. I mean, I don't know how much of this is rhetoric versus truth, but he's the only leader in Silicon Valley who people would use the term, you know, his his team would go to war for him if if if time came. And so there's always had like a cultish following around him. And it's great to have him do his second innings now. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: Looking forward to it. He ends this manifesto with a very strong para, which I think people have posted. Anyone who's watching this do follow that one hour interview that he did on TV. And I think it's phenomenal. Also, read the manifesto. He talks about when people asked him, like, when are you getting back in the game or waiting for you to come back in the game? He ends the manifesto by saying I never left. So Travis Kalanick, we're doing it with style. All right. Let's welcome our very first guest, Rishabh.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Welcome to T.O.N. Thanks for having me at 7th and Truth.

Utsav Somani: It's awesome. So we have a bunch of common friends, Sahil and Kashish. They're in our ecosystem.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): And the last time we met each other was Kashish's pre-wedding bachelor party.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, absolutely.

Dhruv Sharma: I still remember that very fondly. Yes.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. So let's introduce your work to our listeners. What are you doing now?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): I work at this place called Epic. We're building essentially for about a billion people in India and the global south. So we call these entrepreneurial households, which is essentially think of them as the missing middle in the pyramid of where people come. And so we work with businesses that work with these customers by providing them location intelligence to help them go to the right markets and within those markets. So imagine a bank or a financial services company or a diagnostic chain or a hospital deciding to go into quote unquote product. So we help them figure out where to go inside tier three to six markets and expand that. Before that, I built and ran the sales side of scottstack.ai for about 10 years before I took a step back last year.

Dhruv Sharma: You want to talk a little more about location? Did you say location intelligence or locational intelligence?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Location intelligence.

Dhruv Sharma: What's this about?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): So location intelligence is essentially India is 650 districts, 19,000 pin codes, six lakh villages. But you can look inside a village as well and be very, very micro. And what we, you know, when we say there's no census for the last, whatever, 15 years, there's no data to go around and in tier three markets. So imagine anything outside the top 30, 40 cities of this country, right? The area is physically very large, which means location is the new business intelligence. What we do is we've sort of built a hyper local location models to say, okay, where's the population? Where are the buildings? Where are the businesses? Where are the roads? Where are the banks?

Dhruv Sharma: Where are the next storefront come about? This is not a logistics problem.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): It's a market expansion problem. Yeah, it could be an expansion problem. It could also be an optimization problem. Where should you put your team? Where are your customers concentrated? Where are your white spaces? So today, a lot of our work in early beta is with banks and BFCs, microfinance institutions, hospitals, diagnostic chains, companies working with schools in these markets, where we basically tell them the 101 of strategy, where to go and how to win, but with location.

Utsav Somani: Interesting. And Google also recently announced that they're bringing Gemini to maps. I think it was a couple of days ago. So, and will they, I mean, what's your unique advantage in terms of data sources, in terms of how you're collecting this data? How does it remain as a mode for you? And how does Google bringing Gemini into this picture help you?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Obviously, I mean, Google does a lot of things, right? So the way we see it is there is a forward deployed engineer that sort of works here because data on its own is not the answer. It is the aggregation of one different kind of data sets contextualized for your business. So imagine a bank and a microfinance company will have an office in the same building, but where they acquire customers will be very different. So your context of your business and how that applies is very critical. So all our work is custom models for each team that we work with in order to sort of help them figure out what makes sense for them. Google actually is an important partner in a lot of our work as well. So it's not just about, we can piggyback on a lot of what they're doing and they're building world models. They may not just build something for India.

Utsav Somani: Correctly paraphrasing this by saying that you're trying to replace like one layer, which is the consulting layer, which most of these banks or businesses typically rely on for business intelligence.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): That may be one of the ambitions, like a consultant with a map.

Dhruv Sharma: Layers is a very interesting analogy because at the end of the day, maps are nothing but just layers and layers of information.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's still not the information. It's what do I do with it? Teams do not want to look at one more dashboard or one more report anymore. People's ability to process information post AI has actually gone down. And so people just want answers to say, what do I now do with this? And I think that's really where a big shift is coming between just staring at a map and saying, how do I actually use this to drive increased 15 percentage points increase in conversion rate in this market? And that is something that leadership wants to drive across the board. So it's almost like distribution transformation. We're doing digital work already, that's happening. But a lot of products get distributed physically across a variety of very core spaces, healthcare, education, financial services, scaling. And it's really about how you play in that physical realm, like you guys were talking about atoms. And I know there's a lot of work that's happening there. But when we look at the state of our nation and the middle, underserved middle segment of customers, there's a lot more that needs to be done. So that's where we play.

