Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hi there listeners, it's Friday, this is TON Stream 114, Kashish and I are back. Bro, it's going to be a crazy weekend ahead, right, in the world of sport and entertainment. Are you looking forward to both the events, or at least one of them?

Kashish Sharma: I know the sport one, but what's the entertainment one?

Dhruv Sharma: The Odyssey is released, the Nolan movie. People can't lay their hands on tickets, apparently.

Kashish Sharma: Really? Okay. Because, I mean, I've been a big fan of the Troy movie, of course, right, the original one that came a couple of decades ago, and I don't know, like, there's a lot of, you know, notorious takes on Odyssey, per se. It's Nolan at the end of the day, but, yeah, I don't know if I want to besmirch my memory of, you know, the story per se, right?

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. I haven't read the book, but I'm going to show up for the movie on Sunday morning, I'll give you a call to tell you how it is, and then maybe you can decide based on that. But it's not just these two things, we have, I mean, closer home from the ecosystem, there's this one thing everyone's keeping an eye out for, which is Skyroot's launch.

Kashish Sharma: 100%. Yeah. Do you want to dive deep into it, like, what makes it special? Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: So, I mean, the launch could happen as early as July 18th, although with space launches, there's always a launch window. You can't, you know, on this day, at this time, because the weather conditions have to be favorable. Sometimes I think, Kashish, that maybe this is the reason ISRO is the most effective government agency when it comes to delivery, because they always have to work backwards from a specific launch date, you know, it's a forcing function and they, you know, so there is that. But what's special about this launch is, I think, to the best of my knowledge, this will be the first time that the launch is going to happen from an Indian launch site, the Satish Dhawan Space Station, on an Indian rocket, should be an ISRO rocket, and of course, Indian payload, which is the satellite that Skyroot is sending up into the space. So should be very interesting to watch. The name is Mission Agaman.

Kashish Sharma: Is it Agaman, like, is it like when you say, welcome, like, that's the translation, right? Like, of the Hindi word.

Dhruv Sharma: You're right. Is it Agaman or introduction or something? That's what it means. It means welcome.

Kashish Sharma: So yeah, a good foreshadowing, basically, of maybe like all the, you know, like Space Frontier campaigns that, you know, we get to see from our side, and what makes it special and like, once again, like, to help me understand is basically, so far, it's not like we haven't launched Indian based satellites, etc. in orbit, but the payload, everything is absolutely indigenous. Yeah. Which is pretty crazy. Right? Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: I'm, in fact, I'm just double checking. It's not just the payload. I think it's the launch vehicle itself, which is, that's what Skyroot is built. And that's what's going up in low Earth orbit this weekend. And so far, I mean, it's always been, you know, borrowed rockets or using SpaceX, like Falcon 9s, etc. So this is the first, it's a one of its kind of launch. Super exciting. All right. There's more in terms of news, but I think our guest is here. We'll welcome him and we'll cover news towards the end, Kashish, what do you say?

Kashish Sharma: Sounds like a plan.

Dhruv Sharma: All right. So today we have Sambhav Jain from FamX, shall we say?

Sambhav Jain (Fam): It's FamX. You can just say FamX.

Dhruv Sharma: FamX. Yes. Great to have you, Sambhav. Welcome to the offline network.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Thank you, Dhruv. Thank you, Kashish. Excited to be here.

Kashish Sharma: 100% Sambhav. I mean, like FamPay used to be the earliest avatar, right? Like probably the most renowned, I mean, you know, I think just like what everyone easily immediately associates with. Like Dhruv, like, I mean, is this a good time to ask, I mean, just generally like the journey from FamPay to FamX, right, like what was the good capitalistic kind of, you know, journey so far and what's up? What's new?

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Yeah. So our core philosophy when we started the company was how can we improve the next generation's relationship with money? So the problem we wanted to solve was in when we talk about our education system, schools, parents, the subject that's not really spoken about is money and money forms a very important aspect of all of our lives. It decides like one of the biggest decisions of your lives, like which city you're going to be in, what's the work you're going to do, what's the thing that you're going to spend most of your time on. And money is like a huge driving factor for this decision. We cannot discount the factor of money. And we saw that people do not have really good relationship with money because in India, since childhood, as I mentioned, it's not spoken about. And when you look at the Western countries, there are concepts of pocket money, there are concepts of working at, let's say a Burger King when you're 15, 16 year old and you earn your first five hundred dollars, then you go about thinking, OK, now I have this money. What do I do with it? And you may just spend it on partying, shopping, traveling or whatever. But that gives you your first sense of independence, right? And that the cost of learning becomes extremely low because you're not spending thousands of dollars or lakhs of rupees when you start earning. It starts very small. And once you have that, you also start thinking, oh, do I invest this money? Do I just save it, etc. So our core mission was, how can we bring in this culture of pocket money in India and how can we kind of gamify the experience in a way that the next generation can really build a healthy relationship with money and become more independent? So that's where like the idea of FamPay was born when we started speaking to a few kids, we realized that majority of them were already using smartphones. They had Internet, they were spending online, but none of them had bank accounts. So when we asked them, how do you make a payment? The voice of the customer was like, we asked debit card and credit card from our parents. We have to wait for OTPs just to order a pair of jeans and all of that. And we were like, this is the most tech savvy audience in India. Around more than 35 percent of India's population is below 18. So there's more than 450 million minors and absolutely nobody's building for them. So financial literacy, financial independence was too far off. They did not have even access to kind of these financial products. And that's where we thought, if you have to improve that relationship with money, can you be the interface through which they interact with their money? And that gives you kind of a lot of empowerment to improve their relationship with money. So that's where the company started. We started with the name FamPay because we wanted like parents, kids, everybody to be on the same ecosystem. And since then, of course, the journey has been quite eventful and it's been like a roller coaster. We have had our own ups and downs. But we are, we have...

