Summary
The Offline Network Episode 30: Travel & Headout (aired 2025-11-07). Guests: Varun Khona, Salone Sehgal from Headout, Lumikai Fund. Salone: "First of all, I think it was just an incredible experience to meet Elon Musk and Sam Altman in flesh, in person, and as part of a small delegation." Salone: "I think, look, ultimately, the first view, world view is like quality of founder, right, and the founding team in itself." 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
Utsav Somani: Hello, listeners, welcome to the midweek stream of D.U.N., we're at episode number 30. So Dhruv and I were just joking that we've done this for 30 hours. That's almost what a podcast would release across the year. If they do one episode a week, take some breaks. So, I mean, kudos to us for powering through. I hope you're having fun with us as well on the show. A couple of IPO recaps, Physicswala surged 33% on their IPO debut. So congrats to the team and the founders as well. FineLabs, another fintech giant, 19% up. Capillary Tech, which is going to the markets on November 21st, has a 53x subscription. So I think another strong debut. So the public markets are welcoming all these tech companies with open arms. And I think finally, the world of liquidity is upon us. So I think it's overall great for the tech ecosystem. Excited for what this brings about in this world of innovation that we're excited about. My Twitter was not working yesterday, Dhruv, why was that?
Dhruv Sharma: That was because CloudFare was down. CloudFare serves a meaningful part of the Internet and they don't go down ever so often. But when they do, things get to the point that they did yesterday.
Utsav Somani: But then they've done everything, right? XChats, GPD, Shopify, Canva, Discord, all kinds of platforms.
Dhruv Sharma: They're one of the largest Internet infra companies, pretty much sit between the Internet and your servers and power things like DNS and, you know, CDNs and so on. But the good thing about this was that even though the Internet went down and everyone, you know, created a lot of noise around it, they were quickly able to get to the bottom of it. Apparently, it was a latent bug in one of their own sort of old legacy systems using Rust. It's a framework some developers like, some hate. But they were able to rectify it. And then, of course, you know, they followed up with a long incident response report or whatever those things are called. And can you imagine the amount of pressure on this?
Utsav Somani: It's all about, like, just making the world stop. I think it's funny that the Internet had a field day when it came back on.
Dhruv Sharma: It probably feels the same as, like, people who defuse bombs and so on.
Utsav Somani: Imagine being the guy who has to handle all of this at Cloudflare. It's just going to be, yeah.
Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. And then Bezos was in news this time. Apparently, he's going to be in the CEO seat again for a new company called Project Prometheus.
Dhruv Sharma: What's the name? It comes from a Greek legend. So Prometheus, you may remember seeing this name mentioned even in the Oppenheimer movie, for instance. So yeah, it was a mythological character who pretty much stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans. And which was so fire was in many ways the first piece of technology humans used ever. And Zeus, who's another Greek god, didn't want that to happen. And he did this anyway. So there's a certain amount of rebellion and defiance. And also, this is a great story.
Utsav Somani: He's raised $6.2 billion for this, most of it coming from himself. He's leading this with Wick Bajaj, who was leading Google's Life Sciences division. And they've recruited a team of 100-plus people as well, mostly from OpenAI, Meta, all of the top AI labs of the world. So exciting to see what he does. AI for the physical economy is the description that came out in the New York Times article. And he wants to build products for engineering and manufacturing of computers, aerospace, automobiles. And many of these will probably apply to some of the companies that he runs, Blue Origin as well, Amazon.
Dhruv Sharma: Also, you remember for Amazon, Jeff Bezos said the company's mission is to be the world's most customer-centric company. You know what's his mission for Blue Origin?
Utsav Somani: You were telling me something. Recap that for us.
Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, it's for the company to be the world's most decisive company. It has nothing to do with space. It has nothing to do with engineering. But his view is that for a space company, the worst thing that can come between you and outcomes is indecision. And so I think that's a very cool way to think about framing your company's mission.
Utsav Somani: True. I wonder what it is for SpaceX, though. Make life interplanetary?
Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, interstellar life.
Utsav Somani: All right. Recap, what did Google announce for me? Gemini 3?
Dhruv Sharma: Big, big, big announcement from Google. Do you remember? So it actually launched in November 22. And then BARD came out, I think it was Feb 23. Do you remember what happened after BARD came out? Like Google...
Utsav Somani: Everybody wrote off.
Dhruv Sharma: What a lot of... Everyone wrote them off. People are like, hey, this is so bad. They fumbled Gen AI. Sergey is going to have to come out of retirement. But then they were able to quickly get their act together and remind everyone of a few things. In no particular order. Number one, that some of the pioneers in the field still work at Google. They have people like Jeff Epstein. They have people like Demis Hassabis. He's one of the few Nobel laureates they have working inside the company.
Utsav Somani: And they acquired mine very, very early. So they were actually quite ahead in the game.
