Summary
The Offline Network Episode 39: Mobility & Logistics (aired 2025-11-28). Hemant: "We sort of want the potential applicants to think deeply about why they are trying to build a company." Topics: venture capital and funding, AI and LLMs, consumer brands and D2C, B2B/SaaS. The Offline Network is India's live show on startups, tech, and venture — streaming M/W/F at 4 PM IST on YouTube.
Full Transcript
Dhruv Sharma: Thank you for joining us. Hello, listeners, welcome to the Wednesday live stream of the Offline Network. You'll notice today I'm by myself and flying solo because my partner in crime, Utsav, you know, he had something that he had to take care of. And so he's away. And today we're going to cover news towards the end of the show, because we have a special guest who's here with us already with Hemant of Lightspeed Partners, who announced something incredibly exciting earlier today. And let's welcome him to the show, Hemant. It's great to have you on. Thank you for coming at short notice.
Hemant Mohapatra - Partner, Lightspeed India: Yeah, absolutely. It's a real pleasure to be here and hello to everybody here.
Dhruv Sharma: And let's dive right into it, Hemant. What's India's Sense? What's India's Sense? What did you announce earlier today?
Hemant Mohapatra - Partner, Lightspeed India: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for asking. So we have this new program that we are launching, and it should be hopefully a yearly program starting up in February next year. It's called India's Sense. It's part of a two event series. India's Sense is the first part of the series, and the other one is called India Accelerates, which you'll hear more about in the next coming months. As we have been in India for about almost 20 years, coming up to 20 years now, and over the last four to five years, what we've been observing is there's this new cohort of founders that are coming out of the woodworks that we have backed, quite a few of those, that essentially are first-time founders, super-duper young, not native to an industry, and they're trying to disrupt it. They don't have the baggage of knowing anything about how the world operates, and then they kind of break through walls, and then they build massive and interesting companies. Five, six years back, we led the seed round of Pixel Space that has gone on to raise almost $100 million now, and has become one of the most well-capitalized and the most advanced company in the hyperspectral data and satellite category. We backed, and the founders were just graduated from BITS Pilani, and they're 22 years old. And one of the things that I was worried about is they will not graduate if they get the term sheet too soon. So then there's a company called AirBound, which is a 17- or 16-year-old founder when we backed him, Naman Pushpen. He's gone on to build one of the most advanced drone company in the world to do consumer drone deliveries. And there are so many examples of people like that. And we felt like there needs to be a certain sort of class of investors that take these early bets with these, and we don't even call them bets. We back these founders. We don't take bets. This is not a roulette table. And they had to sort of almost take this forward-leaning view of the world and forward-leaning view of the founders and just dream alongside with them and make an investment and put their money where their mouth is. And we just felt like there was not enough of that happening, at least at the level that we wanted to see it. So it's taken us a few years to sort of get to this point. We are really excited to launch this program. It is a program that is meant specifically for 25 years and below. My tweet says above, but that's a mistake. 25 and below. They could be as young as school and high school students. They could be college graduates. It could be people that are looking to do a PhD in the U.S. but would rather stay back in India and build. You know, who's Arvind, the perplexity, who's sitting in India, is not getting enough opportunity to build an interesting company. You want to go identify them. You want them to apply to the program, and we'll select about 12 to 15 of those. And we'll select three to four of those to fund them fully to build a real company out of India for the world. That's the program.
Dhruv Sharma: I have noticed, Hemant, you only announced this earlier today that applications have already started coming in.
Hemant Mohapatra - Partner, Lightspeed India: Well, yeah, they already started coming in. I need to go back and check the counter, but I hope they have been coming in rapidly. But yeah, yeah.
Dhruv Sharma: What's the process going to be like for people to apply?