Dhruv Sharma: It wouldn't be a startup journey if it weren't, I'm saying it wouldn't be a startup journey if there weren't roller coasters and ups and downs of all kinds somewhere. But, you know, the thing about first names is they stick. The company has been through so much and it's evolved into its present avatar and I'm sure it's doing great. But somehow that first name always sticks in the mind of everyone who read the first PR and the first press release, etc. But this is fascinating what you're saying, right? Like the family's CTO and essentially that's what you very often call young kids, the young digitally native financial users, at the end of the day, even their budget is controlled by the family's CFO, maybe their mom, maybe their dad. But talk to us about the design principles that you guys baked into the product to create those habit forming loops that you're talking about. I think that'll be very helpful for our listeners.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Is my internet okay? I think there's been some lag.

Dhruv Sharma: Yes, it's okay. In case you didn't hear my question, I was asking about the core design principles in product to serve that digitally native financial user, young financial user.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Yeah, that's a very interesting question because we take a lot of effort, we put a lot of effort and thought into what we're designing. And it's not just about how visually the design looks, we care about how to design the whole product experience. So we have a core principle of amplifying user love, and we are always very close to the user. So the few things that we do is we always invite our users to our office. Every month there's 15 to 20 users who would visit. We have close community channels with 500 600 of our users, and we keep reshuffling them to be close to how they're actually using the different products in life and what their general behavior traits are. And we try to integrate into our design, like let me give you an example. So do any of you use Snapchat, by any chance?

Dhruv Sharma: I mean, we're aware of what the interface looks like, but too old for that stuff.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): So a lot of our users are active on Snapchat, and on Snapchat, there is this feature called Streaks. So what happens is you have to share a picture with your friend every 24 hours, and they have to send a snap back. And that starts a streak, and the users, you wouldn't believe, a lot of these users have streaks of 900 days, 1500 days, 1300 days. It's very common. So for the last three, four years, they've been sending a snap every day to their friend, and it has kind of become a status symbol for how deep their friendship is, like as funny as it may sound. But that's like the small things that the next generation kind of engages in. And we were designing this feature where we wanted to inculcate a good savings habit. And we were like, there used to be these good lucks in which you used to save, and once you had to take money back, you had to kind of break that good luck. And so you could only break it once. So you were very careful on when you wanted to get the money out. So we kind of combined this actual physical principle and behavior and the current behavior of how the next gen uses different platforms. And we created a product called Save the Streak. So you had to come every day and you had to save some money and it used to create a streak for the user. And if you were to take your savings out, the streak used to break. So all the effort that you've put, that kind of breaks. And the product kind of had like immense engagement and adoption. And those are the kind of things when we talk about design principles, we think about the whole product experience. And not just how the UX is going to be or the UI is going to be, of course, the UX and UI is also inspired from a lot of social apps because our audience, again, is extremely social. So they might not have a lot of money, but they have a lot of time. So they go six hours into the schools, then they go to their coaching a couple of hours. And when they come back, they're talking to the same friends that they hung out with for the whole day on WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram, three platforms, same users. And so apart from eight hours of sleeping, they're extremely social in their behavior. So on our design principle, we try to inculcate that aspect of social into our payments. Like how can when you are sending a payment, you see the picture of the other person. Very simple, very simple thought that we put into designing every screen. But these are two examples that I can share. But fundamentally, it's just about being very close to the user and designing backwards of their actual behavior of the app.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, I think the two things that are really standing out in what you're saying is, of course, simplicity of design, number one, and meeting the users where they are. You didn't invent the streak. It was something your users were already very familiar with, but you applied it to something that didn't have that. Yeah, that is great. Talk to us a little bit about the Rails as well. Sambhav, at the end of the day, this is a financial, you know, call it product, call it platform. Talk to us a little bit about the infrastructure surrounding it as well.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): So so the infrastructure that we've built, there's of course, when you're building a financial product, one of the key things that you have to crack or rather than crack, I would say the key thing that you have to build is trust. So like if you have to convince the user to keep their money with you and spend with you, you have to like really have trust as an important tenet. So everything that we do is to kind of enhance that trust. So when we are thinking about building this infrastructure, of course, key engineering principles would be it should be able to handle scales downtime. It should be reliable. But from an experience perspective, we really focus on how can we improve the speed of every transaction? How can the load time of the home screen be really important? So the whole infrastructure is, again, very backward of user experience. Everything that we do, everything that we build is to kind of improve that user love and build that trust. So even in the engineering team, they won't just be talking about technical terms. It's always backward of, oh, does this thing increase our trust with the user or not? And of course, apart from that, the operating infrastructure, for instance, licenses, compliance, et cetera.

