Full Transcript

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yeah, sure. So just in simple words, basically, we are building an AI infrastructure layer for operating system stack, right? And to dig deeply into it, every device that we use, be it a phone or a car or a robot, it has to have an operating system on it before it becomes usable, right? So now operating systems are complex. It has many layers, starting from your silicon, then firmware, framework layer, vendor layer, and the user interface layer. So we are just tying it all together, right? And basically saying that at this level, we are going to build a platform which will help you bring up your devices, bring up these hardware companies' devices in a faster manner. And diagnosis is just like, right now, we are starting the diagnosis, which is the first part of the story. But eventually, it's like, we all know that hardware companies take time to ship devices. And that is a problem we are essentially trying to solve. How do we bring all of this together?

Dhruv Sharma: Fantastic. And also, maybe just so we understand everything a lot better, give us a few examples of devices, Tarun. And also tell us which operating systems they run on, any open source operating systems as well.

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yeah, so just very simple. The mobile phones that you use, or any kiosks that you interact with, the robots, and in fact, car. Car has this whole ECUs. And then it all goes all the way up to the user screen. All of these are basically layers of the operating system. And I'll take a simple example of the mobile, because a mobile may look like a simple device. But it itself is a collection of computers. There is a layer, like there are equipment manufacturers. Every component has its own firmware. And then these OEMs and ODMs, they kind of assemble it together. There's a Qualcomm base for VSPs. So there are just so many layers to bring up even a mobile phone or the normal phones that we use. And all of this, when basically, so there's a slight stark difference between how devices are shipped versus after the devices are shipped. So just to take an example, I want to add a demarcation line there. Once the devices are shipped, you have all the connectivity to the internet. You have all the platforms and the AI tools that you can use. But before that, you're just doing everything manually. You're connected to the device. You're pulling the logs manually. So the systems that are present there are very old. And to bring up a device, essentially, I would say, is a lot of hard work. And I've seen teams, my teams, and in fact, all the hardware companies, they struggle with it. And yeah, these are the devices I'm talking about. So essentially, with respect to what kind of devices we are talking about, right now, we are starting with mobile OEMs and modems. But essentially, any device or any hardware that we use that has an operating system falls under this category.

Utsav Somani: So two questions. I think, who is your customer here? I think that'll help us understand better the business model. And the second one is that this cross-layer debugging, I think everything, all these layers that you mentioned, of course, turns out these logs and everything has to be connected manually. So Logcat allows them to make sense of all of these together and cross-reference them. Is that what you're trying to solve? And why can't traditional LLMs solve this?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yes. Yeah, that's a very good question. So there are two parts. I'll answer both. First is, customers for us would be starting with mobile OEMs and ODMs, which produce these devices, and telecom companies, automotive companies, right?

Utsav Somani: And who within those companies will be using Logcat?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): You mean specific name of the companies that you're looking for? Hold on.

Utsav Somani: Roles within those companies.

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Oh, I see. OK. So basically, the development teams and the support team. So there are two phases to it. Let me explain it. So there are a set of issues that happen after the device has gone to the field, right? So let's say the device is already in the field. Imagine this scenario that you're getting reports of devices batteries draining out. And this is only happening in certain regions for certain type of devices. These are usually operating system issues, right? So there's a support. So you get support tickets. So there's the QA and the support teams that use it. And when you are releasing a new version of an operating system, at that point, the developers or the dev teams actually use it. So these are the personas who deal with this. And to your second question, which was regarding, sorry, can you repeat the second question?

Utsav Somani: Traditional LLMs. Oh, yeah.

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yes. So actually, that's the most common question that we get asked. And one of the things that we have done is that I'll give an attempt of explaining it. But we have also said, go try it out. You'll feel the difference. And the primary reason is because of the proprietary nature of the code base. As you can see, the LLMs and all of this data is publicly available. But a device manufacturer or any hardware company which is building the device, majority of its code base is proprietary. So just dumping into LLMs will not make sense. And just one file will not make sense. So for example, if I give an example, the bug reports that we get or the logs that we get from these devices, they are spread across hundreds of formats. They are very big in size, like hundreds and 200 MBs. You just cannot directly dump into LLM. And if you were to do so, like writing some script, maybe splitting them and putting them together, you lose the correlation along that. So it's not really efficient. And also, LLMs are not able to do it because they don't have the knowledge of what's there in the system. So you have to build a platform which can get access to your systems, your code base, and actually provide you the right answer. And people have tried it. And this is one of the feedback that we do get from our customer itself is that, yeah, we can see the difference. And that was primarily the reason why we started to build this, because we could see that LLMs are not working at this layer.

Dhruv Sharma: Fantastic. That will also help us understand the value prop for the user a little bit better, right? Like, do you get to the bug quicker? Can you diagnose it quicker? Can you fix it quicker?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Oh, yes. So user in this case, I mean, it would be these hardware companies and the engineers at these hardware companies. So first, yes, for the field issues, yes, you diagnose it faster. And our results have shown that we see up to 80% to 90% reduction in the time, something that used to take days is just happening in minutes. And there's another angle to this, which is more towards our vision, which is like, hey, this whole layer of hardware shipping, what can we do to automate it? Given that it's been possible now with the advent of LLM and the processing power of the LLM that has increased, right now, usually what happens is that for every layer, there are different teams altogether in these companies. And either you need that one senior engineer with 15 years of experience who holds the whole stack in his head, and he has written some individual script. But all of this again breaks down when a new upgrade comes. So it's value propositions both in terms of bringing up the device faster, that's what we're envisioning. And right now, what we have on our platform basically helps you diagnose things faster and at an order of magnitude. Like you don't have to really run behind teams and hop between teams. You just have one place, you connect your systems and you should get answer in minutes.