Hemant Mohapatra - Partner, Lightspeed India: So it's a pretty involved application for a good reason. We sort of want the potential applicants to think deeply about why they are trying to build a company. We want to prioritize people that are building very R&D-centric companies. So it will require this wandering the desert attitude, you know, making a bunch of mistakes. It will require this research mindset versus, you know, let me just go build something quick and dirty and put it out in the market. This will require patient capital and patient founders. And we want to see that level of commitment that is showing up in your history, like how much time you have spent debating the ins and outs of an industry, and why do you want to spend the next 10, 20 years of your life solving a challenging problem? And we really care about not the chances of success, because these companies have very low chances of success. We know that going in. We really care about the consequences of success. If you are successful, what is the nature of the world and how it will change as a result of your success is what we care most about. So that application is a bit involved. It has, you know, video inputs, text, and you can upload, you know, documents and PDFs and so on. And we expect to see a few thousand applicants, if not more. And we expect to, you know, do several layers of filtering and interview maybe 50 to 100 of those and select maybe 12 to 15 of those as final entrants. We'll bring them for a two-day program to Bangalore, all costs included, we'll host them here. And we have a pretty exciting set of lineup of speakers, global speakers coming to that event physically, and, you know, we'll run the programming. And from here, we'll select maybe four, three to five founders that we'll back. And we have a pretty, you know, it's not public yet, but we will take five of these to the next set of the program, which is India Accelerates, which is a very, very global, you know, very niche and sort of closed-room program, which we'll discuss more later next year with all the world's who's and who's coming and attending that program. So we'll take these four to five people to that program post-India assets.
Dhruv Sharma: Thank you for sharing, Himant. And we're happy to help put the word out so that more and more, you know, bright young people doing hard things and technical things and challenging things can come take advantage of this. But I want to take a step back, maybe ask my final question for you today, and we'd love to have you back on the show, which is, what is your analysis of why and how private capital is finally starting to warm up to frontier tech in India? And also younger, younger founders, I mean, conventional wisdom used to be that execution risk type businesses are best handled by seasoned, serial entrepreneurs. But here's you taking a very, very contrarian point of view.
Hemant Mohapatra - Partner, Lightspeed India: Look, I think the world is, I mean, the world of the world of innovation is shifting. You know, we are coming out of a pretty, pretty long-term innovation cycle with the internet where the early, you know, the early adopters were a lot more R&D-centric, where the difference between, you know, the haves and the have-nots was just the access to the internet and building something that is a very new kind of an experience, right? But over time, that cycle is now slowing down. It's something that, you know, I've written about more openly as well. Now, I mean, 10, 15, 20 years ago, either you had a Dropbox which could, you know, store files and save files on the internet, and you can go to a Laptop 1 and Laptop 2, but you see the exact same file in the exact same, you know, formats. But over time, there's a Dropbox, and then there's the Office 365, then there is a Google Drive, and there are five other players that are doing the same thing. You know, it became more of a, you know, less differentiated kind of an approach versus I have a Dropbox, you don't have a Dropbox. I have a car, you don't have a car. It's a lot more about this is my color of my car, and I got a six-cylinder engine, you have a four-cylinder engine, and so on, right? So we are now coming at a point in the internet cycle where there's 50 companies doing the same thing, solving the same problem. So the zeitgeist is shifting to solving hard problems. And some of these hard problems take, you know, a lot of capital in the beginning or a lot of time in the beginning. And you know, we can provide a bit of both, right? We can be patient and we can provide, we have a $30 billion capital stock, we can continue funding companies that as they continue to scale. So we believe that this is the right time in the moment where the capital cycles are shifting towards more difficult to solve problems, nuclear, quantum, space, satellite, bio, and, you know, AI. So that's where I think the puck is moving, that's where the founders are getting liberated to and that's where the capital markets will eventually land.
Dhruv Sharma: All right. Thank you so much for that answer, Hemant, and again, for agreeing to come on such short notice. All the best for India Sense and big fans of what you do. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Cheers. Our pleasure. All right, listeners. That was Hemant Mohapatra of Lightspeed India. We now have our second guest, Saket Agarwal of Onnovation. Saket, it's great to have you on the show. How are you doing? Amazing. How are you? Very well. Maybe let's start by having you tell, share with us what Onnovation is and what Onnovation does.
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: Yeah. So we're a curated SaaS marketplace and the best analogy I would give to explain our business is similar to how the wealth management business works, where they go and identify the best investment opportunities and bring it all under one roof for the best clients. We do that for CTOs, CIOs, CSOs of large companies, where we scan the best in class SaaS companies across cloud data, AI and security, validate them and bring it under one roof and implement it through a more luxury, high-end concierge manner.
Dhruv Sharma: Very interesting. And you've, haven't you picked a particular corridor to do this in?