Dhruv Sharma: And the irony of all of this is the original Transformers paper, right? Attention is all you need. The paper that for the first time spoke about self-attention. And that was written by researchers inside of Google. And OpenAI used that architecture to train the GPT models. And then, of course, launched at GPT. And for the first time brought language models outside of labs. Really put them in our hands. Consumerized AI for us. Now AI has all of the world's attention. But the core invention came inside of Google. And GPUs are GPUs today because of the Transformer architecture. So yeah, this is Google just reminding everyone that the pioneers of the field still work there. They have unique training data. They can outspend anyone on compute, on infra, if and when they want to. The fact that they own multiple product surfaces. From search, to maps, to YouTube, to cloud, to Android. Where they can just deploy models end-to-end. And it is really one of the truly, you know, a few truly model-to-device companies right now. Meta has yet to, I mean, there's Metaglasses. But it's yet to put out more. And certainly Metaglasses doesn't have as many users as Android does. And OpenAI is working on a device. But it's not out yet. And it also appears that they're working on multiple layers. So they're working, of course, on the cognition layer. This new model just came out. But also on the silicon layer. You remember we spoke about TPUs in one of our earlier shows. So yeah, I think this is pretty interesting.
Utsav Somani: I saw some great examples of websites we built for Gemini 3. Like I think there was a launch video which had Sergey in it also. So he truly is back. But I mean, the funny thing about Gemini and distribution is, I was actually, I mean, a fun tidbit. I was on our YouTube channel where we host the show. You can actually go and ask on your mobile to summarize these episodes for you. And chat with our episodes as well. So that I think was a pretty cool thing. I think our guest is here.
Dhruv Sharma: Can we just stop now? Sorry? Just now. Oh, Sononi is here.
Utsav Somani: Our guest is here. Just give me one minute to recap this interesting partnership. So Microsoft's diversifying away from OpenAI as well. Anthropic, NVIDIA, and Microsoft. They've done a deal where Microsoft is investing $5 billion. Anthropic is buying $30 billion in your compute. NVIDIA is investing $10 billion in Anthropic. So it's a full circular economy. But something for folks to look up online when they try to keep up to date with the happenings of the world of AI. But let's switch guests. Welcome our first guest, Soni. Welcome to the show.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): Hi. Hi, Utsav. Hi, Dhruv. Thank you so much.
Utsav Somani: Yes, Sononi. I love the background. Is this real or that's an artificial one?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): No, no. It's very much real. It's my office. It's the Lumikai office.
Utsav Somani: All right. So before we ask you to explain what Lumikai does and your funds, strategy, and thesis, and the kind of investing that you've done, we saw your LinkedIn and social media handles. You were recently meeting Sam Altman and Elon Musk. How was that? Yes. What were the takeaways?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): Oh, amazing. The takeaways, my God, so many. First of all, I think it was just an incredible experience to meet Elon Musk and Sam Altman in flesh, in person, and as part of a small delegation. I think there were just so many incredible learnings because we had the opportunity, as part of the delegation, to visit the Giga factory, to go to the boarding company, then to visit SpaceX, also went to the OpenAI office, and spent time at Starlink. And just to meet the leadership team, just to see the ambition of what these businesses are building, and to just interact with these incredible tech visionaries, I think it's just something else. It's very, very inspiring. The scale of ambition is another level. And the quality of talent and their speed of execution is unparalleled. And just meeting Elon Musk and listening to him and speaking, it's just incredible. Just incredible.
Utsav Somani: I can't even imagine. So what does Lumikai do for our listeners?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): Yeah, we're an early stage fund. We were a fund which, I guess, launched a strategy in an asset class called Investing in Interactive Media, Interactive Entertainment. At that point of time, when we launched the fund, I guess, Interactive Media was, sorry, can you guys hear me?
Utsav Somani: Yes. I think it just broke off for a second.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): OK, sure. Yeah, I guess when we launched the fund, I guess the word Interactive Media was not in common parlance. Nobody really understood what we did. But we invest in very, very early stage companies, which are at the confluence of gaming, content, digital platforms, AR, VR, infrastructure tech, which essentially touches the media entertainment industry, or any kind of company which is essentially use what we call systems of play to essentially gamify existing experiences like EdTech or FinTech or retail, etc. It could be any one of these. Our belief is that every successful consumer app is essentially a game mechanic in disguise. So we apply that lens. We do check sizes of as low as 200K going up to about $2 million. Our fund LPs are essentially global institutional capital. So strategics and institutions from South Korea, from the US, from Europe, some from MENA. And the intention is for us to be able to do initial checks. And then we essentially bring coinvestment downstream partners with global funds, as well as our LPs.