Dhruv Sharma: So of all the layers in the stack, which layer typically produces the most complex log? And is it only machine readable?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Not all of it. In fact, most of it is not. Like you'll have debug symbol files. So like for example, in Canvas, the can traces, they are like symbols. In bug report that we get in Android operating system, or actually let me take an example of a memory dump. Memory dump is like a state of the device at any point of time, from all the processes, what happened. So yeah, there is also another angle to this that why LLMs don't work well, because these are not just text, right? There's just a lot of raw information and one file or one log is just not enough to give you the answer. You need like a symbol file to decode some of the things. And that's where this cross correlation kind of comes into play.

Utsav Somani: And you've read over 10 billion lines of trace data via your deep research tool. So when kernel, modem, framework, all of these terms I'm picking up from your website, is the system or the offering more rule-based, hypothesis-based? How does it know where to like go into to test out what's faulty?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Okay, yeah. So that's what the platform is. Imagine how a senior or even like a principal or a staff engineer would do debug these issues in the company. So what they would actually first do is they will actually collect all the logs because logs has all the information that, that's like the raw dump of your source of truth. Because, and then they go manually correlate, they can write some scripts, put it into LLMs to get some analysis, right? And then how a senior engineer or a staff engineer would do is like create a hypothesis, then validate each hypothesis, do some data processing, and then try to correlate pieces together, right? That's where the most of the time is gone. We are just trying to enhance and automate this. We are saying that, hey, we understand the different formats. You don't have to worry about 100 plus formats. You don't have to worry about extracting specific type of file from a system. You can just come and dump your raw logs. Like it can be tarzi files or zip files. And then our agentic harness, basically what it does is it goes, creates a hypothesis, matches with all the parts of the system, creates a timeline. So there's a lot happening there, which basically gives you an answer. And that's why it also takes time. Like it takes like five to 10 minutes. It's not like, just gives you an instantly, because it tries to reduce the hallucination.

Utsav Somani: It fact checks everything that it proposes, because this is a very critical piece of like- Yeah, but the failure rate here must be, I mean, what's the chances of failure must be close to zero, if not zero?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yeah, you're right. That's why we also keep a human in-

Utsav Somani: Failure or error, that's what I meant.

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): So see, we are building towards that capability. You're right. Like, I mean, the acceptance rate, I would say is zero. Like nobody would want to accept error in this scenario. Right, so how do we, so we're not saying we guarantee that completely, but we give you the best possible analysis. And then later what we can do is, that's why we're building systems where, we can tap into your code base, then we can give you like a better answer. But to solve that trust, there's also a human in loop, which apparently says that like, okay, this is the final, whether this is right or not, right? Autonomous part will come-

Utsav Somani: At any time saved in the process to your customers when you pitch for pilots?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Oh yes, definitely. And we have seen like, as I mentioned, right? Like 80 to 90% compaction we've seen.

Dhruv Sharma: Wow. I don't know, I have a company building related question, which is you guys just announced your fundraise last month. And you were telling us before we went live that right now it's just the two of you.

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: So, and you both founders, who's going to be employee number one? Will they be technical? And what about the first 10 employees? And also it seems to me that there'll be, you'd have to do a lot of serious work in terms of like B2B partnerships. So how are you going to build not just the product, but the organization from here?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yeah. Yes. That's a very interesting thing and question. And we are also thinking about it, but few things are clear in our head is that we want to build a very AI native company, right? We are rethinking how the companies would be built, right? And that's why both me and Varun, we are like completely hands-on and we also take up like the other responsibilities. The sales part that you mentioned, we are already doing that, right? We are basically, and with respect to-

Dhruv Sharma: I'm sorry, are you selling by day, coding by night, that kind of a thing? Or is that like, that's all pre-worked out?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): A usual setup for both of us looks like, like we have our agents running, we like spend some time and the agents are doing the work. We have systems and workflows in place, which kind of guarantees how things are happening. And then we apparently do like the other operational things. For example-

Dhruv Sharma: And you've already hired your first five employees, they're agents.

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Because you don't care- In a way, yes, you can say. And, but no, but we were still throttled and we were still looking for like very specialized roles. And let me tell you why, because this is vertically deep and there are like deep engineering workflows where we are trying to get into. And we need some specialists in these roles who can help us understand like, hey, if I were to automate this whole workflow, what we need to do, right? And that's why we need more people and we are hiring, but we are rethinking, like it has to be like a very AI native way of doing things, right? We are not going to like build like a very big team here, at least for the next one year.

Utsav Somani: And is the final aim to become like the Claude Code for like, I mean, OS level software?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yeah, yeah, you get that right, yeah.

Utsav Somani: What are the industries as we close the segment out, what are the industries or products that you're most excited about to solve and which ones are the toughest actually from an OS level point of view?

