Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there, listeners. Today is a special day. It's special because today we start our second year at The Offline Network. This is stream 133, and I have a feeling this one's gonna be a blockbuster stream. So stay with us till the end because we have four guests, all of whom are here to announce something incredibly interesting. You'll notice that our our, our frames have gotten a fresh coat of paint. Shout out to our team that put these together. And, while we're while we're at it, I have to tell you that, one of the videos from our, stream number 130, which was also chat with Neeraj Khandelwal, the founder of, Astrobase, is available as a standalone video on our channel. You can go and watch it. And guess what, guys? I mean, if you like our channel, don't think twice before subscribing to it. So with that, let's welcome our first guest for today who is our close personal friend, Kashish, and CEO of EquityList, one of our title sponsors. Welcome, bro.

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Thank you, folks. Always a pleasure to be here.

Utsav Somani: Oh oh, I know. I know. Kashish, yes. You were all over the news yesterday, bro.

Dhruv Sharma: What is the big announcement you made?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Thank you. Thank you very much. I mean, the big announcement, of course, that EquityList has gotten its biggest makeover since inception. We have now launched, I would like to say at our scale, probably one of the first AI-native cap table and compliance platforms in the world. Right? And and that itself, I think, is pretty exciting coming out of India, building for the world in general. All this time, we were, anyway, serving a pretty large customer base of 600 plus companies, managing securities worth slightly over $20,000,000,000, in value for 80,000 plus stakeholders. But we were building it pretty traditionally. Right? Traditional cap table, workflows, etcetera. And, honestly, we realized that people who run these operations at companies, too complicated for them. Right? And AI, of course. Right? That that's absolutely changed the workflow. So now you actually get equity agents to run all of these workflows for you.

Utsav Somani: I'm already gonna pause if

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): you have any questions in general.

Utsav Somani: I do, actually. Remember when we discussed this, I think, maybe six, seven months back or, sometime around that time frame? And you mentioned the word AI native to me, and I was hearing that word again and again. So, I mean, what is AI native, like, for you? And what does a customer feel when he sees or interacts with any AI native product?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Right. In fact, we're gonna show a quick glimpse of that as well. But, honestly, it would have been very easy for us or any other traditional SaaS player in whatever space that you are to bolt on an AI chatbot, right, that maybe gives you, like, questions and answers to support queries or gives you, like, some sort of analytics of usage, etcetera. That is not complicated at all. AI-native really means when you look from ground up, bottom up of of your of the entire value add and tech stack of the product that you've built, atomically, how is the data getting processed? What is the customer journey really like? Where does the power of AI really hold? Is it helping in inferences? Is it helping in evaluation and giving the right output that the customer's looking for? And basically changing. Right? I mean, the CRUD operations, which are right? Like, of course, the premise on how all of the SaaS tools are built, those aren't really going away anywhere. But to your product, what kind of value is AI adding? And, essentially, how are you then kind of recreating everything bottom up? It it would have been far easier for us to actually create a new EquityList that was completely AI-first from the get go, in all honesty, than refactoring the traditional SaaS platform that we had. And, you know, like, just kind of ripping apart cords, etcetera, and figuring out how to kind of imagine this atomic ledger of securities in an AI-first way.

Dhruv Sharma: And, Kashish, as you went about doing this AI native refactoring, I'm asking this question because the answer is gonna be incredibly helpful to other people who are along this journey. How do we make a determination as to what AI will touch and what AI will not touch?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): 100%. That's the most important point. Especially the state that we are in, confidential data is the epitome of protection that everyone really worries about, and we deal with, like, PII, super PII, a lot of on a lot of transaction data. Now automation, we work with banks and publicly listed companies as well. Right? They themselves have a lot of, you know, like, data protection laws and governance that they really need to care about. What, essentially, I I mean, I can't speak to others, but what we have done for this purpose is and this is why this makes us, you know, or, like, just just makes us special, is that years of building the data allows us to, of course, naturally build proprietary data models. We understand how the tooling is supposed to work. We understand how the computation, the arithmetic math of cap table, these soft tools, etcetera, how all of that is supposed to work. AI cannot simply just randomiate data and give you some inferred answer and hallucinate. Right? Then there's no difference between us and a Claude or GPT. It doesn't make any sense otherwise. Right? So naturally for us, when a user is giving a command, either it's asking a question or it's asking you to do some sort of operation, etcetera, the AI is used first and foremost to convert that NLP into understanding what is the right SQL query that needs to run, especially if it's like a query data, etcetera. Send that with extracted PII confidential customer data. You extract and rip that out. So the context is highly ambiguous even for the data model to really kind of zone in and understand, like, that okay. That this relates to stakeholder one's, ownership data in in company a. Right? Like, none of that really goes out there. The models are therefore predominantly used to kind of catch the right tool call to ensure that the output is always consistent and correct and then spin out the answer. Naturally, that could be used cases where you're giving nondeterministic task to the AI. For example, if I ask the AI to write me an investor update, it requires that AI fluency. It requires the ability to reason, etcetera. Understand if I'm writing an update to, I don't know, what's up or through, then how many times are those names being used. Right? What do I need to share with them? But for majority of the operations, especially to run your cap tables, right, it's it's all arithmetic precise calculation, which our software and our data models take care of. The AI just kind of stitches all of those things together to ensure that you are getting the right experience and the right kind of nudge as to what the next step should be to carry out or not.