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: So my background is that I'm a chartered accountant. One day I realized I don't enjoy it. So I met this guy from the Israeli consulate and at that time I used to watch a lot of Shark Tank, seeing a lot of innovation outside India. And I was like, this would really help India solve a problem using these technologies. So landed in Israel on a trip and there I met this one company.
Dhruv Sharma: Which year was this, Saket? 2016. 16. Okay. Wow.
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: Yeah. So I think the inflection point was I was meeting Agri Healthcare Defense, you know, technologies Israel is known for. Somehow I met a company called Spot, which built a technology to optimize your compute on AWS by 60 to 80%. Being an accountant, I did not understand cloud, but I understood savings. So we said, why don't we start working with them and take their distribution? So at one point the company was acquired for half a billion. We were roughly 10% of their revenue. And the problem that I saw is every CTO CISO is tired of being chased by vendors. There are so many options for every different tool you want to buy. And a typical company buys 30, 40 different tools. So we said, can we curate one company per category, build very high conviction and build it on, bring it all under one roof for them to consume and buy to a very high touch manner.
Dhruv Sharma: Right. And so did you keep making more and more visits to Israel?
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: Israel is my second home. So you know, the companies we brought into India, you know, we weren't, we knew how well they're doing because we were selling their products. So in many cases, we would also get allocation to invest in these companies. So our business, although it started as a distribution business, we bootstrapped it. But through the money that we were making, we also redeployed into some of these companies. And visiting Israel kind of helped understand, you know, how the tech ecosystem is moving forward because they're really far ahead in many, many ways.
Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. And let's maybe pull the thread on this a little bit, Saket, because we, if it's something you haven't covered in the show so far, how did that ecosystem come about? And number two, why is it they have such an edge in areas like cyber security, agri, defense? I mean, we know the obvious answers there, but you're someone who has a relationship with many, many people over there. So we'd love to hear your perspective on that.
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: I think the many stories are already known. When I say it, I would say it because I've seen it firsthand. So a lot is born out of necessity because they're always in a real time situation to fight for life and death. So when you're thrown into a pool or an ocean, you learn how to swim. If you do. And that's what these guys do really, really well. So many, many good companies come out of it. But I think from a tech ecosystem, I'll give you some interesting nuances. One is that the, you know, there's this philosophy of you are the average of five people you're surrounded by. When you launch an enterprise software company or any technology company in Israel, there's a very strong support system, which is angel investors who are very seasoned about specific topics, investing in seed companies, a very strong venture ecosystem, which is taking a bet on moonshot ideas, which is much more prominent in countries like Israel and the Bay Area than in India. And third, they have a very strong buyer ecosystem, not in Israel, but they've created a very strong buyer ecosystem in the U.S. And so much so that there are people who are actually stationed in New York, in SF, in different parts of the world. And their main job is to make sure if there's a really good Israeli company, they help them open doors to the large customers. And the buyer ecosystem is a very, very, you know, it may sound like a small thing, but it's a needle mover, because if you launch a company, you're able to get 5-10 very good customers like a JP Morgan or Nike from the very beginning or even get them as design partners. You suddenly get a lot of understanding of the scale, you have the right VCs, and then that compounds very, very fast for you. So these are some nuances, but happy to share more.
Dhruv Sharma: And also, you know, I was wondering, now that you have both investing and business relationships with the Israelis and in the U.S. and in India, what key differences do you see, even culturally for that matter, between these three geographies in terms of just, you know, transacting business, getting deals done, and what can others learn from it?
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: I would just say, I think the corporate or the buying ecosystem needs to be very, very strong in India. So, you know, it's unfortunate and, you know, in a way, it's a business opportunity for what I'm running. But it's also unfortunate to see that we have to have international companies coming and selling into India. Right. We have so much talent in terms of security, AI data, like best engineers are Indians. The challenge is that if you are a cyber security company built for India, based in India, the enterprises are not very forthcoming when it comes to experimenting, giving opportunities to these early stage companies, which always becomes a problem for startups to get validation whether the product is good and then attract the right bunch of funding. So I think the key difference is San Francisco is San Francisco because a JP Morgan or a Morgan Stanley or a Nike is willing to give a very real shot, pay for the POCs, see the success. If that changes in India, we would see a much broader, bigger growth. Second thing I strongly see in Indian SaaS companies is the confidence to price somehow because we have grown up hearing about Indians don't like to pay where a cost sensitive market. Even if we deserve a better price and we know that customer sees value in it, we don't ask for it. And as a result, you end up, you know, sub-optimizing your potential. But having said that, I see a lot of high quality brands coming out of there. I use a brand called Nappa Dori for bunch of, you know, for my laptop bag and sleeve. And I, if you just look at the quality and the price point, it seems like they've, they've had a lot of courage to charge the premium they deserve. And more and more examples should come and more and more people should be willing to pay the higher premium to the Indian product.
Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. I think it comes from a place of self-awareness as in which India are you selling to and also are they simply price conscious, really value conscious and there's a difference between the two. But that's interesting. And in terms of the automation business, can you help us contextualize the business and maybe use some numbers, some stats, just give us a sense of how the business has grown over time and also what your 2026 priorities are going to be.
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: So we're a private company, but I'll give you a sense of, you know, few things that are super exciting for us. So our business is like a marketplace. The biggest mode for us is, can we attract the most innovative companies to come to India through us when they think of India as a market, like, can we offer India as a service or India as sales to them? So two years ago, we brought a company called Wiz into India, fastest growing cyber security company acquired by Google for 32 billion. So our win is in the fact that when the founder of Wiz starts his next company, can we be the, you know, he should think of us when he comes, wants to sell into India. The second very interesting nuance is now we've become like a new age BCG, McKinsey, Bain or a new age consulting firm for some of the top CEOs of India Inc. So CEOs of some of the largest banks in India have, you know, have a board meeting and they think about what should they do in AI and tech. The first call is to us than to most of the other firms, because what we're really doing is finding an expert who solves data analytics better than anybody else, which is largely a SaaS solution and getting them expertise right from, you know, the best people on those topics. So for us, the vision is really how can we be the, you know, JP Morgan private wealth practice of sorts for the top 100 enterprises in India, when they look at anything technology and anything to drive change. And we, by the way, we already work with almost every app you have on your phone, it would be our customer in some way or the other. It's just a function of us for us to keep growing that pie.
Dhruv Sharma: Wonderful. Sakeet, thank you so much for coming on and sharing more about Onnovation and all the best to you.
Saket Agarwal - Founder & CEO, Onnivation: Thank you so much. Have a great evening.
Dhruv Sharma: Yes, you as well. Our pleasure. All right, listeners, we now have Shiv Parekh of HBITS to come talk about REITs. In particular, SM REITs is what his company does. Shiv, great to have you on the show. How are you doing?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Hi. Hi, Dhruv. Great to be here. How are you doing?
Dhruv Sharma: Very well. Thank you for asking. Let's just dive right into it, Shiv. What does HBITS do? I already teased out something called SM REITs. What are they? And why should we care?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: No, absolutely. So, I mean, in one line, what we're trying to do is we're trying to create the stock market for real estate. SM REITs specifically is kind of SEBI's newest regulation in the real estate space that's helping to enable this. And to give a kind of, you know, quick insight into everyone, if you think about your, say if you're from Mumbai, think about your buildings in BKC, Lower Peral, in NCR, your buildings in say, Gurgaon, Noida, in Bangalore, your buildings in ORR, Whitefield, I'm talking about your grade A glass facade buildings with MNC tenants. Your tenants could be a Deloitte, an Accenture, an ICICI bank. So, SM REITs enables people to own a share in these buildings, effectively the way one can own a share in, say, a Tata or Reliance stock. And the reason one would do so is obviously because traditionally these asset classes have been restricted to institutional investors or ultra-HNI's family offices. So now with a much smaller ticket size, one gets access to an asset class that they didn't have access to earlier. And you get extremely stable and secure returns. One can get an 8 to 9% rental yield. And then along with appreciation, one can make a 15 to 17% IRR.
Dhruv Sharma: So this is a new regulated way for everyday retail investors to have at least some exposure to real assets in their portfolio.
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Yeah, absolutely. I think traditionally, if you wanted to own real estate, and in fact, if you look at the numbers, 50% of Indians' net worth, and this is not counting their primary residence. So 50% of Indians' investable surplus is invested in real estate. But that's been in kind of your resi apartments, your land, some excess savings. One would put in real estate, post that, there was kind of gold and FD. But here you're able to do so in a real estate asset class compared to the other options that is much higher income generating, much more secure, regulated by SEBI, and therefore also much more liquid.
