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transcript · reviewed JUNE 7, 2026

#episode 70 transcript

Sudhanshu Bhatia

Sudhanshu Bhatia

Matiks | MARCH 19

This episode looks at two bets—gamifying math and digitising procurement—featuring Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks) on building a 3.5 lakh+ user skill-based mental math platform, and Gaurav Baheti (Procol) on managing $20B+ in procurement and layering AI agents to automate decisions.

Gaurav Baheti

Gaurav Baheti

Procol | MARCH 19

This episode looks at two bets—gamifying math and digitising procurement—featuring Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks) on building a 3.5 lakh+ user skill-based mental math platform, and Gaurav Baheti (Procol) on managing $20B+ in procurement and layering AI agents to automate decisions.

transcript

6,209 words

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hi there listeners, happy Friday, we're starting a little late today and I'm going to blame it on my newfound MATICS addiction, we're sitting here with Sudhanshu Bhatia, the founder of MATICS. Hey Sudhanshu, welcome to the show, good to see you.

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): Hey Dhruv, hi, good to see you too, yup.

Dhruv Sharma: Now what's that behind you, what's on the screen, it's just like...

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): Yeah, it is, so I'm sitting actually at a cafe, so...

Dhruv Sharma: Okay, alright, great, there's no great MATICS connection there, but tell us more about the app, tell us more about the company.

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): Yeah, so we started in late 2024, the initial idea was simple, we love math, let's create something for people like us, so that, yeah, we like chess, we like math, maybe we can have something like chess.com but around math, and that was like the basic idea. Over time it has evolved now into being more a mindsport platform where the smart people can just hang out, make friends, play one minute short duels with each other, get a dopamine hit and also maybe spend some time away from just social media. So yeah, it has evolved a lot from what we initially just started to build, it was like a fun side project we were building while we were at our jobs. But yeah, we're very happy to see like now having people from literally all across the globe, like creators and different kind of people.

Dhruv Sharma: This sounds remarkably close to our own story with Tio and Sudhanshu, which is that, you know, just like you guys were like a bunch of math wizards who were like, we're on the screen anyway, let's find a way to make it useful, same thing with Utsav and I, right, like our job, it is to speak with founders and be like, might as well find a way to make that more accessible. Look, you're going to be on behind the screen anyway, might as well just get something out of it. But it's interesting you mentioned dopamine. Now, let's say for a minute like there's two kinds of dopamine, good dopamine and bad dopamine. And if you're playing a game or solving a puzzle or a quiz on matics, you're likely dealing with good dopamine. You want to say something about that?

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): Yeah, so there was this theory I had back in 2023 as well actually, which was like, hey, social media is like gonna saturate and die over time, like at least not be as important as it is maybe today. So me and Sushant, my co-founder had started working on this thing around newsletters and I had this strong belief. Now, it can be backed by data and there was no data, but I was like, hey, people will shift to reading more. And if they shift to reading more, let's make maybe reading cooler. In fact, so we made like a few prototypes, etc. But over time, it just weared off. It was an idea, we worked on it, but it just weared off. We got busy with our lives. But a lot of designs from there, we used here for matics. And we're like, hey, let's make thinking cool. Let's make like the smart people cool and have like a place for them. Because again, the idea was the same that in social media, like there are going to be more people talking about brain rot, doom scrolling, just how social media affects you negatively. So let's maybe create a platform where you still get the dopamine hit, where you can still spend time with your friends, but it's good dopamine. It's like basically better for your brain. It's like a gym. If you go there daily, just your brain keeps on getting better. And like we've been having these amazing stories of parents getting their children, like their four, five year children to be on the platform and use it instead of like maybe opening a YouTube, sharing their stories. Of course, people are age people in their 30s, 40s. But also people talking about, hey, I got my mom on this platform. I got my dad on this platform because they used to just scroll to Facebook or YouTube all the time. And now they're having like 50 day, 200 day stream.

Dhruv Sharma: I bet you don't have that problem, right? When people ask you, friends, family, dude, what do you do? You can just have them download the app. And in the next five or 10 minutes, they know exactly what you do. So unlike many other founders, you don't have that problem.

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): I do. My grandfather doesn't understand. Also, since we're pre-revenue, my grandfather is like, So that still happens. But yeah, since a lot of people do use the platform right now, it just feels really positive. You know, we've had founders from across the globe, like personally reaching out that they've tried your platform. It's like, we love, like people from Duolingo or a Chesscom or an Airbnb reaching out to you personally over the email or like, it's just so surreal. It's gratifying. Yes.