Dhruv Sharma: So Loni, when you evaluate companies in your category, which is you said it's Interactive Media and Entertainment, and gaming, and systems of play. Are there some common attributes that you look for in these categories?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, ultimately, the first view, world view is like quality of founder, right, and the founding team in itself. So that is no different from what any other VC fund would look for, I presume. I think the only difference with us is as a fund, I have, I guess, been in this space for about now two decades. I used to be a builder in this space in global markets. And then I used to cover this space in the global market as a VC investor. And I also used to be in investment banking and private equity covering this space. So that's all I know. So there is a certain degree of, I guess, I've seen what happens in global markets, how those trends have panned out. And then building and applying that lens to the India market also makes us, to some extent, thesis driven. So there are certain thesis that we identify, and then we essentially scout founders. So it's not that we're sitting opportunistically and waiting for founders to approach us. So, for example, our deal flow, 60% of it is scouted. We actually go out actively finding founders within a thesis that we essentially have. Ultimately, over the course of the last, let's say, even just five years, we've evaluated north of 3,000 odd deals within the sector alone. We've done about 20 odd investments. We're fairly calibrated in the sense we won't do more than four or five investments in a year. But apart from, let's say, the founder and the thesis that we have on a particular market that we believe there is white space where a category leader should be built, I think we look for the holy trinity of engagement, retention, and monetization. Many times founders will have something, but many times founders are also pre-product. So in that case, our identifying, I guess, kind of benchmark or threshold for an exception founder is they have a really, really unique insight about what will essentially make their product work or what would essentially drive, let's say, traction. How could this become a very large business? So I'd say to some parts, there is very commonality between what other funds would do. And in some parts, there is not so much overlap or commonality about how we evaluate deals, especially when it comes to something like, for example, gaming. There is no problem solution framework. There's no vitamin painkiller approach that VCs love to talk about. There's no must have in that. Your ultimate competition is boredom. So there we apply a very different lens because we've kind of seen what happens in the global markets. There we're very, very thesis driven. So yeah, I guess it's a combination of a few things.
Utsav Somani: And you put out very good reports. I enjoy reading them. They're very nice and colorful, but also, I mean, fairly knowledge dense as well. So and you mentioned global trends. Can you tell me two trends on two investments that you've done following those trends in India or scouting for founders? Any two public investments in the recent past that are public as well?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): Yeah, sure. I like the fact that you said it was colorful. I'm glad the design palette was appealing.
Utsav Somani: You're a gaming fund, so I'm sure it had to be.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): I'm glad somebody appreciates the visual aesthetics. But look, yeah, look, I think two trends. One was one is micro dramas, right? Like it's the hottest new trend. These are these like short form dramas, which are one minute, one and a half minute kind of short videos, which are, you know, live action, which are acting and script. But they're actually a 60 minute series, which has been clipped into one one and a half minute shows. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but essentially this is this has been quite the rage. We started tracking this in China about two and a half years ago before it had even come to India. Like we had started seeing this wave of micro dramas. A lot of the Chinese companies were building this in China, but they were also taking it to the West. And there were a few observations that we had when we were speaking to our Chinese, you know, counterparts or, you know, just co-investors or just networks. And our thesis was that the companies which would be most successful in this space would have a few common commonalities. So they would have very large distribution modes because there is no network effects potentially in this business. You essentially have to do a lot of marketing if you want to reach that kind of scale. So those guys which had very large distribution modes were actually being able to keep cost of acquisition very, very low. This was primarily a female driven phenomena. So a lot of women were actually watching these micro dramas. The third is the quality of content. And if there was differentiation of content that would help the platforms really set itself apart. If you were just licensing content or you were doing AI generated content, it was less likely to work or appeal because there is a lot of content fatigue with the users. And then the last was essentially to be able to execute incredibly fast and keep your cost of content production very low while churning out original content because the margins of this business were running very slim. So anybody who was able to get all of these three, four things right would essentially be winning. So hence, we when started looking at the micro drama space, we actually did not invest in any standalone platform. We had an existing business called Eloilo, which was essentially doing live streaming. And Eloilo, that was a conversation that we had. And that was a conversation that we had with Saurabh, the founder at that point of time. Clearly, I expressed my concern saying that these are the things that could go wrong if it is not executed well. And Eloilo and Saurabh and team are just incredible execution machines. Plus, they know how to crack retention and they had scale. They understand game mechanics. They understand content production. And Story TV just yesterday is the number one app in the country. And the business is now on an incredible trajectory. It's operationally cash flow positive. So that's worked out incredibly well. So that's a thesis that is obviously played out. That's the first one. The second one, I would say, has been around two things. One is gaming, of course. And we had a belief that there would be and there were probably two additional pieces. One, I'll talk about gaming. But with games had started to see, we believe that games are and this is just common knowledge now that games are larger than movies, music, sports, media rights, et cetera. That's just what global games industry is. We believe that that would start happening in the India market as well. We said that, oh, India will not consume games. People would not play games. All of that has obviously not panned out. India now has 591 million gamers. We see people spending anywhere between eight to nine hours per week playing games. People are also spending money on games like BGMI and Free Fire. And we're seeing a rising flow of casual gamers who are, for the very first time last year, revenue growth outstripped download growth in India, which has never happened before. Now, hence, we started doing two things. We started backing studios who were building games for the global markets, but also studios were building games for the local market. And in both our cases, these businesses have started to make revenue pretty quickly. Again, this was a second thesis which kind of panned out because we'd seen this play in the global markets. And our third thesis was around how AI could essentially build businesses out. We backed a bunch of businesses, again, in the ed tech space as well as the astrotech space as well. And again, those were theses that started developing a year and a half before. And those are actually very dated. We did Supernova, which was a fun one bet, actually. It was about two years ago. And we did a bet called Us, My Guru, which is a recent bet about a year ago.
Dhruv Sharma: Can we pull the thread a little bit on this theme? Like AI-generated content, how is it impacting the categories you invest in?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): With AI-generated content, I'd say, look, there are various categories. If it's an AI compact, let's talk about AI-generated content on video, right? AI-generated content as video content, if you are running a platform with just AI-generated content, there is a lot of content fatigue. It is being currently, you know, words like brain rot and words like AI slop being thrown about. Retention on these platforms tends to be very, very low.