Dhruv Sharma: Do you want to help us understand why it's higher income generating?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Yeah. So there are two sides, right? One is if you invest in properties that are under construction, there, your returns may be higher, but the risk is high. And you know, you can speak to any number of people who invest in under construction projects and their money has been stuck for ages, and they never get it back. So sure on paper, your return might be higher in those projects, but it's assuming you actually do make the return. So that's one part. Other is investing in projects that are already completed, which is what SMREITs enables. Now in projects that are already completed, there are two avenues. One is residential and other is commercial at a high level. Residential traditionally across markets in India, whichever city it is, generates anywhere from two to 3% rental yield. That means that if I bought the property for a hundred rupees, I'll get three rupees at the end of the year. While in commercial real estate, you generate eight to 9% rental yield, and that's the dynamic of the industry. I can touch upon why that is.
Dhruv Sharma: Is that the medium number or is that the outer limit of what one can, one might earn?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: No, that would be the median and the mean.
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Yeah. So, which is why eight to 9% is your rental yield, and then generally your properties will appreciate five to 7% every year. It kind of tracks inflation. And then there's an added benefit of kind of specific micro markets will appreciate at a higher rate. And so you end up with this 15 to 17% IRR compared to resi real estate, where one would make about 10, 11%. Obviously resi real estate, a large part of demand of resi real estate has been driven by end consumers who are occupying the apartments themselves. So there's a more emotional quotient to that decision making. Commercial real estate is purely numbers driven, because ultimately, as an investor, you're investing from an investable, the idea is to invest and make returns, while in commercial real estate, probably 90 to 95% of the occupiers. And when I talk about commercial real estate, I'm talking about your large commercial real estate, not your smaller offices. You know, 90 to 95% of commercial real estate is the occupier of commercial real estate is only doing it on rental. They're not acquiring the properties themselves, which is different to resi and which is why your return profile is because of these dynamics, your return profile is higher in commercial real estate than resi. So that's kind of the reason.
Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. And when was it that SEBI created this framework and made it market facing? Which year was it?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Yeah. So that's, this is a, it's a great story, right? So we started this business in 2018 and at that time, it was effectively outside the purview of SEBI. And we were kind of doing it through private limited entities. What happened is in 2022, I think a few of us players came up and SEBI took note of the industry in 2022 and 2022, SEBI called us in and tried to understand what's going on, what's happening, what the industry is about. And at the end of the meeting, they asked us, would you want regulation around this? And we were like, absolutely. So in fact, we drafted at that point, what we think the regulation should look like. We gave it to them. Yeah. May 2023, they came up with a consultation paper, November 2023, the SEBI board approved it. And finally, the detail SM REIT regulation was notified in March 2024. So it's just been a year and a half since the regulation came out.
Dhruv Sharma: We've, by the way, so my day job is at AngelList India and we've had a very similar experience within the AIF structure that you've had within REITs. And so if SM REITs were formally notified towards the end of December 24, right? That's what you said.
Dhruv Sharma: March 24. How about REITs? How long have they been around, conventional REITs?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: So REITs, so traditional conventional REITs, I think it was 2014, where the first time the regulation was notified. But then the first REIT only launched in April or March 2019. So five years hence after the regulation coming up, there were some tweaks to the regulation that the industry was requesting. But the first REIT five years after the regulation came out, the first REIT launched. As of today, there are kind of five listed REITs in the market and a couple more expected. So that's where we are today on the REIT side.
Dhruv Sharma: And are you comfortable publicly talking about the AUM of your business? So feel free to decline if you don't typically do that.
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: No, no, happy, happy to discuss the AUM. That's kind of this thing. So on the SM REIT, we are still to launch our first SM REIT asset. Prior to that, we had reached a 500 CR AUM. I think what's changed now is because of earlier, a lot of the large distributors were unsure because SEBI was not in the picture. Now with SEBI being in the picture, we are looking at assets that are 300 crore, 500 crore, 1500 crore to launch on our platform. So we're seeing next year to be a year of exponential growth for us and I think overall for this industry.
Dhruv Sharma: And how do distributions from this product get taxed in the hands of investors?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: I think that's the beauty of the product. Effectively, the distributions are tax-free in the investor's hands. You'll see your rental income or the income that you're getting on a quarterly basis is effectively tax-free. Then ultimately when you sell your units, at that point you pay long-term capital gains, which is today 12.5%. So that's very tax effective.