Utsav Somani: You have insane logos. I mean, Sarvam, Flipkart, Rapido, Tata Consumer, and my favorite Taco Bell India, baby. Yeah. How do you serve I mean, a customer, like, who's seed funded to, like, literally the listed player, like, do their differences of requirements, vary significantly?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): 100%. They do. And, naturally, an early stage start up, maybe has ten, twenty shareholders and couple of ESOPs, etcetera. By the time a company starts flowing, right, maybe series and beyond, they're hiring like crazy, a lot of, you know, like, I don't know, there's there's a lot of exits, there are a lot of secondary and transfers, etcetera, that happen, the requirement grows insanely insanely high. And then when you work with listed companies like the companies that we do, you need a lot of steady compliances baked in. Right? Like so we have built, I think, insane amount of enterprise grade customization and workflows that honestly don't really exist in the market as of today because they're very they're very difficult to kind of stitch them together out, etcetera. The ability for a public listed company to literally configure how an exercise window or a policy will run for them. Do they collect the payments first or do they collect the payments later? Do they get a document a signed before a reminder b goes out? Stitching all of that together is it never existed. So naturally, for larger companies, you have to really understand their problem statement and build for them. I I love the saying that no two publicly listed companies are like everyone, of course, owns their compliance as the as the highest regard and as the standard of how everyone should operate. But, yeah, it's very difficult to build a software in that case. And what we have done very deliberately is to kind of understand the problem statement, build it out. So it can be reused for others, from that perspective. So time to shipping also has an ROI attached because then I take that to some other company, etcetera, and it fits their need. AI, by the way, when we first announced to our select customers that we are rolling out and, hey, we'd love for you to be part of the beta program, it was the lowest common denominator, be it like a small start up or be it a company that that's managing 20,000 stakeholders on a platform. Everyone was equally excited. And that's when we also knew that our hypothesis is gonna play out right because you could be at any range. Even if you could have, like, a team of 15 people and there are, by the way, there are companies that have, like, 15 people who do ESOP reconciliation every single month. Right? Three, four people from HR, four, five people from finance, so on and so forth. Even at that scale, understand that complex data, synthesizing things together, it's supremely difficult. So the whole promise of AI helping them query stuff, right, help them forecast. Everyone resonated with that instantaneously, and we're like, let's do it. Let's let's build that out.

Dhruv Sharma: Kashish, I remember when EquityList came into its own, used to have, give or take, about a 170 customers. Today, you guys have well over 650 customers of whom, if I'm not mistaken, a 120 have migrated to you from their existing service providers. Now as

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): This year alone?

Dhruv Sharma: This year alone. Yes. Which is yes. Let's underscore that. And as you go and find the next 120 companies in that mold, what's the pitch to CXOs? Why should they be making a switch from their current provider to an AI native avatar of EquityList?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Pretty simple. People have far more complex jobs that they can be applied to. And the last thing that they need to be doing is stitching reports and making sense, even though that they're already paying thousands of dollars a year for cap table and traditional software that don't really do them any good. Compliance gaps are leaking everywhere. Right? Because the traditional software is as good as the ERP, you punch in and you get the same thing. But an AI that is effectively ensuring that you're doing workflows in the right cadence, in the right manner, nudging you at the right time, that is extremely difficult. Not to mention the customizations that all of these large enterprises need, that is very difficult to build out. You can I mean, you're better off just filling out a new product every time you want to send to our customers, right, just specific to their need? But that's not scalable, not not always that really fun as well. So the kind of things that we actually have in our pipeline, I think that's something insanely, like, blockbuster game changer where we are I mean, we're bringing, like, Zapier capabilities to equity management. Make your own compliance workflows. Right? Stitch together. If you want a report in your Slack, go for it. If you wanna, you know, run down or tear down every week, you know, make you need to couple of see it so it's make that happen. So all of that is there, kind of pipeline as well.