Utsav Somani: And what are the industries or sectors you've found good uptake for your product and offering?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Financial services is primarily like the biggest space, like for anyone in India, really BFSI is the biggest space because a loan is a loan, right? It's repeatable. But aside from that, we only focus on core solutions. So healthcare, financial services, education, scaling, MSME, Agri, core solutions that are still underserved in a lot of ways.

Utsav Somani: Would it work for a dark store where like say Blinkit wants to set up a store, say some sort of store or like even remote? Yeah, exactly.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): So that's actually a good use case. Our current focus is anything outside the top 30, 40 cities, because that's a whole other modeling requirement. So if they're going to open a dark store in, let's say Aurangabad, sure, a hundred percent that could come in.

Dhruv Sharma: Can you do some myths busting for us, Rishabh, outside of the first 30 or 40 cities? What are the actual consumption behaviors of patents like, what does it mean to like deliver services?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Yeah. I mean, that's one of the big reasons why we built this was we want to represent the quantitative voice of this household, which we call an entrepreneurial household, because the way these households run is it is not a single decision. That's a collective decision. There is formal sources of income and informal sources of income. And they're taking decisions as a collective. And there are 250 million such households. What's very interesting is that a lot of them live in like, you know, pukka houses. They're investing in their growth constantly. They will pay a premium for quality service. You know, some of the most interesting things that we've seen on ground is you will have an area which doesn't have schools, but has a lot of coaching centers. And so someone might think, hey, this area can't afford a good school. But if you actually open a good school there, it will work because people will spend on that education. Same with D2C brands. There is premiumization across a variety of categories in these markets. It's a myth that, you know, this India 2, India 3 doesn't have a lot of potential. They are willing to pay for high quality products and services, especially when it is discretionary spending, not non-discretionary spending like food and staples, but like discretionary spending on healthcare, education, financial services. There is a lot of appetite to pay for quality. And very, very few businesses today understand this very well.

Dhruv Sharma: What does a demographic slicing of the data tell you, Rishabh? People by age?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): That data is actually unfortunately very difficult to come by right now, given the census has not happened.

Dhruv Sharma: It's going to happen this year, right? The census is open. It's been long overdue.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): We'll see when it comes out, but it's actually very different. Like, I mean, if you think about it, one very interesting trend is household sizes are very different compared to South versus North, for example, right? Like those are some instances of like, just it's, India is not one, four people per household average, right? It's very different across the spectrum. Education levels obviously vary across the board. Percentage of women in, you know, employment are very different. So there's obviously lots of stats that get thrown around. We like to think micro as much as possible. We don't even like high level district type models. We like to go very deep because yeah, district averages are fine. Another very interesting thing is mutual funds. 20% of mutual fund now is outside the top 30 cities and that's growing at a 40% CAGR. So that's another thing that you can look at.

Utsav Somani: Let's talk a little bit about your time at Squadstack. You were the head of GDM there and at a time I think when Squadstack was building for India, notoriously hard, go-to-market, selling to Indian enterprises. What was one counterintuitive thing that you learned across this process that you're implementing now?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): I mean, so when Squad, I joined Squadstack in November 2015 and soon became co-founder. And so we sort of saw all the waves. We first started and then one of our investors told us that don't build for India, go to America. And then the pandemic hit and then we came back to India. Then we worked with startups in India, which was great. And then startups lost all the money. Then we moved to enterprises. So it was a whole rollercoaster journey. I think the biggest shift, let's say more recently that I like to believe has happened is we like to think of startups as first mover, right? Like, oh, I'm going to go build this with a startup and somehow they'll go get bigger. Today enterprises are actually far more innovative, like a bank, a large NBFC, a corporate like a Tata Group and so on. They'll all have startup arms incubating, giving you access to the right teams inside. They're willing to fund innovation. And that is a very, very big shift. They are now becoming early adopter in a lot of cases. So people used to fear enterprise sales in India. It's still hard, but there is room for a lot more innovation. The problem, however, is that in a market like India, there's this phrase that we use called CYA, cover your ass. People do not take decisions. So you have to go top down. Like if you want to get anything meaningfully done in a large org, you have to go from the CEO's office and below. Otherwise, there is enough and more politics and people trying to sort of stall you from doing what you want to do. So bottom up rarely works in India, which unlike the U.S. market, there is a lot more room for something like that. India is a much more top heavy, top down market. That's probably not changed. In fact, it's increased because people are more risk averse and more...