Utsav Somani: If you don't have somebody, the hosts of the Mumbai AI Film Festival on the show as well, and they think we might see an AI-generated movie in PVRs very soon.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): We may. We may just, but it depends.
Utsav Somani: I think there's some lag.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): Like at the end of the day, you know, you can say that I, sorry.
Utsav Somani: I think there was some lag. Yeah, sorry.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): I'm just saying that you could create AI-generated content. There's no doubt about it. That's like saying, hey, I want, you know, my grandmother's recipe is great for food. I'm going to ask her what to make it. They're going to make it short. They may make it to the complete tea, but is it going to still taste like your grandmother's food? Probably not, right? It's, it's taste, it's soul, which is missing from creative content. That's ultimately what it comes down to, right? Can AI create soul and just character and taste is the question that most AI-generated content is facing like, and you can see that, right? So my view on AI-generated content on video is a little bit different from using AI, let's say, in a very verticalized specific companion. Let's say, are you using it in EdTech? Are you using it in, let's say, NPC avatars? I think there is, therein, I will make a differentiation. Again, I will make a differentiation. If you are creating an AI, which is a wrapper around a model there, I think, you know, with every OpenAI demo day, it's a red wedding for, for startups across the world. Right? So, because suddenly overnight startups are ending and they're going out of business. So I think my view is nice.
Utsav Somani: Game of Thrones reference in there.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): I'm a nerd. What can I do? Fantasy fiction nerd here. But I think it's kind of different across categories.
Dhruv Sharma: And you mentioned gaming studios that develop games for India, Saroni. Do you want to talk to us about some inflection points that have worked to their advantage? I don't know, UPI autopay or in-app purchases being enabled because of that?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): 100% UPI auto-pay. I mean, you know, five years ago, you would have asked me, if somebody asked me, would this strategy have worked? I would have said, absolutely not. You're crazy. Like creating the strategy for the India market. Like if I launched the fund in 2015 versus 2020, you would have a whole different story. You guys probably wouldn't be talking to me, right? But it's timing, right? 2020 was a great year for, well, gaming. And then of course, you know, UPI happens and UPI essentially enabled microtransactions. And, you know, these are not intent-led buys. These are impulse-led buys. So imagine if you have to go through five steps of credit card and debit cards, you're not going to make the purchase, right? Like you're buying whatever is that item, a $2 item. However, when you have UPI, obviously that friction level goes away. And suddenly you start seeing people making actual purchases, right? And it's vanity. Hey, I want to look good. My character, you know, my avatar wants to, I want to buy this new skin. Hey, I want to skip a level. Hey, I don't want to wait. So you start doing all these things. And then suddenly you have a habit where you are paying. And that's essentially what has happened, which has enabled microtransactions, right? Now you have an audience who's been trained to pay, which is very different from the image people have is that Indians don't pay. No, that's actually not true. Indians will pay. They will pay for quality. They're very value discerning. And that's essentially what you need to offer because India is not a walled garden. They're exposed to global best. So when they're playing a BGM, I don't give them a substandard game. They're not going to play it and they're not going to pay for it. So I think that is the other like myth we need to break. But yes, absolutely. UPI was a very key driver.
Utsav Somani: And what are the two trends that you're excited about as we head into 2026?
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): Um, look, we are very excited about the potential of VR. We, you know, again, this is something that comes from my experience. Look, you know, looked at VR a lot in 2015, 2016. There was a lot of hype around it at that point of time. Everybody was kind of pushing VR as this magical solution to consumer experiences. There was a big invest then. There was a graveyard of VR startups because that future did not pan out. But over the course of the last two, three years, what we have seen again from the global markets has been that enterprise adoption of VR is actually increasing. In the US, it is incredibly high actually. And that prompted our investment in a business called Autovoss about two years ago. These guys are building an enterprise product stack for helping Fortune 500 companies deploy VR for very critical training. So they work a lot with medtech, with bio, with pharma companies who have very critical training for their, you know, lab workers, for example, who are testing vaccines with oil and gas or with people who are working on nuclear reactors. So they have, you know, north of 25 odd Fortune 500 companies, average ACVs of two million dollars plus, essentially using their tech stack. So this is a business and a team that we're quite very excited about. I think another team that we're very excited about is, you know, potentially looking at Roblox and some of these other platforms as, you know, what could be exciting, what can be built there. It doesn't require a lot of capital. It requires very lean teams. And there's an exception wide space here to build something. I think on the interactive side, we still want to see more people explore game mechanics on disrupting static linear experiences. We have a generation that we call swipe before type. That's the title of our report. People, this generation has been trained to expect experiences which are immersive, which are personalized. And there's still not enough consumer experiences to deliver that. So I'd say, you know, these are two, three things.
Utsav Somani: Awesome, Saloni. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I would love to have you back on the show and talk more about gaming. I think it's a personal favorite topic of mine as well. So we can go on for hours. The Call of Duty, new one, disappointed. So, yeah, and I'd love to get your views on the meta new VR glasses as well.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): We tried them. We tried them at Insignia. Actually, they brought it. It's it's incredible. Yeah, it's an incredible experience. We tried them.