Dhruv Sharma: Sorry, I'm saying the operating infrastructure.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): The operating infrastructure, of course, like if you're a regulated company, you have to really give importance to compliance. So trust is not just a tenet for the consumer, but also you have to build trust with the regulators. You have to trust, you have to build trust with the team members and everything. So we are a regulated entity. We have our own wallet PPI license and for that, of course, we have a separate office altogether where the 150 member team, which kind of manages everything on compliance operations, support, trust and safety and all of that. The scale is that this small team is able to handle is great. Like we are on track to do three billion transactions this year. We did two billion last year. Hopefully it will touch four. But yeah, our key focus is stay lean and build everything that can help in building trust with the user.

Kashish Sharma: Interesting. Sambhav, how are you acquiring the users? Like, are you do you essentially have to win the trust of the end user, which is this young audience? Or do you in the process also have to win trust of, I don't know, the guardians and parents, et cetera? Considering that for many, this is going to be the first account that they ever open up and usually super early in their journey per se as well.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): So that's a very interesting question. As we keep talking about that, kids are actually the CTOs of the households. So if you just barring the top 2-3% of the population, when you go to tier two, tier three, tier four cities, it's actually the kid who enables their parents on learning how to use chat, GPT, WhatsApp, how to post a picture on Facebook, and it's parents who rely on the kids to kind of order something online, book a flight ticket, book a movie ticket. So it's very interesting behavior. And not just that, the kid is also a heavy decision influencer in majority of the household expenses that are made. So let's say if you have to buy a refrigerator, AC, TV, whatever, the parent would just come to the kid and tell like our budget is 50,000, which TV should we buy, right? And the kid does the whole research on reading the specs, getting the best offer on the best platform and kind of squeezing out the best deal and the best product. So we were surprised on how heavy influence kids were having on their parents. So even on our product, we started adopting to that and majority of the acquisition actually is led by the teenager itself. If they are convinced that they want to use the platform, they go to the parent and that is a conversation that they have with them. But also most of the times it's interesting that parents trust the kid on kind of taking these decisions on which apps to use. So kid just kind of downloads the app, sets it up and just kind of educates the parent on, you have to now start sending me money using your Google Pay, your phone, your whatever UPI app onto this UPI ID, right? So that's how it works. And so kids educate their parents on how to actually track how much money they are spending and everything. So it's very kids first and how kids discover us is mostly they have invested a lot of energy into building a great brand and community online. So a huge part of our growth is completely organic. It's word of mouth. And I think if your product is really valuable, most of the products grow really through word of mouth, like think about all the best products that you use every day, Google Maps to chat with your any of the other products, you wouldn't have seen an advertisement on Instagram or Google to download them or use these products. It's just immense PMF. So I think what we have is a really interesting, very strong PMF and users kind of discover us through word of mouth and they educate their parent on why they should be using this platform.

Dhruv Sharma: Some of them, if I'm not mistaken, outside of, you know, teen and young adults, you also launched a product called Namaste, right?

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Yes, yes, we did.

Dhruv Sharma: And when I first heard about that, it clicked in an instant. Like, you know, it just it's one of those things where you're like, why hadn't someone thought of this already? Love to we'd love to learn some some of the lessons from that journey as well.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): So so when when G20 was happening in India, the RBI was really wanting all the foreign nationals who come to India to also start using UPI because India runs on UPI. So whenever tourists are kind of sitting in an auto or they are just eating, let's say on a small joint, they can't really pay through UPI and they don't accept cards. So they had like a lot of hustle to go to the ATMs and collect cash. And a lot of ATMs did not get were not working on these international credit cards. And also the problem was real. And so we kind of came up with a guideline through which wallets could be issued on top of UPI to foreign nationals. And at that time, we were one of the few people who had this UPI wallet infrastructure ready. Our core product was always UPI without a bank account. And this fit in very well for the target audience. So it just felt like, oh, this is something we should definitely give a chance. We were quite bullish on, we're still very bullish on this opportunity. And it's a real problem to be solved. But unfortunately, that product, we did not scale beyond experimentation. So we made it like we experimented with around 100 users and they really loved the product. We ran it for around six to nine months. And it was surprising, like a lot of people who came for long terms for, let's say, medical purposes or on student visas. They were really hooked on the product for all of that time. But the reason we decided to kind of pause it at that moment was the KYC journey that we had to do to onboard these customers was quite expensive. So we have kind of not just us, I think everybody in the industry who tried that have submitted their humble proposal to RBI on how the KYC regulations need to kind of evolve to really enable this product at scale. There's like a lot of complications when it comes to onboarding a foreign national coming to India, like either you acquire them when they enter the country and that leaves you with like so many different airports and entry points into the country. And the KYC to be done is just physical. So how many kiosks can you set up at different airports or different hotels? Where do you capture them? It's extremely difficult. And if a traveler used to just land, the first thing in their mind after taking a long flight was just going into their hotel and taking a rest, not do a KYC and open a wallet at the airport. Right. So so setting up that physical infrastructure here was difficult. Our insight was it would be great if we can acquire the user before they come to India because they are when they're doing their whole research, when they're applying for visa, they probably look at YouTube and look at what are the things to do in India so we can partner with these YouTube influencers. And maybe that is a little bit more scalable. But then the data protection guidelines of all the countries is very different. So if you have to onboard them outside of India, you will have to kind of comply with different data regulations. So that's that's a whole different battle to pick. So that's where like there were a few hurdles that we observed. So the capital that was required to invest in scaling, this was high. And I think economics would have still been figured out, but this KYC journey would have made it difficult to scale.