Dhruv Sharma: I do want to ask you about this one concept. I don't know if you guys call it that or call it something else, but this concept of adaptive difficulty, right? Today, when I downloaded the app and I was playing something, it obviously started me at like a baseline level of difficulty. But if I was doing well, it was throwing more complex challenges my way. And many, many standardized tests work like that as well. So when you guys design, you know, all of these games and puzzles, how do you think about that concept of adaptive difficulty?

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): So, it's simple. A lot of people say that, hey, I fear math, which was, you know, where the initial thought was started. But when we went deeper, we realized the reason they fear math is not because they found it uninteresting, but rather the world compared them with really A-graders or like the toppers and said to them that, hey, you are an idiot because, you know, we compared you with them and, you know, you basically are just not up to the mark, which is why, like, you know, a lot of people who talk about homeschooling talk about the person can grow at their own speed and maybe be better over time as well. So that was the same thing that instead of comparing you with the toppers, let me give you questions over time as you get better, the questions will get better. So the whole concept was, hey, let me give you that confidence that was found. Instead of comparing you with the smarts and just saying you're an idiot, that was like basically what it was.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. And can you talk to us a little bit about the science of when someone is spending time on mathematics and either, you know, playing the game, solving the puzzles, you have so many things that you can do. How does brain activation work for them really? What's happening in, you know, different parts of their brain? What's happening in their prefrontal cortex, for instance?

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): So your brain is always designed to like, no, I don't want to get into really the biological part of it.

Dhruv Sharma: Neither of us are experts, but based on what you know.

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): Yeah. You know, I don't want anyone to come and be like, hey, you said this, this has not happened, let's leave it at that. But anyway, so what we realized was that the brain always like, the brain tries to find an easy way to do almost everyday tasks. But the brain also creates problems that it can solve. And let me give that brain. Sorry, am I audible?

Dhruv Sharma: Yes, we lost you a little bit, but that's okay. Maybe you can repeat yourself.

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): Yeah. Yeah. So our basic learning was that just like after sitting at a place for a long time, you get tired and you feel like, let me walk, let me do something else, let me just stand up from this chair I've been on for hours. In the same way, your brain functions wherein if you haven't used, like use as in like where it hasn't solved a problem statement for a longer piece of time, it creates that thing. And if we can solve for it and create a habit, which is linked with anything else that you do, you know, in your normal life, then that just like the brain just starts.

Dhruv Sharma: I get what you're saying. We see this in our everyday lives, right? Like when, so try asking anyone if they remember more than two or three mobile, like cell phone numbers anymore, like 10 digit numbers, because you just save them and, you know, remove them from your memory. And earlier, I mean, we've had calculators since forever, but you don't always carry them around in your pocket. And now you do. And so even people like routine people, regular people, their mental math skills are probably at an all time low.

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): I mean, it's not just mental math. There have been reports now coming around how brain matter is decreasing with time in like in an average human. The brain volume itself.

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): Yeah. And, you know, they specifically talk about, like they blame two things. One is your AI tools and the other is social media. Now it's like blaming vehicles for saying that, you know, hey, people are getting fat because they drive a car. But the thing is, it's the new reality. You know, if you have to travel 20 kilometers and you're like, hey, I'll go off then.

Dhruv Sharma: I mean, you know, good luck to you. So many things we want to chat with you about.

Dhruv Sharma: So that's what I was saying. There's so many things we want to chat with you about, but it looks like the internet is not your best friend today. I mean, like running low a little bit on bandwidth. So we're losing you here and there. So maybe we'll have you come back on the show. But final question to you. I know you don't have an answer for your grandpa just yet. But we spoke about, you know, the mind, the science behind what you're building. What about the business? What early thoughts do you have about how this is going to become like an enduring business over time?

Sudhanshu Bhatia (Matiks): So we have like two very clear examples, just form and goal in building a billion dollar businesses around similar concepts and using in-app purchases and subscriptions. We have started experimenting a bit around in-app purchases. In fact, we're seeing like, you know, that as a virtue of the kind of people that come on the platform, they're a bit smarter. They have a bit higher paying capacity. We're seeing like, so Snapchat, I'll give an example. Snapchat charges 9 rupees for a street saver. Duolingo charges 19 rupees for a street saver in India. We haven't charged a single user less than 100 rupees for a street saver. And we've had still a good number of users paying for it. Yeah. So we have started with small experiments around in-app purchases. We'll, you know, of course, have more experiments over time. There are a number of ways in which you can monetize. Yeah. But in-app purchases, the experiments have been going really well. So yeah, fingers crossed.