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): The toughest is actually the bring up of a device and the updates to a device. So for example, let's say there are already a lot of devices that exist in the field today and companies struggle to update the OS because one update somewhere can actually break the whole stack. So giving guarantees to that part of the system, I think that will be the most challenging, but that will bring the most value.

Utsav Somani: All right, perfect Tarun, wishing you and your another co-founder and the sole team member of yours all the best, including all the agents. Wishing you the best and congrats on the raise. Thank you for coming on my show.

Tarun Vashisth (logcat.ai): Yeah, thank you too.

Utsav Somani: Cheers. Moving on to our next guest, we've got Diveakssh from Jungli. Did I get the name right, man?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Wow, man, you nailed it. What's up, what's up? Nice to meet you, nice to meet you Dhruv. Thank you for having me here.

Utsav Somani: Nice to be connected. Do you want to introduce what Jungli is for our listeners?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Yeah, sure, 100%. So Jungli is India's first digital nomad village. So we have 150 acres of co-livings, villas and retreat venues, dedicated to nomads, artists, nature lovers and entrepreneurs that want a place to really zone in and smash their goals.

Utsav Somani: And tell me a little bit more about this nomadic life where people are coming together, vibing, white coding with the view. I think that's one of the things that you run there as well as a program. Like what does all of this, I mean, how does all of this work? Like we've got Yashvi on our team who spent time at network school. I'm guessing that you've heard of them. So, of course I've been. How does it, I mean, all come together? Like, I mean, is there a critical mass that you need for a nomadic community to work with a tech angle to it? Like you, of course, screen applicants or anyone can work. Like give us the, I mean, the philosophy behind this whole thing as well. And of course, visualize all of that.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Yeah, 100%. Let's zoom out a little bit and talk about cities and why cities were built because then that leads to why people are leaving cities.

Utsav Somani: Perfect.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Right? So people came to cities because they were hubs for education, work, medicine, transport, and things like that. Now with the rise of remote work, especially since COVID, a lot of people are working online. And so that's one big reason to leave the city. Right? Now those people travel, they meet their partners on the road. They tend to be nomadic in a sense as well. And then they have kids. Guess what? They don't want to start, they don't want to stop traveling to put that kid into some conventional school because they've seen the other side. So what do they do? They start world schooling. So world schooling is the concept of actually taking your kids with you on your travels and using the world as one big giant school. And so then all these hubs start to pop up to cater for this new market, which I believe is really going to be the future. And so with education and work already going that way, and even things in medicine, startups like Practo, remote surgery happening, there are all fields being disrupted and starting to question whether they need to actually be locked to a location or location independent. Now to your second part of the question about how the community aspect works is, I lived as a digital nomad for three years, a year in a camper van in Australia, and two years backpacking India solo, seeing everything from Ladakh, Himachal, Gokarna to a lot in between. And on this journey, while I loved it and I love my solitude, I noticed that a lot of people, they craved community. Because you're often the only person in that cafe with your laptop on doing speed tests to check if you can work from there. And other people are holiday makers and they don't really get your life. So seeing a few of these gaps in the market as I traveled, I decided that if community is the one biggest thing people are missing, let's invite people home to what happens to be our sacred ancestral home here in Dandeli, the jungles of Karnataka, have a screening process, so that people actually feel a sense of belonging while they work. And that's a big differentiator to work from home, work from anywhere or work from a cafe.

Utsav Somani: And this was actually a town set up by your great grandfather.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Yeah, man, you've done your research. That's amazing. So my great granddad Lalbhai Patel was a freedom fighter for the nation. And his story in a nutshell is really fascinating. After freedom, he got the license to start mining manganese ore. And he got an army together to do that with his freedom fighter network. That evolved into then growing into India's first ever ferroalloy factory. So factories that actually smelt metal out of the ore. So you got a business partner, you got a tech partner from Norway, Netherlands, and then he needed an army. So he reached out to the freedom fighter network. 5,000 freedom fighters lived on this land where I'm talking to you from today. I'm actually talking to you from my great granddad's desk. This was built in 1955. And this factory was formed. The town of Dandeli grew around it. It ran very successfully until 2001. And when unfortunately it closed due to reasons outside of our control. And we like to say that for 24 years, the land was waiting for Jungli to now pop up and start a new chapter on this land.

Dhruv Sharma: Wow.

Utsav Somani: I mean, so the land's- I mean, I'm sold. I'm sold.

Dhruv Sharma: I love it.

Utsav Somani: I mean, you're such a motivational speaker, like your tone and everything. Like I think you can definitely sell to people.

Dhruv Sharma: You can expect our applications and you might have to want to screen them by the evening.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): If you create a video- Well, we can consider this your vibe check call. Should we just run this like your vibe check call? This is, wow.

Utsav Somani: So if you create a TON studio, maybe Dhruv and I can come do some streams there.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Incredible. We have a podcast studio. I'm an ex-podcaster. So we have a bunch of AV and I'm a big fan of audio. I'm a music producer outside of Jungli. So I like your Shore MB7s all set up over there and we can definitely set you some up over here.

Dhruv Sharma: Love it. Man, this is so cool. Well, Diveakssh, did I get your name right?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Diveakssh? Everybody calls me Divy. Feel free to call me Divy.