Dhruv Sharma: When you're sitting inside of an enterprise, you know, the person who knows what you're really talking about is a different person from the one who has a budget in many cases.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): That's always going to be the case, but people don't want to change things. It's the CEO or the leadership who wants to actually drive a change agenda. And then they are the ones who can rally the org around them. But bottom up is slow and difficult in a lot of ways.

Utsav Somani: You're probably the user who's actually going to use the product versus the person paying for it versus the person driving the adoption. I think it's all different parts.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): You need to get everyone's buy-in still. You need to get the users aligned. You need to have all of that. But getting anything meaningful to change needs top down blessing almost always.

Utsav Somani: In the world of AI, how do you think GTM changes? Most of them are self-fulfills, but at enterprise level adoption, do you think that's true?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Yeah. Just because you sold co-pilot licenses to a team doesn't mean they'll become AI native tomorrow. It simply doesn't work. I think with AI, my one big hypothesis is that people don't know what good looks like. So a lot of times it's like, oh, you're trying to do something, but a lot of it fails because you don't know what good looks like because the person implementing the AI may not be the subject matter expert. My hypothesis is it's probably a two people team always about one is a subject matter expert and one is someone who can actually get things done with the AI and they can sort of iterate and move fast. There is product-led growth, obviously, but there are a lot of me-too products. People are tired of buying more dashboards and customers anyway hate paying for SaaS. So we see more outcome focused things come in. But enterprise adoption is still one very, very big question mark for a lot of teams because they're happy to do lots of imagination, but getting in and deploying it, which is the Palantir playbook of call it a forward deployed engineer. It's the Valley keyword, right? It's easier to do that in India because cost of resources are much lower, but that may be one of the most important things that large teams are doing. You have Anthropic and OpenAI now set up offices in India, taking some of this enterprise playbooks to market as well. So PLG is fine for testing things, but you really need to get in the weeds in these large orgs to have those deep embedded workflow modes, data modes, so that your piping is sort of well secured and you can have more sticky revenue going forward.

Dhruv Sharma: Back to your early point about leaders driving change. What's the field report on again, leaders driving adoption across financial services companies, other large institutions?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): It's definitely something that's top of mind for people. I just, people don't know how, I think. Lots of people don't know how. It's like show of hands who can prompt, great. What do you use it for? Oh, I used it to write emails. It's not moving the needle fast enough, far enough, and layoffs are not the answer, obviously. You can't just cut people and say, okay, now you see and figure it out.

Dhruv Sharma: I think maybe the answer is like get the most expensive subscription, then use it to do the toughest thing. And then maybe you'll learn a thing or two.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Yeah. But people think everything's a magic wand, right? Like, which is the point of like, what does good look like? I've seen so many people not having the patience to do one iteration and then say, oh, the output is simply not good enough. And I don't believe in this and I'm going to move on. It's very hard to sort of stay persistent and continuously test and iterate from where you are to where you want to be and have a space where people can try and fail. Like if you, one of the leaders I was listening to recently said something very nice. He said, I've not made it a people CRA to say use AI, because if that becomes a CRA, that becomes a whole other misalignment and incentive issue. Right now, the focus is just on as many experiments as possible. And then, you know, maybe next year, we'll think about how does that feed into your PR is to say, this is how much automation should reduce PNL and so on. So I think teams are still fast as well, right?

Utsav Somani: I think the world, I mean, every six months, there's a better model, there's a better way of doing things. And I think for organizations to adapt to one thing and like spend the resources to educating the entire company about one particular tool or offering or a workflow, and then six months later, it's probably redundant. So I think a lot of it's, I mean, it's good to mention in earning calls, but I think it's wait and watch as well.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Maybe it's my very much an individual thing right now. And obviously, there are large, this is a top of mind question in board meetings, every every day. But I don't think anyone has a clear demonstrable playbook on case study to say here is exactly how you do this. I think everyone's figuring it out. And I think some teams have champions inside who are constantly tinkering with systems and early adopters and demonstrating new tools to teams, taking new products to market, showing what's possible, showing what good looks like. And lots of teams have these evangelist champions whose it's not their job to do this. They're just AI enthusiasts. And if you have those guys in your team, those are gems that you keep around and give them more problems to work with, I guess.