Dhruv Sharma: Amazing. Kasudanshu again, thanks so much for coming on. Fun chatting with you. We've got to repeat this sometime. All the best growing, you know, the MATICS user base. I think we might just have like a TON community of our own. We'll bring it up in the app and just challenge each other to some quizzes and puzzles. Super. Thanks, man. Thank you for coming and all the best to you. All right, listeners, that was Sudhanshu Bhatia building MATICS. And if you haven't checked out the app already, please do. I did today and I had to remind myself after, you know, some 10 minutes of playing that today is still a working day. We're now going to invite a second guest for the day. Gaurav. Gaurav Bahethi of Procol, who is going to be on the screen in just about a minute. Gaurav, good to see you. It's been a while.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Hi, Dhruv. Good to see you too. I think we last met in Japan.

Dhruv Sharma: That is where we met. And it's already been more than three months since then.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Yeah. Oh, wow. Has it been? Yeah, I didn't realize. I think the quarter went by really fast.

Dhruv Sharma: It's been three months. It's been a couple of market crashes. There's obviously a global conflict. The world keeps on surprising us in even interesting ways. But how have you been and what is new at Procol?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Yeah, I think since we last met, everything is different. And everything is speeding up significantly faster. I think the world of agentic AI has risen expectations, not just for companies, but customers. Every single customer boardroom conversation revolves around agentic AI in different functions, especially for procurement in our case. So those conversations are picking up extremely, extremely fast. So that's what's going on. The speed at which things are changing are rapid and we are very, very excited to be building at this point in time.

Dhruv Sharma: I'm sure. How's life for a procurement professional, a procurement specialist is going to change in the next three to six to call it nine months, Gaurav?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): That's an interesting question. Maybe let me take a step back and share a simple anecdote. Seeing it's very popularly said that the cost of buying pen is more than the pen itself in an enterprise. And the reason is there is an army of procurement specialists who specialize in understanding how to reduce cost for buying anything. They are protectors for cost in any company. And what we have realized is that while they want to do their core work, 80% of their time still goes in doing tactical activities like following up with vendors, writing emails to them, asking clarifying questions or getting RFQs published, getting quotes in a comparative sheet and then chasing for approvals with internal stakeholders. It's a mess in enterprise. And so when all of this is still on Excel and emails, it's very difficult for them to get themselves organized. And hence the problem with the CFO or CXOs are they don't have the visibility and there could be areas of saving cost which they don't get visibility as much as they should. So with agentic AI, the world is completely different. All these tactical activities are now taken care by agents. We just took our agents live in production in Fortune 200 company. And now 80% of their work is done by agent for anything in tailspin. And that's the category or segment spend we start with. And so we think all RFQs, the agent negotiates with vendors, calls vendors with voice AI, following up for quotes. It's magical experience for enterprise.

Dhruv Sharma: It truly is. Is it at this point, is it agents calling and speaking with humans or is it also agents calling other agents? Have we gotten there already?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): I was in a demo with the Fortune 50 company just day before yesterday evening in the US. And this was the exact question they asked. Can your product handle agent to human interaction only or can it also handle agent to agent interaction? And we told them today on the sales front, at least there are sales human professionals and we don't see that going away anytime soon. But for procurement front, it's mostly agent to human communication that goes on because every human is trying to sell into enterprise, everyone. And they all need sales guys to build those relationships. That's where sales helps. But during the procurement process, procurement is now automated. They will still interact with other stakeholders to get their product or service into the enterprise.

Dhruv Sharma: And I'm assuming for most large enterprises and maybe when you answer the question, give us and our listeners a sense of who your customers really are. And I believe you guys serve like 10% of the Nifty 50, a little more than that. And that's just in India.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, let's just talk about your customer base for a bit. Thanks for asking that. We started in a specific category of food and agro commodities. And my father was a procurement leader in one enterprise and we got the opportunity to serve them. And we then expanded from there and build the product to understand how we can serve the needs of a growing procurement org. And today, Procall serves more than 200 enterprises globally in about 10 countries today. And majority being a base being in India. We serve the largest, largest enterprises of the country, including Reliance Industries, ArcelorMittal, Hershey, Imami. These are some in Middle East, we have known IKEA as customers. In Europe, we have Italian customers. In North America, we have many accounts now in different industries from manufacturing to construction and so on. So Procall helps multiple industry customers just get visibility and spend and reduce cost. And make sure the procurement flows smoothly without hassle. I think that is the best part. When a customer, we today manage around $30 billion in procurement spend on our platform. That is a lot in terms of how much business is being transacted on our platform. And we have millions of suppliers who submit bids, negotiate with their buyers to be able to win those orders. We feel privileged to have a platform that powers it all. And I think there's a major economic impact in doing so. Because if you can enable billions worth of business for suppliers, I think the opportunity is just scratching the surface right now.