Dhruv Sharma: I think Divy is so much better for me. Yes. So Divy, you know, I'm sure you have a lot in common with your great, great granddad, but both of you are forming communities around you. How are the guiding principles and philosophy is different back from when he did it and now how you're doing it?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Man, that is such an excellent question because my dad and I, my dad's kind of my co-founder and he jokes that he's my founder. But anyway, so my dad and I often joke about how this land already had this energy that we're resurrecting. We're not starting anything new. We're just stoking a fire that was always there. So for example, my great granddad was really passionate about the employee's end-to-end lifestyle. So this campus that I'm talking to you from has a regulation-sized cricket stadium. It has a pickleball court, a volleyball court. It has an old hospital, obviously not in good condition anymore, but it was there. And the actual villas for the managers, which were now resurrecting for nomads, were done to a T with balcony-facing views. So he really believed in an individual self-actualization with all of their social and environmental needs and community needs being met. There was chai that was delivered to all the security guards at 5 p.m. back in that day, and there was a lot of security guards. So even today, what we're doing with Jungli is rooms and food is not what we're selling. That's just the infrastructure required to make community happen. But what we're doing above that is every Monday we have a family meeting where we get to meet the new residents that come to Jungli, say bye to the ones that are leaving. And Geetika, our head of people, runs a family meeting where we say, what events do you wanna do this week? Then the residents tell us that this week they wanna teach about Bitcoin, or yesterday someone wanted to show a movie about the ancient Roma tribes, the original nomads. And then we go ahead and help make that happen. So really, like great-granddad, wanting to make sure every single resident on campus thrives in the truest sense of the word.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, and I have a quick follow-up, which is, and you lived in a camper van, right? That's a lifestyle. Skateboarding is a lifestyle, rock climbing is a lifestyle. So, I mean, if we extend that analogy to what you're doing over here, is it a lifestyle that people can check in and check out of, or if they commit to it, do they have to like burn the boats?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Yeah, that's such a good question, man. When I started, a lot of people said, hey, if you call it Jungli, the nomad village, people might not feel included because not everyone identifies as a nomad. And as you said, some people check in and out of nomad life. So the way I see Jungli is, in India, we don't have a nomad scene. I've traveled the world, I've been around Southeast Asia, there is a nomad scene out there. It's not there in India. So my friends and I, and our other co-living partners, we call it the Jungli Trail, we are actually trying to create the bare bones of the nomad scene by doing things like a digital nomad festival. We had 50 people here in June for India's first Nomad Fest. And so when people apply to stay, and even they say, I'm not a nomad, can I still come? We say, hey, by you leaving your comfort space, catching a train or a bus or a flight, getting picked up and driving one and a half hours into a secret location into the jungle, and living with strangers that'll soon turn into friends, you are exploring your nomadic side. And whether you commit to being a 100% full-time nomad living in a camper van, like I did, that's pretty extreme, or whether you decide to do it for two, three weeks, take some lessons from it, and go away wanting to be a little bit more spontaneous, you still exercise the nomad in you. And that's what we want people to do here when they come to Jungli.

Utsav Somani: Fantastic. We've interviewed over 250 people on the show. And I think there's one person who comes to my mind who I wanna connect you with.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Oh, please.

Utsav Somani: Like, I think he's doing this whole Darjeeling Renaissance thing, and I think the vehicle is called Alt Carbon, the company that he's created. And I think you two will really get along well.

Dhruv Sharma: Oh, wow.

Utsav Somani: I'd love to connect.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, the stories are very similar.

Utsav Somani: Stories are very exciting. And I think, so, I mean, you mentioned that India doesn't have a nomadic scene, but I think firstly, like, define what a nomad is, for me, at least, and our listeners. And the second thing is, what are the big global nomad hubs or campuses that you've seen that you're inspired by across the world?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): For sure, yes. This is a very active movement. And when people come here and I tell them about it, they're surprised to hear that there's nomad festivals and hubs around the world. So the definition of a digital nomad is a blurry one. Whatever I say, I'll piss some nomad off, and that's okay. But the idea is combining work with travel, right? It's not being locked to a place. And I also see it as not being attached. If you buy a couch and you're like, I can't leave Bangalore because of this couch, you're probably not cut out for nomad life. But if you're someone that's happy to get out there with a backpack or something and try and find a way to work online, so online jobs is obviously one big one. And the other one is growing your personal brand so that you actually attract your dream kind of clients if you have some kind of service that you offer. That's another way. And then there's a third, which was me. I was one of the first employees at Uber Australia. So I built Uber for five years over there with the team, got a bunch of stocks, saved up a bunch of money, and decided that I don't want to work for a year. I want to go into a camper van, use my savings to explore my artistic side and make my first album. And so that's also a nomad. So I think it's anyone that's getting out there and turning left off the highway and finding a more alternative trail.

Utsav Somani: Now, in terms of- What percentage of nomads are, I mean, I don't know if this is the right question, but like have capitalistic intentions? Like they actually want to make money beyond their means to like get wealthy?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): I would say a high percent. So there are now 50 million digital nomads in the world and that number keeps growing. And the nomad festivals I go to, half the topics are about business and entrepreneurship and AI and getting ahead. And the other half is about wellness and mindset. And there's a lot of coaches in this world and stuff as well. So there's that too. So I think a lot of them have capitalistic intentions, but they like to balance it with a sense of don't want to burn out like they did in their past corporate job, you know?