Utsav Somani: Kashish, let's continue talking, but run us through the platform. We've got four, five minutes together, to spend. So let's spend that on the platform and give our viewers and listeners a chance to experience this firsthand. 100%.

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): I am

Utsav Somani: Alright. Can you see our screen?

Dhruv Sharma: Yes. Yes. We can.

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Perfect. So Clicking that for Amazing. Thank you. Yeah. So this is the latest avatar in the of the EquityList. Clean, simple, not a lot of clutter, hopefully. As you can see, naturally, the metrics that people have to look at, reminders, who's best thing, what actions you need to take, right, who was accepted, signed word, all that is pretty required. But, you know, we are throwing emphasis on the AI capability here. Right? So there are suggested bills especially for first time customers. In fact, the listeners of TON, if you're not already a business customer, it's not only do you get 5,000 of free AI credits this month, but when you sign up for the first time, you get to experience a cinematic onboarding experience. So I think you'll enjoy that. But, yeah, but let me let me start with, like, simple things. Right? Like, something as simple as who owns the most equity. A lot of these operations naturally can be done by me, like, going to the UI or extracting a report, and we share the reasoning very deliberately. You know, we're actually telling you how is the AI going, looking at which database, dataset, etcetera, to derive the results. And as you can see, it just spewed out something, pretty instantaneously.

Dhruv Sharma: I love the tabular render, by the way.

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Amazing. Thank you. Now if I'm gonna go, like, a bit more extreme and be like, how many in sub grants have to be issued?

Utsav Somani: There was an example where the system gets blocked. Like, I think that's more important for people also to know that it's not always that it can do everything for you. Like, there must be some human in the loop, but there's some, like, safeguards.

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): There are. So, I mean, this specific example that I'm showing is, like, a a lot more reasoning because now I'm asking you to do analytics for it. I'm seeing that how many software should they see it and compare it here on your basis to all of my previous years. Right? And I'm really hoping that this demo doesn't pay because that tends to happen way too often then. And I do admit, not to the customers, but in general.

Utsav Somani: Well, I don't know. But think it's sign of a great product, by the way. Like, I think, all the cool demos, I think I've ended up becoming, like, great. I mean, when Elon Musk, that's cyber trucks, that's stuff. So

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): That's, like, a good point. Myself. But yeah. But but as you can see, right, I mean, like, the ability for it to generate charts, export this, the amount of time so, either way, that people have to kind of create reports over Excel and share it for board meetings, it's I think we underscore all of that.

Utsav Somani: And how do people pay? Like, is it per seed? Is it per company? Like, what's the per stakeholder? What's the billing mechanism or economics?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): You know, one of the biggest things with this release, we wanted this to become a pretty transparent product. And with that, we have actually, exposed our pricing as well. Not a lot of capital products have done that so far. We do are pretty gated. And our pricing for India, in all honesty, I mean, we have a free tier that allows you to manage up to 10 stakeholders, and you do get thousand credits, lifetime credits. You could run a couple of prompts, etcetera. The build tier honestly starts at 5,000 rupees a month effectively. Right? Not to mention we're giving our users an option to actually pay on monthly basis. cap table software have notoriously been known to collect everything 100% as an annual fees, and I know that credits from a SaaS metric, but the AI metric has really kind of changed the entire business model proposition. So yeah. So we charge our users essentially on the number of stakeholders that they need to manage and the tier that they're in. The growth tier, which is the most popular tier, and I think a lot of, like, series and Beyond companies will end up using, would allow them to give like, it gives them specific functionalities like expense reports and compliance reports, etcetera. And the AI is baked in. Right? You could effectively effectively, you get, like, 6,000 AI credits, and the AI credits are your allowance whenever some sort of an operation is happening, and naturally, we have assigned a weight weight and model to them. Like, a simple query is not gonna be as expensive as, like, a multistep agentic function. So that is how people effectively then you can always top up credits. Your question, by the way, so where a human is required is, helps me issue a grant if issues. Right? So any materially important workflow would need a human-in-the-loop approval. Right? Not to mention at this point in time, you've also barred any terminal actions, which means that I'm not gonna ask AI to delete any share class or delete a system of record entry. We haven't approved that as of yet. That will be in a very guarded manner. But the ability to create, update, and even drag and drop and parse files to extract report, all of that is already there. Not to mention people will be able to create their own custom skills for repeated tasks, to make their lives a lot more easier. Kashish, so within your I mean, I