Dhruv Sharma: I agree. And maybe let's talk about the role of intelligence in all of this, Gaurav. I mean, let's take the example of even this ongoing situation in West Asia or the Middle East. Massive supply chain disruptions. And over time, most supply chains follow that conventional wisdom of just-in-time delivery and of even the inputs. And so you were never creating buffer stocks because you didn't need them. It was expensive. But now supply chains get disrupted. Your production process stalls. And you suddenly have to get to work and figure out where you can source supply from. Are you seeing that happening with your clients? By the way, I just painted a hypothetical scenario.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Yeah, no, absolutely right. We see this out of every crisis, from COVID to war to supply chain getting disrupted, freight logistics getting disrupted. So we see this very often. And this is one of those times where acceleration for technology is accelerated. And it is one of those moments where every enterprise realizes how many gaps are in their supply chain. None of the supply chains are traceable. If you go in these enterprises, these sourcing and procurement of some parts are managed in Excel sheets in a team of 200 people. And you have no idea where is the exact supplier located in which Excel sheet. So in some cases…

Dhruv Sharma: Or WhatsApp chat, I'm assuming.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Or WhatsApp chat.

Dhruv Sharma: And you get really friendly with your vendors.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Yeah, it is a real-life scenario for an automobile company or electronic manufacturing company sourcing from different parts of the world today. All of this lies in one different Excel sheet. For one procurement specialist, you don't know where. So that exposes the supply chain to certain risks which people realize now. And that's when they believe that without traceability, they can't do shit, right? They can't move the needle. And so the CEO can't pick up the phone and call an alternate partner in a different country because they still don't know who their current partners are and who are the partners they've engaged with in the past. That knowledge sits inside the procurement specialist's head or their WhatsApp chat or the email or the Excel sheet. And Procall typically solves that entirely. But also because it has that system of record of historical sourcing and purchasing data which no other system has, we are able to suggest alternatives of different vendors, different timelines, what market is doing. All of those things definitely help and has helped some of our largest customers. With this visibility, they can drive things more accurately than they couldn't before. And increasingly, it's just becoming obvious for them to start doing this. 2026 is that age or the year where this is now where CRM was in 2010. It's unavoidable. Like without a procurement system, if you're running procurement, it's considered a legacy company altogether.

Dhruv Sharma: And I mean, your procurement agents are now in production. They have been now for over a month, I suppose, right?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): This quarter, actually. So we went live in January. We are seeing incredible results in production and just manual work.

Dhruv Sharma: That's going to give us a sense of what have the agents gotten really good at already and where there's still work to be done. And also, is it more like agents support the decision, but a human at the end of the day makes a decision or are agents making the decisions or humans are just auditing them?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): That's a good question. So when you look at sourcing or procurement, there are two types of spend. One is tactical and tail-end spend and another is strategic spend. 80% of transactions are tactical tail-end spend. These could be transactions in a company less than 5 lakh or 10 lakh in an order value, PO value. These are all tactical transactions. Strategic spend is like raw material for a company or project spend for a construction company. This is considered strategic. Procall has different agents to solve both these use cases. Our primary use case is obviously the tail-spend or tactical spend automation where people are leaving everything on agents to do end-to-end automation and just doing the work. For example, when a requisition comes in from the end user, it's going to aggregate all of them to identify what is the best demand aggregation approach to send this to a particular set of vendors. So the agent is going to aggregate that and publish the RFQ to a particular set of vendors. It will then call vendors to ask for the bids and quotes and prices and documents for processing what goes in negotiation. And next step is the agent for negotiation starts a conversation over email chat asking them to reduce prices if they want to win the order. We use something called the BAFO strategy which is best and final offer which is a strategy used by procurement professional where the agent doesn't typically reveal the price but continuously tell the vendors that you are not going to win if you reduce it further.