Utsav Somani: Garry Tan made this post where he said, I think a VC posted where the number one hire that a CEO should make is an AI transformation engineer. And Garry Tan said that that's the CEO's job. But coming back to Squadstack, so voice agents is a use case, which is getting deployed pretty actively. Eleven Labs is also a company that is set up shop in India. Sarvam, OpenAI, everything I think is playing into this voice. OpenAI, like Eleven and Sarvam definitely are and Squadstack is also entering that space. How do you see this space evolving?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): Hard to say. I'm maybe not the right person to answer this. I left last year before Squadstack took on this journey. Probably should get Apurv on this call and I'm sure he has a much better answer than I do. There's an industry product market fit wave right now, which is a good thing always. Like when the market is pulling you towards a wave and those are the times when companies just like the companies that are ready to capitalize on this opportunity are almost like Mark Andreessen said this is like timing is something you don't control. Being ready just before the market gets hot is what you what you can really like, you know, play the game long enough so you're ready when the market sort of hits lift off. Markets hit lift off. That much is clear.

Utsav Somani: Is it a combination of cost for a minute which is cheaper or is it better service for everyone at scale?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): It's about outcome. I see cost is a the cost of broadly whatever like two bucks, three bucks, four bucks. It doesn't matter. It's outcomes because one thing that's not changed even before voice AI is the cost of let's say if you look at sales, the cost of customer acquisition or even support, the cost of a customer lead is just increasing linearly. In fact, exponentially in so many cases, it's harder, much harder to generate. So no matter what you do on the calling side, the lead will still be very expensive, which means it's always going to be a function of outcomes. I don't think cost will play a huge role. That's at least my assessment of it.

Dhruv Sharma: Of course, depends on which segment we're talking about at the bottom, the funnel aren't agents also generating leads?

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): They are. Yes. But that means you need a larger top of the funnel data set for, let's say, some kind of cold calling campaign, which has its own set of problems. People are not answering your phone. So there are lots of these tailwinds or the headwinds also that are sort of affecting this, right? Like if people answer fewer phones because everyone can call you now. That's, by the way, like the minute you buy a car in India, your name goes on a database of high net worth individual. I'm not saying H&I was a traditional definition, but 40 lakh cars are sold in India every year. That data set is sold everywhere. So everyone who's spam calling you, I'm not saying, and obviously God and others, we don't do use cases like this. It's not even allowed to do this, but lots of these spam calls, which come from 10 digit phone numbers, are those data sets being sold out there. And because you've suddenly bought a car, so Club Mahindra will sell you a membership and some hotel will send you something. And because you sort of reach this.

Dhruv Sharma: God forbid if you incorporate a company that day, you get more calls than if you won a Lok Sabha election.

Utsav Somani: Oh man, yeah. The current account, the current account. Do you even know when your car insurance is due? Like one of my car insurance is due. And I mean, there are like 50 people who sent quotes and like, I mean.

Rishabh Ladha (EPIC World / ex-SquadStack): All of these data sets are unfortunately out there. Yeah. Like I lived in Kalkaji back in Delhi, like I'm in Bangalore now, narrow place. You just can't buy all of this there, if you so wish, unfortunately. So if more spam calls happen, then people's ability to answer phones on genuine calls will also go down. And I think that's one concern, at least just as a consumer to keep in mind. But I think at the end of the day, it will be a function of outcomes. No question. The other day I was talking to a leader because and he said something very interesting. He said, because I call the lead faster, because a bot can call a lead faster, especially at nights when my team is not around. It actually drives more conversion for me. Forget cost. It's about speed and increased conversion. It doesn't matter. A few bucks here and there will largely change the game.

Utsav Somani: Awesome, Rishabh. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, guys. Good to see you all. Cheers. All right, listeners. Now we have Ankit from Sky Air joining us. Ankit, welcome to the show.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Hi. Thanks. Thanks. What's up?