Kashish Sharma: Got it. You know, just like switching gears back to Fam, on your website, some of you mentioned that this is your first in forever account. Right. It must it must be pretty, you know, like, of course, special having literally having a user start their first financial instrument and that lifelong journey with you. I'm just curious. And only only if you are, you know, like, I don't know if you want to talk about it. Like, can you help us understand just the user behavior of the longevity, right? Like the early teens are opening accounts, we're going to college and maybe cracking their first ever jobs, etc. How well is that thesis playing out? And what are some interesting learnings from that entire lifecycle journey?

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Yeah, that's a that's a very interesting question. And we like being the first adds a lot of emotional value in the consumer's mind. Right. It's like they always remember their first bicycle. They always remember their first phone. So this this first card, the kind of excitement and ownership that they feel is immense. It's like that first ticket to independence, first time feeling that sense of freedom. So it is it was so it's it's such an enriching experience when we see like a lot of user reviews, how excited they are, they create these Instagram stories, unboxing videos, and they put it on YouTube and on their Instagrams. The excitement is real. And the interesting thing is that we are capturing them at an age where it's in habit forming age. Right. So the thesis that we had is it's actually playing out. It's starting to prove itself. We have one of the best in class retention and engagement numbers in the country by benchmarks. And so the users really just on their home screen, they have set FamApp. They know this is the app I need to open. This is where I need to go and scan and pay. So UPI in itself is such an such an engaging product, like once you use it, you're never going back. And I would like to probably ask a counter question that will answer like maybe Kashish, what UPI have you used?

Kashish Sharma: GPay.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): How long have you been using it?

Kashish Sharma: Gosh, maybe like for three, four years after experimenting with a bunch of others, maybe three years at least.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): OK, and what about you, Dhruv?

Dhruv Sharma: I'm sorry, which UPI app do I use?

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: God, do I have to give it away? I use GPay.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): And how long have you been using it?

Dhruv Sharma: Since as long as I can remember, Sambhav, I did have the other Indian homegrown one, but then they went through a period of setback. Then I had to like switch back to GPay. And now that's the one that we've had.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): And you've been using it like almost since day one.

Dhruv Sharma: But I will say, I think back to Kashish's question, right, I still have the first bank account I ever had in life. It's just it was with a very large bank. Had it been with, if I was young enough to have it with FAM, I guess I would have, am I too old to have an account with FAM now, by the way, or will you still let us get an account with you? Is there such a thing as?

Sambhav Jain (Fam): You would probably feel out of place when you enter the app. It's like if you download Snapchat, you'll feel old.

Dhruv Sharma: That happens to me a lot. But Sambhav, I'm so sorry, we're nearly out of time for this segment also because our next guest, you know, they have a commitment that they have to get to. Thank you so much for coming and sharing, you know, your journey with us. I think it's a true case study in the grit and I'd say rigor that it takes to build like a generational financial, you know, infrastructure company. All the best to you. We'd love to have you back soon again.

Sambhav Jain (Fam): Thank you. Thank you so much, Dhruv and Kashish. I appreciate your kind words. Looking forward to chat again.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you very much. More power, Sambhav, take care. All right, guests, we will definitely have to bring Sambhav back because, you know, we couldn't finish up the last question. But but now let's welcome Kavitha. Kavitha, welcome to the Offline Network. We're so excited to have you also because this is you're literally the first drug discovery company we've ever spoken with. So if that's how you if that's how you like to think of the company. So welcome to the show. And we're looking forward to the chat.

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Thank you so much, Dhruv.

Dhruv Sharma: I think just to get started, because both Kashish and I, we were we were just discussing before the show, we are so out of depth, you know, for this for this segment, I think this is truly going to be like a one on one style education for us. So please, in your words, describe what the company does and then we'll just go from there.