Utsav Somani: I didn't hear good reviews about it. At least the the risk control of the band that they were giving.
Salone Sehgal (Founder & Managing Partner, Lumikai Fund): I think with my I have like a really tiny risk. It didn't didn't react. Apparently, it fits like 90 percent. But even whatever little experience that I had with it, it's incredibly, incredibly smooth. And you can you know, you can see visually through, you know, it doesn't block your spatial spatial vision, which is a big problem with the bulky devices, especially for women, because of our themes are smaller. So actually, it causes, you know, women have three times more nausea than men on VR devices. But even metaglasses actually takes that away. And the current device seems a lot more intuitive than the previous one. So I actually think it's a it's a big improvement.
Utsav Somani: Amazing. Can't wait to see it in India. Awesome. Thank you so much. All right, listeners, we've got our next guest, Mr. Shlok, who's going to come and announce his headlines and also give us a sneak peek on what's actually going on behind the headlines. And that's what TUN stands to do by bringing you close to founders who are building awesome stuff. So Shlok, welcome to the show.
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): Thanks. What's up?
Utsav Somani: Hey, Shlok. Nice to meet you. Congrats on the fundraise. You've raised three million from, I mean, of course, the same company and the same brand that backed Zomato and Policy Bazaar's InfoEdge. So tell us a little bit more about what does the company do and why is this funding important?
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): 100%. So we started a year back trying to solve the problem of fashion discovery. The key insight that we were trying to solve for was that today, young consumers spend most of their time on TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest more than they do in the offline world. And because of that, they are just generally more aware about fashion trends, inspirations. You have influencers talking about these trends very regularly on these platforms. And what we realized as a very interesting problem was the bridge between inspiration discovery on social platforms like Instagram and TikTok to commerce discovery on marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, etc. was completely broken. And we wanted to solve that. There were solutions like Google Lens and Google Shopping that existed with sort of aggregated inventory from all of these marketplaces and showed it to consumers to sort of buy from. But there were a lot of frictions in the product experience for consumers, which made it very hard for consumers to actually do it. So it's been a year for us building those experiences out. We right now serve about half a million people across the world. US and Canada stand out to be the biggest market for us and India stands to be the third right now. So yeah.
Dhruv Sharma: Very interesting. Shlok, can you very quickly unpack the user journey for us?
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): Yes. So the way the way Shopin works through is that there is a search experience for consumers and there's a discovery experience for consumers. The search experience for consumers works through channels like Instagram, TikTok, where the origination of inspiration might be happening for you as a consumer. So let's say you as a consumer today are scrolling on Instagram and discover a reel, which is interesting for you. And you like that shirt that the person is wearing in that field. Now, today, if you have to go and discover that you have to go to multiple marketplaces and search for that shirt using keywords, you know, you have to figure out how to how to best get that shirt available for you. And even after you do that, you're constrained by the inventory of that particular marketplace or brand at the end of the day. So if you're searching on Zara or if you're searching on H&M, you're constrained only by the inventory of that particular brand or marketplace. Versus on Shopin, when you come and search, firstly, the search is very intuitive. So you just have to share that reel that you've seen on Instagram with us on Instagram itself. We message you back in about 30 seconds saying that, OK, we found the shirt that you were looking for. You just have to click a button and it takes you to the app or the web experience, whichever is available on your phone. And we show you that particular shirt, the exact match and all similar outfits that fit that vibe. Right. Without you doing any form of hard work in the middle.
Dhruv Sharma: Do you have digital stylists too? Alan? Do you have digital stylists too? Like something that looks good on someone else may not look good on me.
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): Yes. So the way that works for us is that we're going shopping after the show.
Utsav Somani: It's the one activity, you know, an attire coming up.
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): Yeah. Yes. So the way a stylist works on Shop and Groove is that we believe that AI can't solve the objective problem or the subjective problem of understanding your tastes and my tastes at the moment because the tastes can't be classified into 30, 40, 50 types, at least yet. Right. So what we do is that we obviously personalize the experience for consumers using 3000 data points for each consumer every time they interact with the app. But the way the stylist works for us is through a try on. So you just put an image of yourself and it shows you all outfits that it thinks would look good on you. Now, it is giving you an option of choice here where you can either choose to go on with what the stylist is telling you, but you also have the option or the opportunity to go and search for anything. So today on the app, you can go and search for Hrithik Roshan, right? And we show you a bunch of images of Hrithik Roshan from popular movies, his Instagram, his TikTok, whatever, right? And you just have to click a button and it breaks down Hrithik Roshan's outfit for you. Now, he might be wearing a watch, a shoe, a particular type of a shirt. And we discover that from you, not just from a brand like Gucci, etc., which might be what he is wearing, but also from a brand like Pantaloons, which might be one hundredth the cost for you.
Utsav Somani: And how is AI playing into all of this? Because Google image search has existed for a while. So maybe explain the tech behind this to us.