Utsav Somani: absolutely love it.

Dhruv Sharma: This Yeah. I was gonna ask you, Kashish. Within your customer organizations, is there anyone who gatekeeps the AI credits? I mean, I'm I'm wondering if there's you know, if one AI, one equity curious user consumes a lot of the credits upfront leaving very little for others to consume. Do you foresee that as a possibility?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Sorry. I didn't quite understand your question.

Dhruv Sharma: I was saying the AI credits within your customer organization, will someone manage how many of those credits can be used by, you know, different set of users?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Got it. So this right now is 6,000 credits for the admin. Mhmm. Right? So so it's it's not like a shared pool of how many admins, like, collectively shared because we understand that there are multiple people, you know, involved in this entire operation. Yeah. But 6,000 or x number of credits per admin user, and then they they could always be overages, that you could kind of top aboard. So we're not gonna restrict anyone, essentially, from that perspective. You put a very well ad and, honestly, over a period of time, we'll also, look at few things. What's up to your point? As you can see, right, it's kind of drafted everything out. Whatever my policies were for the pipe pipe release of the 2021 tool, all of that is there. Now it's asking me to create that grant. I could also ask the two legs, esign and send it out, and it would do just that. But, naturally, that would require my input for all of that to happen. And as you can see, it's rendered a a vesting schedule. What is the cliff flag? Not a mention. If I We're keeping

Utsav Somani: our Instagram section. Next guest waiting, Kashish. So we'll have, like, to wrap up thirty seconds. I will

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): always talk about it. But yeah. But the point is that Love

Utsav Somani: it once. Founders get passionate about their projects and topics and, their companies and their their products, and they just wanna, like, showcase it for long. I'm guessing the next one is waiting, us Yeah. With to share more with us also. 100%.

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): 100%. I'm gonna stop the share, but I think you got a quick glimpse of it.

Utsav Somani: No. No. Absolutely love it. Where can they sign up right now?

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): They can sign up on equitylist.co. They could sign up for free. It's ungated. Experience the cinematic experience yourself, and I'm using that word very, you know, like, strictly because and deliberately because there is one. And you will need to understand how how to operate now in the in the AI world. That'll be fun.

Utsav Somani: Thank you so much for coming on our show. Wishing you and the team EquityList the very best ahead.

Kashish Sharma (EquityList): Thank you very much, folks. Bye. Always a pleasure.

Utsav Somani: Folks, we're moving on to our next segment. We've got Rajinish from Sukino. Rajinish, welcome to the show.

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Hi. Thank you very much.

Utsav Somani: Alright. So let's start with a simple one. Somebody is discharged from a hospital after a stroke. What happens in India right now?

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Well, currently, you know, it depends on where you stay. And if you're staying in a tier one kind of a city, then you have some access to some sort of a specialized continuum care centres or rehab centers, like the one that we have currently in Bangalore. So pretty much depends on where you stay. The information age today, you know, has enabled a lot of users to understand what typically needs to be a lot of the stroke, but it all depends upon the facilities that are available in that particular city. So, if you're suppose, you know, if I were to I probably ask that, scenario to be in Bangalore, then obviously, you have centers like us, and they come to our centers. They undergo a a period of rehabilitation in our, center, and then they go back home. But if you don't have such centers, then they typically go back home, then you have a very unstructured program of rehabilitation being done. And and then people misunderstand rehabilitation. You know? It's it's not just about moving your body. There's a lot of things between active therapy and passive therapy. A lot of times, you know, some people also go to the gym and try to buy one-kilo dumbbell, two-kilo dumbbell to kind of do things. So a lot of unstructured things happens, and sadly, that is the reason why you have have a lot of readmission back to the hospital. You're close to twenty point five percent of people getting readmitted back to the hospitals in typical care scenario. You know? So, that is the solid reason that centers like ours becomes an extremely important cog in the wheel, in the case of re in a continuum of care. And, sadly, also, there's just about one fifty or 200 odd centers in India.