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Sure. Thank you so much. My name is Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues and I'm founder CEO of Zumutor. Zumutor is an immuno-oncology drug development company. And what that means is that we have developed a first in class drug, the first from India to be filed with the US FDA by means of a mechanism of action and a novel checkpoint antibody that combats cancer in mechanisms that have not been tried before. So like traditionally, you know, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and others have been in the space. They do, however, have limitations by means of how much and how far they can get along in the cancer journey. And so immunotherapy, immuno-oncology is that slice reasonably late stage in a patient's journey and now getting to the earlier stage because of the options that we have with regard to how the immune system itself can be enabled to fight cancer. That's probably the simplest way of defining this.

Dhruv Sharma: And it's fantastic, I think, and that it sets us up for a question to Kavitha, which is what's the pipeline like from, you know, from the lab to for a drug from the lab to becoming a prescription drug that's that's easily available in the mass market?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): That's a really long journey, and I think we're just in the beginning of it and we play a smaller role and we play a very niche role in this space. For us, all of the work begins in our lab in ensuring that we have a novel sequence that comes from our platform, proprietary platform, which is an antibody discovery platform. And we have worked for close to five and a half years in getting a clone from our labs to that becoming a drug that was tested in mouse, monkey and now finally in phase one in patients. And it's been a year and a half with trials in the US and we have got some very promising data. And also, most importantly, the drug is safe and showing early signs of efficacy in certain kinds of solid tumors. And typically, this journey is a long one. You can imagine it's phase one, phase two, phase three and phase four. But for a company like ours, it would be more to do with how this would fare in phase two and with which big pharma we can partner to ensure that in hopefully, you know, three to four years from now, it's with patients in an approved format.

Dhruv Sharma: Well, that's that's pretty fantastic.

Kashish Sharma: And Kavitha, for us, could you also help us understand a bit more about NK cell, just the biology and what makes this special for our, honestly, for us, not like honestly, for me, not just for our audience as well.

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Sure. So traditionally, immune oncology is known with a lot of T cell assets, which essentially means in our immune repertoire, you have B cells, T cells, NK cells and multiple immune cells that help the body to fight various kinds of antigens or invaders, so to speak. In the cancer space, all of these subsets that are already existent in the body is very compromised because the cancer has fooled the immune system. Therefore, to unmask this or to have the ability of the immune system to fight back, there are multiple mechanisms. Chemotherapy is typically kind of carpet bombing the system, right? All of the good cells also die. Whereas in immunotherapy, you have very targeted approaches. And in this approach, the T cell, B cell approaches have been very commonly used. You probably heard, you know, kind of Jim Allison winning the Nobel Prize for CTLA-4, etc. That's been a while back. And now this whole space has moved towards NK cells, which are natural killer cells, a certain subset of the immune repertoire, which are very powerful. And this was not very well looked at before. And you're probably the first company that looked at this particular target, which is an immune checkpoint target, and then looked at how they could be therapeutic options in this space. So NK cells are like sentries in the immune system, whereas T cells are the ones that have the guns and do the work. If the T cells are compromised or if they have been exhausted, you need other cells to work. And so the approach is to see how we can have other cells work in the system to have best results.

Kashish Sharma: Wow. Wow.

Dhruv Sharma: Kavitha, from the outside, you know, this work always seems very, very capital intensive. In the US, for instance, we only know this from the headlines, but, you know, most life sciences companies, biotech companies will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to even get to human trial. You've likely done all of that with, you know, a different set of resources. So talk to us about about how you've navigated your way with, you know, what the company has right now and with, you know, where could the company go if you were to attract more resources to the company at this point in time?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Right. So from a structure basis, we've been quite different. We had flipped to being a US Incorp back in 2016, also because at that point, given, you know, how IPs are viewed, the geopolitical ecosystem being very different, we had to center ourselves in the East Coast to ensure that, you know, we could have access to not only VC ecosystems, but also a plethora of vendor and possibly, you know, licensing ecosystems. Now, cut to the chase in, you know, 2026. What we believe is I think India is extremely vibrant with not only capital, but also, I think, multiple big pharmas and startups having the ability to access this capital. So it's a different ecosystem now. And but our structure exists. We are a US India company and we have gone this far with a very, very solid set of VCs who have participated in multiple rounds. And they have been, you know, kind of large VCs like Accel to other deep tech VCs like Bharat Innovation Fund, Siana Capital and now a new entrant, Premji Invest, etc. So this capital has ensured that it has taken us in a very, very prudent manner to the stage that we are because we were able to do all of the R&D in India and ensure that all of the outward facing, whether it be the clinical trial or potential licensing, could be out of there.