Utsav Somani: Maybe let's try and bust one. I think the global nomad thing, I think we missed out on that.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Sure, happy to tell you about that. So there are some big nomad hubs in the world where people tend to go. So the biggest one is called Chiang Mai. It's a town in Thailand. It's literally designed for digital nomads from policy makers to your grab driver. They all know the script that people come here to work. Everyone needs wifi. We got to help them do their work. Da Nang in Vietnam is also one. And then we have Bansko in Bulgaria. That's a ski town, which in off season is empty. So nomads saw that as an opportunity and made a scene there. Madeira Island off of Portugal is a big nomad hub as well. Mexico. And India has all the conditions for nomad life, especially affordable cost of living. But I believe it's not on the nomad map because of one core reason, which is women don't feel safe traveling India. And that's one of the big things that we're doing at Jungli with the screening process, with hiring women, with it being family owned, making sure women feel safe. And we now have one in three room nights booked by solo female travelers at Jungli as our mission goes towards that. Fantastic.

Dhruv Sharma: I think, and we're of course talking about digital nomads, but I have to say like this question of settlers versus nomads, it also gets the question like, what are you attached to? So for instance, if you were a settler, you were attached to your land because that's where you would cultivate your crops.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Right.

Dhruv Sharma: If you were a nomad, you'd be attached to your livestock and they couldn't stay in one place because they had to, you know, you had to just change the grazing grounds. I think one thing people get wrong very often is they mistake nomads for aimless wanderers.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Right.

Dhruv Sharma: Even nomads in the truest sense, they were never wanderers. They had a summer camp and a winter camp. But anyway, my question for you, Divi, is very often, let's see if we can bust this myth, but very often there's this myth that, you know, this lifestyle works up to a point after which it doesn't work. It's like a, it's a young person's life. Are you and your experience seeing people who are older with families and are still, you know, living this life?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Such a good question. And there's, I think there's some truth to that. I'm seeing in a lot of the festivals I go to this kind of level two of nomadism. Like initially there's the dopamine, there's the new places, there's a bit of hedonistic lifestyle. And then a lot of people say they want a base. So they don't want to go full power back to a middle of a CBD lifestyle, but what they might want is two bases and they want to follow the sun, right? So they might have a home in Bansko and they might go there when it's sunny over there and they might have a home in Thailand and that's their second base. And then even when partners get involved and all that, then world schooling becomes a thing. So they tend to actually stay in places for longer, also called slow mads, right? And so especially they'll actually follow world schooling retreats around the place called Boundless Life is a big one. And that's a big thing we're setting up at Jungli with our villas is getting more family friendly, becoming more of an experiential learning center. We have a long-term couple that's moved in now for indefinite with their one-year-old and the village is now gonna raise that child together. So the trends that you're talking about are true and it's the same trends we're seeing at Jungli too.

Utsav Somani: Let's talk about some numbers to close the segment out. So how much is it to stay for a month, for a night, for a week? Like, how do you think about economics? How many people have been through your camp? Sure. And just anything else that you can share and wanna highlight?

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Of course, man. So firstly, with the numbers, we really wanted to make one clean lifestyle fee where the nomad doesn't need to think about like, oh, this is also extra, that's also extra, similar to network school. And so basically our lifestyle fee starts at 42,000 a month and peaks at 70,000 a month. That's like a luxury balcony room and all that sort of stuff. And in that, you'd get your room, your three meals, and your taxes. And also most importantly, the community events and vibe. That's the main product over here. A feeling of belonging is what we're selling more than the room and the wifi. So all of that's included. This is our launch pricing. We've co-created this whole experience with the WhatsApp group called All Things Jungli. And they have helped us arrive at this pricing. And now after two years of running it and 700 nomads coming through Jungli, it's time that we actually do another survey with our community and we increase pricing going forward just to start finding our path to profitability.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Wishing you all the best, Avi. Thank you so much for coming on our show.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Thank you, guys. Come over to Jungli. We'd love to host you. And we'd like to say this is where wifi meets wildlife. So we'd love to see you over here.

Utsav Somani: Love it. Thank you so much.

Diveakssh Schae (Jungli the Nomad Village): Thanks for having me.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners. Moving on to our last and final guest for today, Bhavik of GetVantage. Bhavik, welcome to the show.

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Hey, thank you, Utsav.

Utsav Somani: Congrats on the new raise. The guy who built RBL Bank, a traditional banker, led your latest round. What's the story behind that fundraise?

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): You know, firstly, I think I want to just mention this, that bringing me on the show for the listeners after an amazingly creative nomad and slow mad story. I don't know how interesting banking and finance is going to be for everybody. So now there is extra pressure on you to make finance fun. So let's go. Well, and I'm certainly taking up the previous speaker. I'm a father to a eight-year-old as well. And so I love the concept he's talking about as I raise and parent that child. And yeah, the fun part is, look, Utsav, I try and explain it to my eight-year-old in a fun way of what we do, why we do, why we build a capital gateway. And so hopefully I can do that to all the listeners listening in as well.

Utsav Somani: Perfect, let's dump it.