Utsav Somani: Hi Dhruv. Good to have you on the show. Dhruv has seen your drones, but for anyone hearing about Sky drones, for the Sky Air drones for the first time, please explain what your company does.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): So we're essentially a drone delivery company. We saw this whole thing six years back with the idea that the drones are able to go to consumers and deliver to them because there's a lot of times that we have seen and it's been existing in the market since I think 2012 or 13 when Jeff Bezos went into announcing that Amazon will use drone deliveries and drones will actually go to consumers and delivers it. I think the wide amount of applications started more on the B2B front, on doing warehousing to warehousing. We wanted to pick that up and do consumer delivery and led India to become the first country to do that at such a wide scale in an urban population like Gurgaon. So Gurgaon became one of the first cities in the world to enable such things at a massive scale. So today you order from any of the e-commerce and quick commerce platforms, you order anything from your favorite B2C brands, we're there to deliver you through drones in span of seven to eight minutes.

Utsav Somani: And you've announced a 9 million series B recently with IA and Alphapond leading it and you said that you'll expand to different cities as well with this capital race. What's the scale of the business right now?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): So indeed, we wanted to do that in one city. We developed Gurgaon as sort of a model. We scaled it to two lakh deliveries in a month and that's the size of things that we did. So last two and a half years since we in Gurgaon, we did about 3.6 million deliveries, saving about 1000 tons of carbon emission, one of the very critical elements for people living in Delhi NCR. And now the time is to replicate the entire playbook, go to multiple cities and do that. So a part of the 9 million that we are raising, it's going into expanding in multiple other metropolitan cities and going deeper in the NCR belt. So we are not in Delhi, we are going to South and West of Delhi, we are going to Central of Delhi. We're looking at activating Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad and going very deep on NCR. And outside of NCR, Bangalore becomes the first city that we want expanding to. Bangalore, we just started with like five zip codes. We're looking at amplifying more in Bangalore and then add more and more cities to the entire list. We have a plan in the next two years, we want to go to three to four more cities outside of NCR and Bangalore that I spoke about and replicate this entire model. The second element, which is creating an entire ecosystem of a human list delivery that to the end to end, the entire thing is so asynchronous that the drone is able to deliver it to the Skypod and from the Skypod, the rover is able to take it and go to the doorstep and deliver you the entire stuff. I think imagining that piece of it and replicating that on ground to make it an actual reality is what we are working on right now, to go with maybe one station that we will start soon with and then go and replicate in certain other cities. So a lot of amount from the fundraise that we are doing is going towards the development of those things.

Dhruv Sharma: Ankit, this also appears to us to be the kind of business where you can't, even if you wanted, you can't like bring in, bring about explosive growth because safety is a very valid concern and you're bound by regulations.

Utsav Somani: So you cannot use words like explosive. Oh yes.

Dhruv Sharma: Oh yes. No, that's a bad word. You know, using that word at the airport can get you on the no-fly list like permanently. So that's a PSA. Don't use the word explosive bomb, any of that. Hopefully DGC is not listening to this pod. But Ankit, I was asking you, what were the initial set of permissions you guys got? And then how far did that take you? And now that you've shown valid proof over several flights, what's the next set of permission you want to unlock and where will that take you? Or is that even the right way to think about this?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Yeah, I think the regulatory framework in the country today in India is very much similar to the US, right? There's FAA, here's DGCA, which is governing the entire structure. How it works today here is if you want to…

Utsav Somani: There was a civil drone bill in 2025 also.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Sorry, come again.