Kashish Sharma: That's actually pretty promising to hear, right? And I guess I guess it's a foreshadow, I mean, like a good just like a just summary of the changing landscape of the Indian biotech ecosystem as well. Are there any interesting, I don't know, milestones that you feel has made the Indian biotech landscape a lot more conducive for companies to actually take a massive shift like reverse flipping back from U.S. to India and, you know, like starting this venture here for prolonged R&D? Like, I mean, how how easy was that process per se, especially when it comes to talent, right, like hunting for the right talent to join your mission, etc.? You know, what is that part of the business really like?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Sure. So to be clear, we continue to be a U.S. India structure with being headquartered in the U.S. Having said that, we are certain that as we go forward, our phase one clinical trial will open out as a global clinical trial for phase two. And one of the centers will be India. And that for us is extremely exciting because for a company that's developed a novel drug in India, for us, I think our dream is to see patients treated with our drug here in India. That would be extremely promising. And so for that, we are making all efforts, you know, kind of working well in line with CDSCO to ensure that things are done. And hopefully we'll have first patient dosed in India for a phase two by the end of this year or the beginning of next year. A little bit about the ecosystem change. I think there's a lot that's happened over the past two, three years and especially last year. If you've seen there's the RDI, there's two like flows infused into the ecosystem, there's specific verticals, agendas by means of where this money is going to be used and spent. And most importantly, there is a promise that it's going to be spent in R&D, especially novel R&D. I have been a part of multiple conversations like this, and I find it very, very promising. I am very excited to be in the center of it because I think now finally the chance has come for novel companies like ours to kind of take all of the steps from clone development in India and finding a market and capital in India. Those last few steps can be achieved right here.

Dhruv Sharma: I think that's a really, really good play and I'm hoping the kind of regulatory framework that probably the US or Europe is known for, that same playbook could be played out here in a better, efficient manner. In fact, I have a related question, Kavitha, which is once a therapy has gone through the FDA approval process, does it become simpler to get similar approval in other jurisdictions? Like what's the lay of the land globally? Right.

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): So once you get an approval in a particular, let's say, country, geography, it's typically easier also because all of the documentation and the data accrual is there. Having said that, each country, let's say like the EU has a particular kind of format in place or Japan or other jurisdictions would have particular formats. It would be about complying with those formats. Of course, there is some work to be done. But I think with one approval, it's generally easier to go into other approvals. But having said that, you know, patient access, having the right PIs and of course having the right networks in that particular geography matters. And that's why we are looking at US first and of course, India for phase two as one of the centers. And then we could open it up in other geographies.

Dhruv Sharma: That's amazing. And I'm wondering at a personal level, how have you navigated being in two places at once, two different time zones, having two different teams? Have you built the organization such that everything runs the way you wanted it to run?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): So one, we do spend some amount of time in the US, but I think we have a great team of consultants in the US who kind of manage all of these pieces. And we've also realized post-COVID the best way is to be very nimble about it. And so we have structures that enable us to kind of have a consultant representation in the US when required. We also meet our customers, investors in person when required. I spend majority of my time in India, in the labs, in Bangalore. And I think this kind of nimble structure where we have 21 people here in Bangalore and the rest of the folks in the US, I think that's kind of helped us keep not only the pace and cadence of the clinical trial in place, but also the kind of people now who are looking at us by means of interest in this antibody.

Dhruv Sharma: And this seems like such specialized work, like where are your talent pools in India? Where are you recruiting from and how are you training your people?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Sure. So the folks that we have in Zumutor have been with us for the past 10 years and they've been PhD postdocs. They've really believed in the story and they've been with us. We have always kind of hired people, known people through our own ecosystems. We've really never had a consulting firm with us through whom we have taken folks. I think that also goes to say about the relationships that we've had, the deep relationships we've had in India and in the US. So it's been really, really, it's a learning curve even for us, I want to say, right? By means of the newer establishments in India, for example, CCAMP in Bangalore or any of the other ecosystems, large, big pharma now setting base in India. I come from Biocon myself. So we've had a lot of good relationships that now extend out to people who've had great experience and now want to dabble with normal antibodies.

Kashish Sharma: I mean, clearly right now, all the focus is in development and R&D and all the phases and getting the clearances. But at some point, do you wonder about market education and how oncology as a sector most likely has to transcend in order to understand immuno-oncology and the treatment space? How aware are regulators and individuals and the average Joe in the country about such drugs as well?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): I think the landscape's really changed over the past two, three years. Today, if you look at the immuno-oncology landscape in India, you have more than six to seven immune checkpoints, which also shows, you know, kind of big pharma play, interest and deep penetration in this segment of oncology, number one. And I think for a startup, typically we would want to rely on big pharma to do all of the hard lifting work, right? Whether it be patient education or whether it be kind of looking at the slice of markets that need to be served. But for us, our mechanism of action is clear. We've also seen some early data in certain kinds of solid tumors. So for us to kind of get into those segments would be very useful. We do have great relationships that we have developed with big pharma over the years. And for us also to be guided by their pipelines is important because these drugs go in conjunction with either other small molecules or other biologics. So we work pretty closely with them.