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): You know, sometimes there's a lot of us as operators and founders, we try to sit back and think of what that next big innovation is, but really it's sometimes just right in front of us. And we look back and say, hey, why hasn't anybody thought of this? Why isn't this already there? And that's exactly what happened to me having spent 20 years in FinTech. We all saw what payment gateways did to the world of digital money, right? We've seen over the last decade, every small business, every founder, every D2C brand, every emerging brand today can accept money with a digital payment and a digital gateway. Why can't they access money? And that's what gave birth to Capital Gateway and saying, can every small business as instantly get access to working capital and growth financing, just as simply as they accept money from their customers.

Utsav Somani: And the term that they used is revenue-based financing, and you were the first player in 2020 to do this. So what truly was lacking? Like give us some numbers on why revenue-based financing is and where it sits in the funding stack as well. Like equity is expensive, not every round or company deserves to be equity funded or founders shouldn't choose equity capital over say other sources of capital. So give us that landscape on where revenue-based financing, the capital gateway that you mentioned sits in.

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Yeah, look, I think we've all seen the tailwinds and it's become more obvious in the last few years than it was before. Where we've seen every business now be that much more digital and reaching more consumers through digital channels, be it e-commerce, quick commerce. And so every traditional business has got that much more digital. It accepts a lot of its revenues digitally, but yet raising debt or working capital was still being done traditionally. So what we had to first solve for, and Dhruv, you used a nice word before this, let's first start by busting some myths, right? I think for years, there were myths that debt is very onerous, right? We don't want to touch debt as small businessmen or as founders, because we all grew up with that thought process that debt is worth three years, five years, collateral-based, because that's how lenders, that's how traditional banks actually still gave a lot of financing. It was all rear view mirror, Utsav, where you look at last three years profitability of a business, you look at taking some collateral, but nobody was really looking at digital data. How is that business, how is this new age business that's asset light, does not have to mount collaterals, but is growing their businesses, growing their revenues on a month-on-month basis, because now it's got better distribution or digital distribution than traditional distribution. So if distribution has gone digital, commerce has gone digital, payments and money movement went that much more digital. Revenue-based or cashflow-based financing was simply to address that, can we now evaluate a business basis, its real-time revenue? How did I do in the last six months on some of these marketplaces? How did my business grow? What was my cash flows coming in as these marketplaces were settling my revenues? And based on that, can we in real time give quick growth capital that helps that small business, helps that brand get more inventory so they can get ready for a festive season, or get some additional cushioning of marketing spends so that they can scale up over the next quarter or two. And for all of this, so like you mentioned, you don't need to always part ways with equity. Equity fundraising is great, it's sexy, it's great to go on a whole lot of different tanks these days, but can we get very performance-based capital and if these businesses are being run and all of us as founders are running businesses that much more digitally, access to capital also should be digital. And that's really what we're in our small way trying to keep building at and keep powering ahead.

Dhruv Sharma: Bhavik, in your experience, the borrowers you lend to, your partners lend to, what is it that they come seeking? Is it a quick turnaround in the decision? Is it a favorable repayment schedule? Is it, as always, a lower cost of capital? Is it something else, a combination?

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Dhruv, this is something that absolutely evolved. And what we were trying to is listening into what the market expected, right? Modes are never really just technology or speed. Sometimes it's just about not having a founder or a businessman coming to look for financing. Because let's be real, right? None of us wake up in the morning saying, I take a loan in the morning, right?

Dhruv Sharma: I don't take a loan.

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): So what we started from is, let's make access to capital or access to financing as invisible as payments now is. So we went and embedded ourselves in every ecosystem. So you are now a small businessman from Rajasthan building a brand, or you are a D2C founder selling on multiple e-commerce and quick commerce channels. Can we be in the merchant dashboard? Where he's taking business, he's looking at his orders. If he gets a pre-qualified offer there, that based on your transactions and volumes, here is a pre-qualified quick round of financing. Now, this is where we wanted to stop businesses from coming to look out for fundraising and be present where they're thinking of growing their business in each of the channels. So that really is what Capital Gateway is. So it's, look, it's been the journey. It was not easy. Embedding ourselves in these ecosystems, getting access to a lot of that data and making the experience and making the infrastructure available that unko paisa wahi pe do and make financing so invisible that the founder should accept that there's, it's not about the cheapest finance, right? But it's also about the opportunity cost. A lot of times I've heard founders saying, arre main bank se loan lete, that takes two months, three months, all the documentation. We forget that in trying to save a half a percent or more, the time that a founder, and fundraising is always only the founder's job, no matter how large your business is or how small it is, right? So I think over a period, what we've done is just embed ourselves in these ecosystems where the conversation is not about just speed or cost of capital. It's just, you know, two clicks and can I get that quick financing that gives me that booster growth?

Utsav Somani: So you work with over 2000 brands. You go up to 20 crores, I think as your single lending ticket as well. So what do you typically underwrite? Like, I mean, what stage does a business come to you? Like, suppose I'm running a digital brand that's doing like five, six lakhs in month and maybe growing like 10% month on month. That's still exciting. But if some businesses with later stage, slightly more mature, not growing at that growth rate. So what exactly are you underwriting? At what stage does a business become not lendable for you?