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): Yeah, hundred percent. So the tech that is powering sort of the image experience is something that has existed thanks to machine learning in 2010, which is what Google used to use. The embeddings that are generated today using the same models has gotten way more refined. So just to put things in perspective for you, Google today analyzes an image across 812 different vectors or dimensions and maps that with the closest possible. We do that at 3564 vectors. So the accuracy has gone up. And what AI really plays, like the role AI really plays for us on the app is the personalization aspect of it. So let's say you get onboarded on the app and you answer a few questions for me. So let's say you answer three questions for me, right? Within five minutes of you spending on the app, I know you as much as, let's say, Instagram knows you or as much as a TikTok knows you. Now, we're not talking about a personalization layer like the kind of personalization layer that exists on a Myntra or an RGU or a Tata Click, right? It's much more deeper. And that is where we use models more than on the image recognition side.
Utsav Somani: Got it. Any final closing question for Shlok, Dhruv?
Dhruv Sharma: Yes. So we, I think, really like the proposition, Shlok, but where do you take things from here? Do you foresee social commerce is something that's coming next?
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): So interesting thing with today is the day we're launching a very interesting feature, which has not existed anywhere in the world till today. It's a shoppable reel feed. So you basically have a video playing on the app. It's kind of like YouTube shots, Instagram reels. And you have a button across each reel, right? And you click that button and that outfit or whatever many outfits that are there in that reel gets broken down for you and you get results from across the internet. So we see the evolution of shopping from being a vanilla utility tool today to becoming the next TikTok shop for the world where you're not just discovering or searching outfits, but you're also actually, you know, we are the source of inspiration for you. So what we want to replace for consumers in the US and other parts of the world is that if people are spending two hours on TikTok today and 15 minutes on shopping, we want to be the platform where you spend two hours every day. And we want you to spend not just searching, right? And just swiping or scrolling or just discovering your way. And that's the evolution that we're seeing for the platform.
Shlok Bhartiya (Founder & CEO, shoppin'): All the best. Thanks a lot.
Utsav Somani: All right, folks. Now we're shifting to a different industry. Let's welcome Varun from Headout. Varun, welcome to the show.
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): Thanks for having me Utsav. How are things?
Utsav Somani: We all love Travelman. And I know we got connected to through Max. And Max is one of my closest friends from college. And he works at Headout. Which country is he based in now?
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): He lives in Berlin. And he makes the UK and Netherlands for us.
Utsav Somani: Nice. Awesome. So for our listeners, explain what Headout does.
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): So many things, but let me keep it simple. What we are at our very core is we've created this beautiful home for some of the world's most exceptional real life experiences. And the way that we have done this is we have sort of created this managed marketplace where we curate the kind of experiences that we get on board. We work with local businesses in 300 cities around the world today, where we work with tens of thousands of these businesses to upgrade them, upgrade their services, upgrade the technology to be able to bring them into the 21st century. And then have this available as a seamless marketplace for users to be able to discover and book these experiences. So far, we've had about 44 million guests who have booked an experience in Headout with us in one of our 300 cities. And they've come from almost every single sovereign nation that exists on the planet. And we've generated close to $2 billion worth of economic activity in the tourism ecosystem as a function of the value that we create on the table. So that's been our journey so far. It's a decade in. But second decade is kind of where the magic starts to really compound. And that's what we are benefiting from right now. And so there's a lot more to be built, especially with all the evolution that technology has to offer today.
Dhruv Sharma: Varun, do you think you'd give us a sense of the categories that you're spread across? And also, how do preferences vary from geography to geography, age, you know, each category to each category?
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): So today, the world of experiences is extremely diverse by design, right? And the same diversity is mirrored in what you see on Headout. So we have got experiences which are private tours of iconic venues, after hours to experiences where you're doing something, adventures to cruises to shows on the West End, to getting tickets to incredible historical sites and everything in between that, right? So the core thesis of ours is that, hey, listen, if you want to head out and do something fun and exciting, we want to be a port of call for whatever that fun and exciting could be. In terms of consumer behavior, given that we've got a window into how the world behaves, what we see are sort of diametrically opposite things. In some ways, the world is very consistent and very homogeneous. Customers and travelers who are educated, who travel from metropolitan cities around the world behave rather similarly. But you do have these minor differences that occur either from a demographic basis or from a sort of a geographic basis. So for example, what we see is customers from the US typically tend to spend a lot more time in a single city than customers from Asia who tend to do more cities, but spend less time sort of per city. And that reflects in the total number of experiences that they book in a given city on Headout versus kind of other geographies. What we see, for example, is also that Germans are planners. They love to book things in advance versus somebody like a Mexican or even an Indian are fairly last minute travelers who are very flexible with their plans and are okay with sort of being spontaneous on the go. You sort of get to see these really interesting nuggets of behavior from different parts of the world. But what we also see, as I said earlier, is that to a really reasonable degree, there's a fair amount of similarity between how all of us operate. I think we are more similar as a world than we are different. And that's sort of great for us to see from the window that we have.
Dhruv Sharma: But as the founder, how do you... What's up, do you want to go?
Utsav Somani: Naini, please, after you.
Dhruv Sharma: I was saying, so as the founder CEO of this company, and there are so many categories and from what you just said, it appears there are so many cultural differences and nuances. How do you put yourself in a place where you're receiving all this signal and filtering it out and designing an org internally that can cater to such varied demand?
Utsav Somani: So I was going to top up to this. You mentioned that thing, right? Managed marketplace or managed experiences. And I read a case study on Ferns and Petals on how they do this globally and the kind of SLAs that they have with their partners and stuff. So maybe tell us how it works on ground as well as a secondary to this question.