Dhruv Sharma: Kavitha, we're getting questions on us. This is a live stream. We're getting questions from the audience as well. We'll maybe just read them out. There's one that says, I came across, I'm just quoting someone, I came across a report a few days ago claiming that cancer will eventually touch every family in the world. OK, that is a very bold claim. If that is true, what can we do to safeguard ourselves? And then there's another question which I had, which we had also, which is just the role of AI in modern oncology. So maybe your thoughts on both of these things.

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Sure. So I think to the first question, it is true that cancer detection rates are higher now. I would not say the prevalence of cancer has, you know, kind of changed. It's probably existed all along. It's just that the detection levels are higher and therefore those numbers that you see are very, very high. And so we have to be cognizant of that. And I think there are so many things playing into this, right? Lifestyle changes, a whole bunch of interventions that are now possible, including so many things in the longevity space. But I think if you, I mean, that's a broad question, but if you go into the specifics of the second one, which is essentially AI, and I get this often, right, from investors too, saying, you know, you do have an antibody discovery platform. What about an AI enablement? Would you use an AI tool for discovery, etc.? Yes, of course. These are very, very important, slick tools that would enable faster generation of novels for sure. We have worked in collaboration with multiple startups for the same, right? So what we become is like a validation partner for any of those AI models, right, in translational biology, because we have physical labs, you know, we have a physical platform, etc. On our own, we haven't yet gone into either buying or formally partnering with an AI company. But I think I'm sure that's for the future. And that's something that we will keep in mind. So those are those two questions.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. Thank you. Kashish, back to you.

Kashish Sharma: Yeah, I mean, you did mention investors, and I think both of us are curious to understand what are investors really looking for when they're investing in such a deep tech space, right? And honestly, deep tech as a keyword is used pretty loosely around the ecosystem. But this domain, I think, proves what deep tech exactly should be. So, yeah, so like, I mean, what usually are investors looking for and what have you understood about bridging that gap as well, so that we get the right gap and allocators and long term patience gap behind these projects?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): So I think one, I think the investors, like you said earlier, for them, deep tech would probably be like consumer tech, food tech, like in the beginning of our journey, that's how it was. And then when, you know, life sciences, biotech kind of crept up, they kind of included us into that bucket. And then it took quite a while, even for them to kind of onboard this very, you know, kind of, it's a narrower space. It requires a lot of discernment. It requires a lot of education. It also requires them onboarding expertise, right, for them to understand startups. I think that's happening now. Before, they probably used to lean on their US or European counterparts a lot more. But now I think they have, you know, kind of organic teams that can assess, you know, companies like ours, which is great. And that movement, I believe, is very positive for other startups to come in in the future. By means of what they would assess and what's in it for the long term, one, we are here to burn investor money because that's drug development. It takes the longest time and you've got to be extremely patient in the space. That's number one. I think that is something, that's an understanding that they come to. The second part of it is that, you know, you've got to be in this for the long haul. So, you know, this is not for a quick turnaround in three years, five years, because these are not CRL services. This is drug development. So I think that in conjunction with the second part, and I think the third part, by means of outcomes for these VCs, whether it be pure life science VCs, which is the kind of differentiation you'll find in the US, versus kind of deep tech VCs in India. And now the thesis is kind of, you know, kind of narrowing down. It's very focused. The outcomes would be about, you know, kind of long term licensing. Companies like ours bought either for the single drug or their pipeline. A good example is the previous startup that I did, which was an eight molecule pipeline and it was bought like that. So I think big pharma and big biotech is now ready for these kind of acquisitions, which is essentially one molecule with a platform or, you know, kind of a pipeline of molecules with a platform and what else they can do with it. And that in turn would speak to exits for investors.

Dhruv Sharma: But these are long term players. Kavitha, maybe on a parting note, you've of course built several companies since with Biocon, I believe is the first place you went to work. What were some lessons you learned there that you've carried through your career and also working with Ms. Shaw, what was that like?

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Yeah, so I think that's been a great learning, working with Kiran. She's amazing. She continues to remain a mentor in the space. I think that grounding that Biocon gave and the kind of, you know, the ability to future think and the kind of entrepreneurs that Biocon itself has spawned is amazing. So Kiran is somebody that I hold in a very high esteem and it's been it's been a very interesting and long journey and it's been helpful, you know, entirely because we have a great team and most importantly, you know, family that supports entrepreneurs like us.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you so much for coming and sharing your time with us and all of these great insights, all the best to you. We, you know, we'll be rooting for you all through the way.

Kavitha Iyer Rodrigues (Zumutor Biologics): Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks, Kashish. Bye bye.

Dhruv Sharma: All right, Kashish, we have a round off with the news. So where were we? I think we were talking about Skyroot last.

Kashish Sharma: Skyroot. And how proud we were of the complete Indian mission.

Dhruv Sharma: Taking off.

Kashish Sharma: Yeah, no, I think in other news, of course, I believe it's a third AI unicorn out of India that we have gotten to experience. Emergent. How much have they raised?

Dhruv Sharma: They've raised $130 million at 1.5 billion from Krakus, which is a private equity firm alongside Ranjan Pai's family office vehicle and Tepoin Capital and Sentinel Global. Yeah, so Emergent's been in the news of late.