Dhruv Sharma: Are agents like good negotiators Gaurav?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Agents can be incredible negotiators because there is no bias for agents. But we are training them to be biased in some cases now in strategic spend but not for tactical tail and spend. But for tail and spend it's very objective on making sure the price reduction does happen and the service quality doesn't get hampered. So that needs to be taken care of. So negotiation agent takes care of that and then we have an awarding agent where once the negotiation is concluded the buyer decides how they want to award. So typically we have seen enterprise anything below 3 or 5 lakh rupees they would just let the agent award it without human in the loop. So we are seeing that live use case today. But for orders larger than that we still see procurement guys taking the final decision and judgment call in understanding where and who they want to order and allocate the order depending on the risk appetite of the enterprise. I think risk starts seeing a big role as the spend goes bigger and larger per order. So if you want to say start a new office building that is very strategic. You don't want a bad procurement done for that. And so a human will get involved in understanding who are the key vendors, what is the risk involved. There might be premium to some vendors and so a human in the loop decides all that today. In the future once we aggregate all this data across the network I believe agents can also inform the buyer about these risks upfront. To be able to take the right decision. One of these use cases is something we are working on right now and we believe it will be live by next one month for this large enterprise that I am talking about. And so there are about 5 or enterprise customers that we are already going in production with this product. It's called Clara. Clara is the name of the product. How do you guys spell it? C-L-A-R-A, Clara. All right, all right. And Clara is able to run procurement agentically for new enterprises.

Dhruv Sharma: Is Clara like a general purpose agent or is she like an orchestrator and has several special purpose agents working?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Absolutely. So we started with a special purpose agent but eventually it became an orchestrator because when we were building an end-to-end role or persona of a procurement user we realized that it is nothing but a combination of sub-agents that we can bundle together, configure them differently. So we ended up building a agentic studio for enterprises to be able to configure their own agentic use cases in procurement and finance. For example, the next use case that we are going live with is agentic account labels where customers are able to process their invoices agentically which means any discrepancy in what vendor is saying, what the internal users are saying can be resolved quite efficiently. And there are like hundreds of such use cases in an enterprise that we can go after. So we are very confident that over a period of time if we double down on figuring out what is the best intelligent use cases that produce the highest efficiency we should be able to build amazing experiences around that.

Dhruv Sharma: I have no doubt about that. The one thing, Gaurav, this era of agencies starting to do is causing, and there is no question here, it is more like a discussion point, but it is causing people a lot of existential angst. People who, you know, great engineers, those 10x, 100x engineers who used to write code by hand until three years ago are suddenly like, dude, I have not written a line of code in three months now. Same thing for procurement specialists. They used to be these sutradars and organizations, almost encyclopedic guys who knew exactly what to buy, where from, what price, how to negotiate.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): It is an incredible skill. Look, we have on our platform there are thousands of procurement specialists who use Procore and each of them understand the category extremely well. For example, a pharma customer buying APIs and medicine for their customers, they understand the best on how to buy medicine. They are chemical specialists, actually. So, they understand the composition of medicine to be able to source them. Similarly, we have construction companies who buy entire projects. So, they float a tender or a BOQ within it. They understand how to put that all together to be able to negotiate a large project that one of the largest developers is releasing in the country. Or it could be a latest plant or manufacturing site, which the chief minister or the prime minister is going to inaugurate, and that is going to be procured. So, we have seen tremendous amount of volumes in different types of categories, but I am amazed by some of this knowledge that procurement specialists have, because I think if you want to have a worldview about some supply chain, it is amazing to talk to a procurement specialist. They have a specific worldview about a specific supply chain, and I am always amazed how much I learn by talking to them in each of those use cases.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, that's super interesting. I'm wondering if you've already had to, in a sense, negotiate, like reprice your contracts with existing customers, Gaurav, because now you're just, you know, giving them a very different offering, or you're likely to do that with your new customers. So, now with this current evolution of Procall, how are you guys thinking or rethinking pricing?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): So, pricing has to be a function of the value, as always. So first, our focus is to create value. The second focus is to capture some of it. So, when we process billions in spend, we capture some fraction of it, right, as our monetization engine. And with AI, I think the world is, the market is significantly much bigger of services, where we can go after about just understanding how much time we can save, money we can save, risk we can...

Dhruv Sharma: Would you say customers are receptive to pricing experiments, because all of this is just so new?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Yeah, we are seeing that incredibly, incredibly as priority number one, that let's make it work. And pricing is something that always comes into picture automatically. Okay, now we're ready to pay for this, because don't take this away from us. So, once it is successful, customers are hooked on to using it. And that's when pricing discussion makes sense, right? If you like using it, you don't mind me paying something for it. I'm not going to come and tell you it's going to cost many multi-million dollars upfront, because my job is to create value first. So, as we do that, we have already seen customers being very open to paying for such agents.