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): So for every new category creation, right? It's a journey. You start with a niche approach. You start with one channel of acquiring customer base or small businesses. So yes, even when we started four and a half, five years ago, so we had to start by going direct to a brand and a small business, right? With a digital application, a brand would connect with us and that's how we would acquire. So yes, initially 80, 90% of our customer base were brands we directly reached out to and so it would direct source them. But quietly what we did behind the scenes is as we were penetrating directly, as I was explaining to Dhruv, we went and started embedding ourselves in these ecosystems. So now our distribution flywheel itself is we acquire a small restaurant that is in your neighborhood. Traditional business, one shop has most of his business traditionally, but even now 20, 30, 40% of its revenues are coming from online delivery platforms like Swiggy Zomato. And so we can acquire or provide a small business, a quick five lakhs, 10 lakhs for its Swiggy channel or for its Flipkart channel, for its Amazon channel. And that's how now being embedded in so many different ecosystems and we are embedded now across 10, 12 large market ecosystems we are embedded in the government marketplace, which is called GEM. We are embedded and we power the capital gateway at Tally. Imagine all of India, all our small businesses do their accounting on Tally and using that live transaction data, we're giving a pre-qualified round of funding. So we do everything from as little as a few lakhs to like you mentioned, two crores, five crores, 20 crores. And there is where we've grown with a lot of these brands. Happy to share that a few brands we started with financing four years ago, they've grown to a hundred crore, 500 crore business and we are still giving them larger ticket size capital. What we've done is we've been able to stitch up growth financing for different needs for a different size of business. We've gone up to that 20 crores because we know that that's beyond which there is always large banks, et cetera. But our ability to start and give a business and give any business, what we truly believe is every business is worthy of funding and financing. We just have to decide how much and for what tenure, right? And at least let them grow their revenues first and we can keep topping up.

Dhruv Sharma: Bhavik, I'm thinking aloud and really building a question as we go along. So when you're embedded like yourselves as Capital Gateway and you're pretty much offering people credit before they need it, you're not exactly sure what they're gonna use it for, right?

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Yes, you're absolutely right.

Dhruv Sharma: One question I've had for the longest of times is like traditional lenders got reasonably good at underwriting the borrower, but can Bondon lenders or invisible infrastructure players like yourself get good at underwriting the transaction itself because even a good borrower can have a bad day and even a bad borrower can have a good day.

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Absolutely, absolutely. And you've hit the nail on the head because lending is a slightly tougher business. And I keep using this comparison to payment gateways, right? In payment, I had to transfer money to you. I paid you, you received the money, transaction done. In a capital gateway or in lending, in fact, when I give you the financing or when I give you the funding, the transaction begins. It doesn't end because I have to find and ensure that repayment works. So Dhruv, what we've underwritten ourselves on is firstly, we believe that the best way to underwrite a business and to de-risk the entire model, not only for the businesses that are borrowing, but also for the financial institutions that are lending is what Utsav mentioned, revenue-based or cashflow-based. And what revenue-based or cashflow-based is not just the financing, it's the repayment. So when I fund a merchant or a seller on any of these marketplaces, I'm funding for its growth for it. He could use it for his inventory, he could use it for his marketing, he could use it for X, Y, Z, it's working capital, but we align our repayments to that same marketplace from where they are getting their business and their settlements. So that's why it's cashflow-based repayments. And that's how, if you are able to make repayments that much more easy for a small business, and I'll tell you the biggest myth we were able to bust and it took us years to do it, it's an intuitive instinction that once a month EMI is the best way for a business to pay. But actually for a small business, for a founder, we all will know it's the toughest because on the same day, Dhruv, you have to pay rent, electricity, payroll, and you have to pay EMI for financing. You don't get money or revenues once a month, you get it on a daily, weekly basis. So today, through marketplaces, every small business has learned that the amount of goods I sell on Amazon, my trade commission comes down by 10, 20%. So you bake that into your margins. So that's where what we have de-risked the model, not only for the borrower, but also for the financial institution is everything is cashflow-based repayments. So as you receive your money and your revenue on a daily, monthly business, a small percentage goes towards that liability. And that's how it becomes not only invisible access to capital, it's an invisible way to repay and be a disciplined business and founder, growing your revenue without really worrying about having to park cashflow aside for a monthly repayment.

Utsav Somani: So you have an NBFC as well. I think you got a license recently. So what's the scale of that NBFC and how much has it improved your margins in terms of cost of capital and other things and efficiency as well?

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Utsav, especially building a financial services business in markets like India, we were very clear from day one that as we build an innovative and tech and data-first platform play and a FinTech platform as a capital gateway, doing all of that in regulatory and compliance guardrails was sacrosanct. It was not an option, it was a must do. So very early on in our journey, we went and got our NBFC license. And that's what firstly makes us very compliant, right? It's not about how much we disperse through our own balance sheet and our own NBFC, but that from a regulatory perspective allows us to co-finance and co-lend with every other traditional supply partner, bank, NBFC out there. So what our NBFC allowed us to do is we were able to scale our capital gateway and we facilitated over 2,000 crores in the last four and a half, five years of our journey, right? Our NBFC alone is more like a nursery NBFC. And I give this example, right? Look, even market creators like an Amazon or Uber didn't have to control all the supply, but had to manage some of it. And that's really what Get Growth Capital, which is our own NBFC does, is allows us to be in a, you know, from a consent perspective, from data protection perspective, from a KYC perspective, all other traditional bank partners who finance on our platform, who are the supply partners, are able to do co-lending through us as well. And so, you know, this year alone, we are targeting 1,000 crores out of which we'll always play out a ratio, right? 70-30, 70, 30% on our books, 70% through supply partners and larger banks. And that's why we are truly asset light ourselves as we scale up and gives us that velocity of throughput as a gateway.