Dhruv Sharma: It is, yes. When you first described the business to us, you used the expression stock market for real estate and you just spoke about selling units. Is that something investors can do proactively? Can they do it on a whim if they want to? Can they get easy liquidity from this product?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: So see, structurally, it's the same as owning a stock, right? It's in your DMAT account. We'll be listed on the BSC, NSC. So the same way your stock of any other company lies in your DMAT, this will lie in your DMAT account. Then it just becomes a function of how many people are interested in that stock, right? Large caps in India are very liquid. Small caps may not be as liquid. So I think it's obviously just a matter of time till we get more and more liquidity in the SM REIT space. Obviously, there's a lot of investor education and awareness that does need to happen. But just by way of numbers, even when we were not listed in the earlier kind of era, if an investor wanted to exit, they were able to easily exit in about 30 days. So sure, it's not the stock market today where you list and you immediately exit, but it's much more liquid than owning a resi apartment, which takes about six, seven months to sell.
Dhruv Sharma: Any day, yes. Great. And what are the long term plans like? Do you hope to diversify beyond commercial real estate? And are there other avenues that might be even more lucrative for yourselves and for investors?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: So I think, so when I say commercial real estate, I think it means a large gamut of things. Obviously, the biggest segment is the office market. And office market is expected to continue to do strong. I know in the news today, or last few days, you've heard about the rupee depreciation touching, you know, a dollar is now 90 rupees. While everyone else is negative about that, the office market will be silently celebrating. Because effectively, the office market is an export driven market. We are effectively exporting services to the US, to Europe. And so office market becomes cheaper. And because it becomes cheaper, you're able to charge a higher rent to the tenant. So people who invest in office market tend to benefit. Just a simple analogy. In 2010, when the rupee was 40 rupees to the dollar, and today it's a 90 rupees. For the end consumer, if the rent increase the same amount for the person paying in dollar, he's actually paying the same amount while your rent has increased from 40 to 90. So office will always be the biggest segment. But then we also look at, you know, warehouses, schools, hospitals. So any long term, long term tenant, rent generating asset, we have a grade A tenant is something that we could look at.
Dhruv Sharma: Yes, I mean, it's interesting you clarify this, because when you said BKC, you know, the only image one conjures up in their mind is glass and steel buildings. Yeah, absolutely. And well, Shiv, I was told you only have until you have a hard stop in a few minutes. And so maybe the final closing question for you. Do you have a point of view on how the large global private equity players came to be among the largest landlords in the country, in the commercial real estate space and even others?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Yeah, so I mean, if you look at it, the biggest boys in Indian real estate are your Blackstone and Brookfields of the world, right? I mean, how they came to be and why that came to be, I think, is, if I had to say it in one sentence, it's pretty simple, because they had access to long term patient capital. And I think that's the play that they took. They obviously kind of took various approaches. I mean, if you look at specifically Blackstone, Brookfield, it looks slightly different approaches. But ultimately, they had to partner with local players. I think Blackstone followed more of a partnership model. Brookfield went a little bit more alone. But ultimately, they were the ones providing the capital. And then the Indian players were the ones providing the local know-how, expertise, development capabilities. I think what was lacking is access to long term Indian patient capital. And now I think you have that, right? I mean, in a lot of your prior network, you had people who talk about how wealth is growing in India, how even with FIIs not being there in India, the stock market is sustaining. You're seeing the same thing play out in real estate. So I think in a way, as a patriot, it's a little bit unfortunate that the benefit of the real estate rise has gone to global players. And the idea is for us to kind of change that and allow the appreciation of real estate to stay in the hands of Indians. But effectively, it's a long term patient capital, the ability for Blackstone and Brookfield to take 10 year views on a property and stay invested and hold price when they need to. And that's what's allowed them to kind of keep acquiring more and more properties and allow them to ride out cycles. The main issue with real estate is, you know, there will be cycles in real estate, there will be periods where your property prices are stagnant, there will be periods where your property is vacant for the period of time. So in that period of time, if you can continue holding the property, if you don't have leverage, you know, and a debt service to make, if you don't have a fun life where you need to return money to investors, if you're able to continue holding in the long run, you will make money in real estate. Because ultimately at its core in India, I mean, if you just look at the amount of office real estate around India, it's less than the amount of office real estate in New York. And we're kind of, you know, as a population of New York versus India, it's not even comparable.