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): I'll take this sequentially, right? So the first one is that you infinitely just cannot scale as a founder when you're dealing with this level of complexity. And so it's all a function of the team that you curate and put together. So today we have got a team that's spread across 12 cities around the world, 12 countries around the world. And we've got, I think the last time I checked, about 41 nationalities in the team. And so the team today is a representation of the world that we serve. And so we learn from them as much as we learn from our customers. And that's been our specific sort of kernel. We have not transported talent from India to all of these different countries and tried to build an Indian company everywhere. We have tried to build a global company from India. And by being global, one of the tenets of being global is that your workforce, your team sort of represents globality in your team, right? So that's kind of like been our sort of solution for that problem statement because you just cannot understand the world fully and it's all in sort of its entirety of complexity and awesomeness. To Utsav's question in terms of how we manage, there's a fair amount of nuance in this ecosystem, right? From the outside, it looks like a really cool, sexy, large, big business in terms of the addressable market that we are after. But when you sort of look at and slice and dice it, these are an amalgamation of a lot of different fragmented local industries. The way that a venue works versus the way that a local bus operator works versus the way that a freelance guide books are just fundamentally not the same. And so what we really believed in is that this complexity needs to be obfuscated for the user in a way that they get to make simple choices. But all of the work of the difficulties are sort of taken care of by us, right? The way that we do this is one, we have a point of view as a marketplace. We're not a simple aggregator. We don't just list experiences as they exist today. We go in with data and with a point of view about what we think should exist and we then almost create that specific experience into existence. We go into the local ecosystem, we find local businesses, we vet them heavily with the local teams that we've got on ground and we get them to modify or create experiences that match with what we are looking for. And what we do is we don't just stop there at getting them to create it. We actually create the experience and get multiple local businesses to provide that exact same experience. If I have to drive a loose analogy, it's like what Urban Company does in India where they have defined what a great plumbing experience looks like if you've got a leaky faucet. They have defined SLAs, they have defined toolkits, they have defined a certain SOP for what training looks like. But it's still an open marketplace of individual plumbers who are then connected to you, but you don't have to go and look for plumber X or Y or Z. You simply have to say that you want this service and they will give you a plumber that matches all of these different criterias that they've put together. So that's exactly what we've done. When you book something with us, we've got multiple such local businesses who have all been aggregated into one single experience, but all of these different businesses are operating under the exact same SOP. They're all tech-enabled, they all have last-minute availability, they all have great guides, they all operate in ways that make sure that the experience for the end customer is seamless. And all of these sort of little works that we've done behind the scenes ensure that customers get one really simple discovery experience. So on HeadUp, we've got this rule of thumb where we say that for a given collection, when we say a collection, we effectively mean for a given interest, right? So for example, let's say you're going to the Vatican museums. We have 10 or less experiences, even though in reality, thousands of experiences exist in the world. But what we've done is we've sort of collapsed that complexity down to 10 experiences, then got multiple businesses to run one of those 10 experiences. Each experience can have 20 different companies behind the scenes running that experience, but they've all been beautifully sort of really aggregated and standardized to be able to make sure that end customer experiences is really simple and seamless. So that's kind of like the stack that we have, the managed stack to be able to make sure we're creating a ton of value for both the end consumer, but also consequently for the end business provider by really getting them to focus on what they do best, which is to share these amazing stories, but take away all of the complexities of tech and operations in a way that just allows them to focus on what they do really well.
Utsav Somani: Beautiful. You've summarized the playbook quite well. So thank you for that. You love sharing numbers as well. I think it was 130 million in February. October was your best month ever. Give us some insights. Yeah, of course.
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): Yeah, so last year in 2024 for the calendar year, we did about $130 million in revenue. This is the take that we make as a marketplace. So this is our revenue as a marketplace of the GMV or the GBV that we sort of generate as an ecosystem that of course is multi-fold higher. And this number has been growing and compounding really well in multiple pockets of the business today. On an average, of course, we are growing very healthily, but we've got sort of centers like Japan, for example, which are growing 5x, US, which is growing 2x. We've got UK, which is growing almost sort of 3x. So there are different pockets of the world where as tourism rebounds from COVID and as people start to sort of head back to the same extent they used to before COVID back in 2019, we're sort of benefiting from that wave. But also in addition to this, we have just been investing tremendously in AI. So one of the core surprising facts that we have seen people realize or not realize is the fact that today, if there are a hundred travelers who go and visit some place in the world, less than nine of them are actually taking the assistance of some sort of a guide to help them really go deeper into what they're looking at and what they're experiencing. The majority, the vast majority, right? 90% plus are effectively doing this in a DIY mode where they're just simply seeing things by themselves without getting the ability to be able to go that two, three, four levels deeper to be able to sort of really connect and immerse in the surroundings of where they are at. And the reason for these are many, but the two of the biggest ones would be that, one, it's expensive to have a human guide assist you. And two, it is unclear as to what the value of the human guide is because sometimes you can have question marks about, hey, listen, am I getting a history lesson? Will I be able to understand the accent? Is the guide available at a time which is convenient for me? And so on and so forth. So those are standard problem statements when you have sort of a human at the center of a delivery solution. And so what we are really trying to imagine is that, hey, listen, for the 90% plus people who today do not take the services of a human guide, could we leverage AI to be able to give you exactly what a human guide does?