Dhruv Sharma: So that's fantastic. I think for most people, for people who want to understand co-lending or, you know, extending a default guarantee a little bit better, I think you can really stretch the dollar with your own book because otherwise, as the capital gateway, when you sit between a third-party balance sheet and a third-party loan book, you can say, hey, here's my first-party NBFC that's also going to own some of the risk along with you. And we'll put our money on the line.

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Absolutely, Dhruv. You have to, you know, like they say, when you innovate, you have to sometimes put your money on the line. Put your money where your mouth is. So be a co-sharing and risk-sharing partner, but could we have done or achieved this kind of scale? You know, 2,000 odd crores, if we were our own NBFC or looked at it doing everything in our balance sheet, we would not have been able to get this scale either. So that's what allows, sorry.

Dhruv Sharma: No, I was just saying one question that comes up often when anyone's trying to build invisible infrastructures, how do you even set the right growth metrics, right? Like, I mean, if it's on the software side, you could say API calls. If you're a payment acceptance platform, you could say number of payments processed or amount of money that passed or the throughput. How do you guys set growth metrics as another invisible infrastructure player?

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Yeah, so look, I'm going to be very candid and confess openly that, you know, when you're A, creating a new category, it's uncharted territory, right? So it's all day confusing, right? It takes a long time to A, share what you're trying to do, then give the proof of the pudding. And then like you said, what is the matrix you can be measured on? And so honestly, the real answer is it had to be a journey, Dhruv. And, you know, I've been at the front end of digital payments, my last venture being It's Cash. You know, you don't come out and start with everything day one or don't say everything out out loud, right? What's up, you will remember, you and me probably spoke about this five years ago when I was just setting up. And Dhruv, at that time, we just kept it very niche. We just said revenue-based finance. New product offering to the market, to the lenders. That was not the end game. They would say this, right? 30, 40, 30, 35 years ago, Amazon also just sold books online first and won that market. So very honest answer. Look, we had to navigate. We came out with first pioneering revenue-based financing. Then we kind of built and went out and got an NBFC license. The moment we got an NBFC, Dhruv, half the market and investors and stakeholders started saying, okay, so now you'll make books. So we'll have to evaluate you as a traditional NBFC, not as a fintech. And so tell me, tell us what your A is. And then it took us another two years to get 10 odd large marketplace programs and scale to come through and velocity to come through. I think in a nutshell, we were always clear that real enterprise value that we are creating is just like a payment gateway. Large volumes go through the infrastructure, right? Payments is a slightly larger volume, thin margin business, right? You make a couple of bips as a pass through. In financing or in lending, the spreads are a little more healthier, right? So truly, it's eventually staying true to what your end goal is, but navigating on an annual basis, what gets you to the next year and the next milestone. And today, we can, through this capital raise, and really this capital raise is not about how much we fundraise, right? It's just about how much now is our own net worth and credibility so we can open up the capacity to fund more and finance more. And Dhruv, I would like to believe and wish that if we stay true to two fundamentals, ultimately is revenue. We look and we measure what's the revenue that goes through my gateway and my platform. For every 100 rupees that I finance a small business, there's 10 rupees that we would earn as interest income, as fees. That's the revenue. And if you're clean about your revenue and you're accruing revenues and keep it a sustainable and at least a EBITDA positive unit economics business, it should be about velocity throughput and what's the operating margin and net margins we are playing out on.

Utsav Somani: Bhavik, as we close this out, this was fun. I think one final question maybe for you. The funding announcement had AI native mentioned in it. What does it mean? What's next for GetVantage in this world of AI that's coming up?

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Yes, superb short answer. There's a lot of FOMO around AI itself. Everybody talks about India missing out on the LLMs. We've believed that LLMs are great. They are built on public data, publicly available data. They do hallucinate. What we've really built in our understanding of AI was all the data we are consuming, alternate data on a small business, it went into proprietary data. So today our really AI native is, if I have to finance you and I'll give you an offer in your e-commerce marketplace as a merchant, I need to underwrite your data very quickly and understand which sector also. So our proprietary work is our own SLM built over the last five years because we've looked at 100,000 odd businesses across different sectors. So Dhruv, you asked me, right? What we trained and battle tested our AI is saying if you are a food and beverage business, if you're a restaurant, and if you're an apparel business, very different sectors, very different unit economics and margins. But if I have to in real time finance either of them, I should be able to underwrite that business very quickly on that alternate data and give them an offer. So that's the real use of AI that we've powered our Capital Gateway with.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Bhavik, wishing you and the team were very, very best and congrats on the raise again. And thank you so much for coming.

Bhavik Vasa (GetVantage): Thank you. This was fun, Dhruv, what's up? Next time I'm gonna make sure I have better lighting. You guys had like perfectly zoomed in lighting, but thank you, it was a pleasure. We'll see you guys.

Dhruv Sharma: Thanks so much. Have a good evening. Bye-bye.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, that's it from us today. We'll see you for Stream 122 on Friday at four o'clock. Bye-bye.