Kashish Sharma: Yeah, congratulations to them. I think they're unicorn number one, three, six now at this point. In total, right?

Dhruv Sharma: In India, yeah. And maybe the third one this year. And then there was a news report that's still developing, but Stripe and one other potential buyer has put a bid for PayPal in front of the PayPal board. What do you think of that?

Kashish Sharma: And it's just insane, right? As we were chatting about this earlier, the disruptor acquiring the incumbent, something fairly poetic about it. But I mean, first of all, massive credits to PayPal, the whole ecosystem, the PayPal mafia that still continues to shape what the highest benchmarks of the startup ecosystem looks like around the world. So just housed in the genesis of a lot of great operators coming from it, the genesis of what a truly first, you know, like on Internet fintech product needs to look like powering, I believe, even like right now, eBay runs mostly on PayPal, if I'm not wrong. Right. And like so on and so forth. So that would be quite the, I think, finishing pit stop.

Dhruv Sharma: You're right. There is something very poetic about this because PayPal was the top financial company of its generation and Stripe arguably is the top financial company of its own. PayPal was founded in the late 90s, 97, 98, around that time period, Stripe 2012. So, yeah, that is that's the nature of these innovation cycles where and it's also very humbling. One can only imagine what PayPal was like in its prime. And and now Stripe gets to hopefully buy them out. And if the deal does go through, it's going to be a fifty three billion dollar deal.

Kashish Sharma: God, I think. Which, but, you know, I believe this fifty three billion dollars in hindsight is probably I believe it's a massive dilution from what PayPal was.

Dhruv Sharma: It would be much more than that. Absolutely. Yeah.

Kashish Sharma: That was around a hundred plus, like one thirty odd billion dollars at its peak is at its peak time. Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: Companies very rarely get acquired at the peak valuation anyway, so by the time they get acquired comes by then I think the levels have reset. And I think in a final piece of news, there's a new model that's taken everyone by surprise, which is Kimi K3 by Moonshot.

Kashish Sharma: Yeah, it's a Chinese frontier lab and proven like Fable level performance at one third the cost. And it's also an open weight model. So just to compare the two, like for roughly they both have a million token context window. And, you know, the Fable tokens are priced, I think, at ten bucks, like ten dollars an input and fifty an output. And these are priced like the Kimi K3 tokens are priced three dollars an input and ten fifteen dollars an output. So cheaper by a factor of third and equally performant, quite crazy. I think everyone is watching the space very, very closely. Have you have you used Kimi for any project?

Dhruv Sharma: I do. I use it every now and then. You've got to be using all the models at this point.

Kashish Sharma: Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: You know, it used to be the case, I think, in late 23, 24, where the where there was a huge difference between, you know, what's what was supposedly at the frontier and what was behind it or what was coming out of the different labs. Now, in fact, they're so close. Sometimes you can't tell the difference. In fact, if you want to have fun or do a better job at whatever you're using them for, you can have the models sort of like fight with each other and just make each other's work better.

Kashish Sharma: What does this mean for Anthropic? Right. Because up until this point of time, prior to the benchmark results being published, you know, everyone pretty much, of course, right. Wanted access to Fable still does and is getting it in some containerized form. But I don't think Anthropic can afford to pull and not that they that they were willing willingly kind of pulling the stunts that they had to admit it was a lot of pressure, of course, from the U.S. government, but they can't afford to really pull the plug anymore. Right. Because then you have Chinese models that will, of course, leverage that time very opportunistically for market share grabbing.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, there's Chinese models. There's the there's the resurgence of the open source movement in the U.S. itself. And model outputs are pretty comparable at this point in time. And you can't act the way, frankly, that Anthropic has been acting with Fable right today. You have it tomorrow. You can't have it. Well, now you can have it again, but only until such date. Well, now we're extending access. You know, it's kind of it's also disrespectful to a subscriber in a certain in a certain way. The other thing is also there's there's always shapeshifting in in in the eye, like the narrative keeps shifting. You know, two weeks ago and everyone coming out of Anthropic and maybe you could say still working on the hill. And now, you know, lo and behold, the others have caught up. One can only imagine the pressure, you know, the leaders and everyone else in the Frontier Labs must experience at this point in time. Like the whole world's glare is on you. You're within inches of each other. There's so much money on the line. You can't afford to screw this up.

Kashish Sharma: Oh, it makes a lot of sense. That's that's about it. Is there anything else you want to talk about?

Dhruv Sharma: I think that is it for one month for from us now, you guys have a restful weekend and hopefully get, you know, see the match, the World Cup final, Argentina and Spain. Let us know who you're rooting for and then maybe even go see the Nolan movie and whatever else. And of course, Cairo, if the launch tomorrow, hopefully, fingers crossed, the launch goes on schedule as expected. I should have the pleasure doing this with you.

Kashish Sharma: Always. Thanks.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. Cheers. Take care, folks.