Utsav Somani: There was some bill regarding civil drone usage as well in 2025, I think, which came out.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Yes, that's a draft which is yet to get into the framework and get passed through and become legit. But that's a draft which was sent out for consultation and I think the industry bombarded on that. But anyways, I mean, coming back to where we stand from the regulatory perspective is that we don't have a BB loss regulation. BB loss is beyond visual line of sight where drone delivery is typically qualified to become a part of it, air taxis become a part of it. So, what you need to do is you need to go and get a waiver on that, right? The entire airspace is classified in red, green, yellow. So, red is where it's a prohibited airspace. If you want to fly, you need multiple layers of approvals, starting from the Civil Aviation Ministry to the MOD to the MHA and whatnot, which is not easy task for anybody to take it unless they are working very closely with the agencies. The second element is the yellow zone, which is a 5 to 12 kilometer periphery of an airport. That is something that you have to take again approval and then you have to maintain a coordination with the air traffic controllers. That to maintain a coordination with the air traffic controllers, you need some mechanism to be set up in between the operator who's operating a drone and the air traffic controller essentially. I'll talk about how we are bridging in those pieces as well. And the third layer is the green zones where you can go and fly. You don't need approvals essentially to do any amount of visual line of sight flying. But even if you want to do a drone delivery sort of thing, you need several layers of approvals which needs to come in. So, what we did is we found out that the biggest challenge why people are not giving approvals, why this is super complex, is hinging around two things. One is safety and reliability and the security concerns are the second thing. Now, safety and reliability is what you can bring up with more on technology, adding layers and layers of safety protocols, have mitigation strategies that you can build in with, which we did. So, we got parachute on board, we got multiple redundancies built into the entire system, we got the visibility layer built in to the government that, hey look, we give you a UTM. UTM is an unmanned traffic management system. That gives you the access to know exactly where I'm flying, when I'm flying, how I'm flying. If I have a flight plan which I filed for it, that flight plan is intended for me to go to go from A to B. Am I following the same flight plan, etc. And be in compliance with what permissions you have got.

Dhruv Sharma: Do you have to do that before every flight or is one flight plan good for the same route for, you know, a certain amount of time?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): I think eventually we'll have to do that for every flight. It can happen that you can generate the flight plan 30 days in advance and file for it. That's what typically happens with the civil aviation, the general aircrafts that you get into. Every single aircraft, every single flight files for a flight plan.

Utsav Somani: How long is the average journey for your drone? Like how much can they carry in terms of weight? What are the unit economics like for delivery? We carry about 10 kilos.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): We cover a distance of max 15 kilometer, but we are right now operating within a seven kilometer radius. So go seven kilometers max, comes back seven kilometers. We can do 15 kilometer and come back 15 kilometer. 10 kg is what we're carrying. Now on a unit economics front, we are already at the same level where the industry is with the conventional mechanism. While we are providing an input of 10 to 15 percent cost reduction to the brands that we work with. So A, the brands are getting benefited by 10 to 15 percent cost reduction. B, we are generating 20-25 percent gross margin, which we can take it to about 50 odd percent, right? Because it's the cheapest mode of transportation that can ever happen because it's generating good amount of efficiency.

Dhruv Sharma: But you're saying on a cost per kg basis, it's comparable to just routine logistics, like if Tempo was taking a 10 kg pack, they would cost the same.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): I think that comparison is not fair. That's where we are not going. If you talk about the middle mile, that's the cheapest in this country, right? It's primarily on kg per kilometer and that's the cheapest out here. We cannot beat that ever. No drug company can beat that. If you look at the overall product logistics cost to the AOE of the product, 65 percent of the total product logistics cost goes in the last mile logistics, right? So the larger chunk is last mile. So essentially, if I have to ship a product from Delhi to Bombay, the first mile, which is the pickup and the middle mile to get to Bangalore warehouse, would barely cost me 35 percent of the overall cost. The 65 percent is taking a package from your warehouse and delivering to the consumer is 65 percent. So we went after that 65 percent on how we can reduce that, on how we can provide the impact, because it's much easier and better to provide an impact there and make value out of it for yourself and for the customers.

Utsav Somani: And India's banned imported drones from China, right? I think so. You were using Indian-made drones?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Yeah, so these are custom-built drones. They have got multiple layers of things. We got couple of OEMs that we work with. They provide us like 60 percent of the entire thing and the 40 percent is our in-house developments. We have 30 patents that we have applied for and these are all around the com systems, the navigation systems, the autonomy, the safety system that is onboarded onto a drone.

Utsav Somani: And logistics will remain a key focus. You don't want to focus on sectors like agriculture or defense or any of the other stuff?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): I think the biggest potential in this country for drone-related activity lies in logistics and eventually in aerial taxi. It's not a low-hanging fruit that anybody can jump into it. It's a very difficult domain to go and crack it because there are tons of things that you have to work. So we never call ourselves that, hey, we are just doing drone delivery, right? We say that we are building a vertical transportation ecosystem because you're building the layer which is there in the airspace, which does the aerial traffic management of how the drones will navigate, how the drones will go, etc. How the drones will navigate without a camera and all those kind of elements which are there essentially. And then you have a ground infrastructure, okay? We can't go and land everywhere, right? For the consumer to get the package being delivered through drones, we can't go and land in the balconies for sure, right? It's not safe. And from a safety and reliability perspective, we can't go and build designated zones because you have seen how it happens in the real world condition in India. You build a designated zone, tomorrow you will find somebody parking a car over there. We don't want that, right? So we went and building something called a skypod. It's like a mailbox where the drones go and deliver packages. We got a walker who is inside that apartment complex or housing complex who goes and puts in the OTP, takes out the package, goes to your doorstep and delivers you, right? So this entire infrastructure, the vehicle piece of it, and how the entire communication happens between the infrastructure and vehicle piece of it comes together to create that ecosystem.