Utsav Somani: And you acquired a company called Dabble to help you do this also, right?
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): Exactly. So we acquired this company in Canada called Dabble. They're a Y Combinator company that were sort of a bunch of these really, really smart University of Waterloo grads who were focused on using spatial computing and AI to solve problems for experiencing physical spaces. They were deploying that technology in a bunch of different use cases. But we sort of brought them on board to be able to apply to what we think is the sexiest and the most fun use case, which is that, hey, listen, can we use AI to help you get out more often and get to see the real world and have a great time while we're at it? So that's exactly what we're building right now. I mean, in fact, I've got a closed beta going on in London where thousands of users are using it every single week and having a great time. And in the coming weeks and months, we'll be rolling it out pretty much across the globe wherever you are.
Utsav Somani: Man, that's a wonderful application of AI. Help people get out. Something that Dhruv also... Dhruv and I chat about and how can we get away from the screen a lot more. So yeah, awesome. Excited to check it out. Dhruv, any final closing question for Varun?
Dhruv Sharma: Sure. Varun, so you know, a lot of the most frequented cities and places in the world are now starting to complain of over-tourism. Do you have a perspective on what it will take to solve it? Also given that, you know, when people go by what chat GPT is telling them or just what every third person on Instagram, you're all going to end up in the same place. How can HeadOut help you disperse once you reach the destination?
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): Yeah, so what I would say is that it's a good problem to have in some ways. I think a lot of cities around the world have taken it for granted that, hey, listen, these tourism dollars are taken for granted, but they're actually very helpful to the local economies in ways which are very well documented in terms of just the amount of economic value that they create for the constituents of that specific location, right? But at the same time, I am empathetic to the problem statement. And what we believe is that the world is a very big place and it has got multiple great things to see literally in every single corner that you can imagine. If AI is able to democratize the ability to be able to go deeper in places around you, wherever you are, including your own city, then effectively what we hope will happen is that you will have an era of abundance where there'll be a lot more to do, right? And when you have anything that's abundant, it almost always leads to a really nice diffusion where people are able to use it in so many different ways in so many different parts of the world. So what we're really hoping is that while chat GP recommendations may give you similar recommendations as answers, but if we are able to use AI to get you to go deeper and not just go to a place but get to hear those stories, it will inspire you to be able to want to get more such stories. And if you get addicted to the idea of going deeper and getting real authentic stories, then you will automatically find yourself transfixed and moving towards more different parts of the same city, different parts of the same country, different parts of the world entirely. And that's exactly what we hope that we'll be able to achieve with our AI guide. If it can unravel a slightly different level for you, then you will get the motivation that you need to be able to go deeper and go wider as a result.
Utsav Somani: Solid. Varun, before we let you go, give us Wanderlust goals. Talk to experiences for you this year that you booked on Headout for you personally.
Varun Khona (Co-founder & CEO, Headout): So it's the year also where I have been a dad for the very first time. And so I've not traveled as much as I would like to, but still I've had two really great experiences. One was I was in the UK recently for Headout work, as you would imagine. And we were in the place called sort of Cotswolds, right? Which is this really sort of beautiful countryside in the UK. And I literally randomly on Headout sort of bumped on this experience where you're able to get on top of a flight, a little micro flight, and actually sort of stand on top of it like Tom Cruise did in Mission Impossible. And they take you up to about 2000 feet and get you back down while you're sort of just clipped with a simple harness system, right? And so I did this experience with a tremendous amount of fear of heights, but I really sort of wanted to try and overcome that. And this did that beautifully. And a bunch of us did. My wife was there just to sort of cheer me on. She saw me. She saw how amazing it was. She ended up doing it as well. I had my brother-in-law with me as well. He did the exact same thing. He was there to cheer me. He said, okay, cool. This seems fun. And we did this. And it was a really, really fun experience in a way that is not obvious at all. Who would have imagined that? Listen, like you can just get on a plane, stand on top of it, and like take off and come back down, right? And have a great time. So that was a great experience. And the second was that at the beginning of the year with the whole team, we actually were in Dubai for a team off-site. And we booked a private yacht, which is one of the experiences that we provide on Head Out. And we just took off in Jan to be able to see the city from sort of the vantage point of the sea. And I have to tell you, in the month of Jan and Feb, there are very few cities in the world which are as pretty as Dubai is. The weather is perfect. The sun just hits perfectly. The waters are great. You get to sort of see both the nature in its sort of absolute prime and those man-made sort of metropolis in front of you, which just looks imposing. And the ability to be able to experience that with 50, 60 Head Outers, all in a single space, having the time of our lives was a great experience. Those two are kind of the ones that stand out right now.
Utsav Somani: All right, Varun. Thank you for giving us travel goals. Have a wonderful rest of the week ahead. Thank you for coming.
Dhruv Sharma: I'm so tempted to say Varun's mission impossible stunt. Try it on Head Out. Don't try it at home. Thank you, guys.
Utsav Somani: Cheers, Varun. Cheers. All right, listeners. Hope you've had a good Wednesday with us. We'll see you on Friday at four o'clock. Cheers. Bye-bye.