Dhruv Sharma: And Gaurav, of course, you guys are very much startups and nimble, you can move incredibly fast. But how are you observing the large incumbents? I'm talking about the large ERP, OEMs, the large players also innovate rapidly in this era, like in this era of AI.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): Yeah. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a lot of it. I don't know the reason, but I think structurally, it's very difficult for an incumbent to change themselves this fast. I was in a talk in the Valley last month, and one of the biggest insights is that the CIO in an enterprise has a stack of technologies, which was built pre-AI era, first an on-prem era, then a cloud era, and now the AI era. And that stack has not even completely migrated to the cloud era from on-prem in a large enterprise. And now we are moving to AI. So that stack requires significant shift in change to be able to enable the enterprise to move faster. And we are seeing a lot of initiatives being tried out. However, one of the areas where incumbents are lacking is innovating faster with their customers. And startups are gaining incredible speed and advantage in this window of opportunity, specifically. And it's popularly said that the startup needs to gain distribution before the incumbent figures out the innovation. Innovation, yeah. Right. So our role is to get distribution as fast as we can, because we have something that is completely new. And nobody in the world today has this technology, which can enable them to run procurement and finance so fast. So we do believe that pricing is a function, everything is a function. But enterprises are very open to trying out innovation. Every boardroom conversation today happens around stock prices collapse if there are no AI initiatives listed on the deck.

Dhruv Sharma: And if you think about it, why wouldn't they? In their personal lives, they're using the best apps, right? And they're not held back by what's in the enterprise and what's on-prem and so on. So it's natural for them to carry that expectation somewhere in the back of their mind into the boardroom, into the conversations as well.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): So if you remember, five years ago, this was called consumerization of the enterprise.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, that's what they used to call it.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): That's what they used to call this thing where, OK, cloud is the new thing. It has to become consumer-friendly for the enterprise. And because AI has seen bottom-up adoption from the end users with distribution in billions now, I think it's imperative for enterprises to expect the same level of product and innovation from their vendors, because they are paying millions of dollars for this innovation. So why shouldn't they? So I am a firm believer that this is the time to build. And I feel very, very privileged to be building ProQol in 2026.

Dhruv Sharma: Well, on that, I think that's just about as good a note as any to end our conversation for today, Gaurav. Thank you so much for coming and making a chat about procurement so fun. Before you came on, we were speaking with the founder of this company called Matix. And it's an app that has great math problem sets and puzzles and so on. I was like, dude, one problem you probably don't have is if people ask you what do you do, you can just show them the app and they'll get it. I imagine with ProQol, you've never had that luxury of people getting it.

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): We will get in a boardroom where there will be 50 people where we are presenting how procurement can be transformed.

Dhruv Sharma: If there's one thing B2B founders are probably envious of and B2C founders is the fact that your close friends and family would never get it. What's your life's work all about?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): My family certainly gets it.

Dhruv Sharma: Oh, yes, you mentioned that. So I think it's great that you played into an unfair advantage that you had. I think that's it's certainly par for the course. And again, thank you so much for coming, Gaurav. Any final thoughts, any closing thoughts from you?

Gaurav Baheti (Procol): No, I'm very excited to seeing you again soon. I think we should catch up again. We'll be sure to. Offline this time. Yes, absolutely.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Dhruv. I'll see you soon. Bye. All right, listeners, well, there is news, but we're not going to be doing a breakdown today, if anything, we're going to be doing a quick newsflash. So and I'm just saying this off of memory. We don't necessarily have a readout, but the the patent on GLP-1s or what are they called again? They're called they're called Semaglutides expires today, lifts today. So who knows? Maybe Ozempic or other generic copies are going to be available are going to be flooding the markets tomorrow. They're going to be priced maybe as low as 1300 rupees. Maybe we see a transformation coming. And that is one thing. The other one that is unfortunate, and we really don't want to make a joke about it, but this company called Delve had apparently been faking SOC 2 compliances at scale. So we feel incredibly sad about all of their customers. We're going to have to get go through that whole process all over again. And then the Income Tax Department in India today also shared that the Income Tax Act of 2025 has been notified. And so there'll be new income tax rules in 2026. So that's the quick three-bullet newsflash from us today. Ozempic is going to be back on Monday, and we will join you with with more guests and more insights. Have a good weekend ahead. See you.

Sudhanshu Bhatia - Episode 70 Transcript - The Offline Network