Utsav Somani: There's a question from YouTube through I think one of our live audiences is asking a question. How do you justify the capex of the drone against the earning made? I'm guessing they're asking about the payback period for a drone.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Essentially, if you look at our depreciation on drone happens to be about one rupees per packet per shipment. And our cost of getting a drone completely developed custom build with every single element is approximately about six, six and a half lakh rupees. We generate a lifetime value of about 1.4 crore in revenue from one drone. Oh, nice. So if you remove the last leg of the human from the loop, right, the drone delivery cost is barely three, four rupees. Okay, awesome.

Utsav Somani: Thank you for answering that.

Dhruv Sharma: Is increasing payload an immediate priority? Okay, from 10 to 120?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Not essentially, because if you look at today, the last mile delivery ecosystem and the number of shipments, how it's going today, 86, 97% of the shipments are below seven kilos. Okay, so we are looking at going to that end of the pyramid rather than focusing on the 4% of it.

Dhruv Sharma: Makes sense. And then can you tell us on one of the busiest days you've like had ever, how many, you know, concurrent drone flights might have been taking place? How choked did the airspace get? And how did you manage it?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Yet, the airspace is not got choked. Because again, I think it's very wide. drone flights are happening in different stations. Yeah, it will different pods, which are connected via the sky tunnel.

Dhruv Sharma: Maybe the other question is to ask here is have you stress tested the system? And if yes, what have you found?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): We have stress tested on one of the routes, I would say, right, and we figured out that we can fly four drones at a single given point of time, with certain vertical and horizontal separation lag in between two to in one particular timeframe. So you know, in the span of let's say, two, three minutes, we can fly four drones.

Utsav Somani: And I've been meaning to ask you about the drones being run by Ankit and his team. ATC controlled.

Dhruv Sharma: ATC controlled. Yes, absolutely. And Ankit, are the drones like fully autonomous? Or do they all have ground based controllers, even if they weren't needed, just just safety?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): Just from the regulatory perspective, we do need to keep our ground controllers.

Dhruv Sharma: And like map one is to one, like one guy flying one drone.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): One is to two at the moment. So we have got we've got the pilots who is managing like two drones at a single given point of time. They are required to be there because the regulation says so. On the tech front, we can achieve one is to five potentially in next six months to seven months.

Dhruv Sharma: So how do you feel about getting a drone pilot license?

Utsav Somani: Let's see when the bill becomes law. I think we might apply and get one and do our deliveries between each other via this for all the document work.

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): You can even apply today and you can go to the UTM and take approvals to fly wherever you wish to fly.

Utsav Somani: Oh, nice. We'll look it up. Ankit, what does the future look like as a final question for the next two years? Where do you think drone delivery goes from here?

Ankit Kumar (Skye Air Mobility): I think, you know, let's talk about the next five years to six years. We see that at least 30 percent, 40 percent of the last mile deliveries in the top 25 cities are going to convert to drones. Awesome. That's what we are envisaging and that's how we are looking at doing things right in Gurgaon. There are certain clients, I cannot name them, but we are doing about 30 percent of their deliveries through drones at this given point of time. So we are already deeply penetrating in these cities and we are adding more and more brands to directly converge with and work with in terms of enabling a faster turnaround for them.

Utsav Somani: I think the part that stayed with me was that when you mentioned that you're actually helping the pollution and the traffic problem as well with these deliveries. So I think that's a net positive thing. And thank you so much for coming on the show, Ankit. Wishing you all the best on this journey. Thank you so much. Cheers. All right, listeners, that's it from us. Dhruv will see you on Friday and I'll see you next Monday with Dhruv. Cheers. Have a good rest of the week ahead. Bye-bye.