Dhruv Sharma: Is that a fact? Wow. I had no idea. And you mean like all seven boroughs or just like?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: No, I mean all seven boroughs, not just Manhattan. Yeah. But it's also more vertical.
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: No, I'm talking about in square feet, right?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: So it's about in terms of square feet. So, and I think ultimately, if you look at the top six cities in India, the, you know, people are going to, are migrating towards these top six cities. And more and more of the population is moving from agrarian based to service based to white collar to professional. And for that you need.
Dhruv Sharma: Can you maybe stack rank Indian cities by availability of commercial real estate, like grade A commercial real estate?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: So the biggest, the biggest would be Bangalore. And then, yeah. And then there would be Mumbai and CR. And then you have your Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. I think those are the kind of the top six cities. Bangalore is kind of the services hub, right? So that's where it comes from. Pune is kind of coming up as a second services hub along with Hyderabad. Mumbai and Delhi or NCR are more historical. So they have a lot of other industries that's not just service based.
Dhruv Sharma: And globally, which are the top three cities out of curiosity in terms of commercial real estate, like availability?
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: I'll have to look that up. But my guess is it would be kind of something like Manhattan.
Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. All right, Shiv. It looks like that's time. Unless you have more time to spend with us. We're always we're happy to have you back. No, great.
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Great being here.
Dhruv Sharma: Wonderful chatting with you. Thanks for coming and sharing. Thank you.
Shiv Parekh - Founder, hBits: Thank you. See you.
Dhruv Sharma: Thank you. All right, listeners. That was our third and final guest for today, Shiv of HBITS. I said we would round up today's episode with news. So here we are. Today, Mishra is finally listed. Congratulations to Vidit, to Sanjeev and their entire team. They've listed at a 46% premium to their issue price. No mean feat. And so congratulations to them. We also have a bunch of other interesting things that have been happening, you know, in terms of news. There's one company we've spoken about before called Emergent Labs, which is being built by two exceptional founders. I believe they're ex-Dunzo. One of them has, in fact, worked in one of the sharpest technical teams at Google. And it's a company that allows you to, in a sense, prompt your way into launch-ready applications, both web and mobile applications. And they're on a tear. They're adding revenue like we've never seen before. There's users in already 180 countries using them. And they've just raised a new round, which is in the back of a large $23 million Series A they've done in September. This round is led by Google. That's almost like a full circle moment for the co-founder who previously interned at Google. So congratulations to them. And Tiger is back on the prowl. There's news of them putting together their, you know, what they call PIP 17, or Private Investment Partners 17, a $2.2 billion fund, which is, you know, in the same ballpark as PIP 16, which was also a $2.2 billion fund. It's the fund from which they invested in OpenAI and Waymo and Databricks. But both of these, by the way, are a sharp scale down from the 2021 fund, which is a $12 billion fund. And let's see how things go this time around. Satya Nadella was in, or was, or maybe still is in India. There's a picture of him meeting with the Prime Minister. And Microsoft has announced a commitment to invest $17 billion in India, building hyperscale infrastructure over the next four years. And I remind you that this is pretty much the same thing that we've seen, the same kind of commitments we've seen coming in from Google and Amazon. And their goal with this is to diffuse, to be able to diffuse AI at population scale, which is an unparalleled opportunity only India can present, and further the government's sovereign AI agenda. And finally, there was a lot of entertainment in the world of entertainment. And so what happened was that Warner Brothers, the movie studio, had first received a bid from Paramount, and then they got another one from Netflix. And the Netflix bid was somewhat complex. Paramount was offering all cash. It's turned into something like a bidding war on the Netflix bid. And there's potential of it running into antitrust issues, because if, God knows, if Netflix were to acquire Warner Brothers, they'll have a lot of eyeballs. And so Paramount has put in a rival bid. And guess what? They, people had doubts if they're good for the money, and they showed their hand and said, hey, Jared Kushner is a part of this deal. And so we're good for the money. And Jared Kushner has been everywhere these past few months. He brokered a peace deal in the Middle East. He was President Trump's special, you know, one of his special envoys to go broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. He's doing this also. So we thought we'd just share that with you. Well, that's it from us today. On the Wednesday live stream of The Offline Network, we'll see you again on Friday. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in.