Dhruv Sharma: Rajinish, can you help us understand what the typical rehabilitation protocol looks like?

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Well, you know, it depends on what kind of, you know, issue you had. For example, if you are talking about a stroke, then again, it depends on what sort of, you know, FIM score you come with. And when I talk about FIM score, talking about what type of cognitive ability you currently have and how much of disability that you that one has endured during the acute stroke phase that you had. So it depends a lot about the ailment that the person has undergone to. Right? Taking a severe case, when typically, in our case, at least I've seen people usually come to us with a with a very hopeless score of what twenties, you know, even as low as thirties. And that is where the functional independence has completely gone down. So you need to understand, a, you need to understand what they've done in the hospital. Because typically what happens in hospital is that it's a very acute care center. You stay for two to three days, you stay for four days, and you get your surgery done, and then you discharge back from there because of the hospital, the way the model works over there. So when they come down here, what we start off is to stabilize the patient. We understand what the patient needs. There's a plan of care that we put for the patient. We run it fast through the primary physician because he becomes a very important element in the continuum of care. And, taking his inputs that the plan of care is structured, discussed with the family, and then started off. When I started off, it's a period of, you know, step length of the patient in initial few days, maybe in a week, and then slowly start taking it for the rehabilitation. It just start with physiotherapy sessions. It may then go to, you know, after a few weeks, it may go to an occupational therapy. Then if your speech is slur slurred, then you start, you know, taking the patient through an SLP program. You know? So all these small, small elements of, therapy will start playing its own role. So typically, it takes about at least about a month or two depending upon the severity of the case. It takes typically a month or two for a patient to, you know, get back some sort of a cognitive ability and some sort of, moving mobility, for for himself.

Utsav Somani: And at the root cause, I think it's an incentive problem. Right? Because the hospitals don't want to keep people our patients as low yielding patients for very long. So they want the turnover to be quite high, and anybody who's coming for a high value surgery, I think, should remain in the hospital. That's their incentive mindset to maximize revenue per bed. And insurers have recently started paying for this. Right? Up to sixty or ninety days of

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Right.

Utsav Somani: Rehab care as well. So when did this change come about, and how is do you think the incentive cycle is now fully aligned for people to get the right care?

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Yeah. I mean, you know, thankfully, the insurance industry, you know, as the months go by, the days go by, you know, the government, the central government is making it very, very mandatory and trying to have IRDAI. If you see the mission of IRDAIAI is to see that by 2047, we need to have a good amount of, in a much higher percentage of coverage of insurance and the health insurance coverage. But currently, if you see, there's about twenty, twenty odd percent in the in the urban centers are covered. Now if you come to the hospital, you you talked about the hospital model. You know, that's what that model is. Nothing wrong with that model because their their, their entire cost structure is different. You know? Right? They have to pay for the OTs. They have to pay for the specialists. So their cost structure is totally different. And, for them being in acute care, it's all about, you know, ensuring that the life of the patient is given back. Right? That's what they do. But when it comes to, providers like us, we are adding more, you know, life to those years. So the the hospital will add the years, and we add the lives to the years. That's the way one needs to look at it. Now coming down to insurance, you know, the way it has played out in the last few years, at least. I remember in the starting days, we didn't have insurance. You know, there was no this sixty days, ninety days period was absent completely. It's only post-COVID that we saw the insurance, playing a very big role, and people likes getting, you know, the reimbursements and all done. So, currently, if you see, what have happened is that post insurance, the payer has shifted. Right? The payer is the insurance industry now, which means that, you know, earlier, if a customer who was the daughter or the son of the of the patient, today it is insurance companies. And in a way that has helped a lot because, you know, when it comes to the insurance, they're looking for an incentive to understand is there a readmission possibility and has the patient gotten better, which means that, you know, it says one time payout and then he knows that the patient has gotten better. Whereas if it comes to the family, then the point is for the families, always looking into, you know, how many more weeks is it going to take for my dad or mom to get stabilized. Right? So if you see the insurance has played a very big role in shifting the payer, one. And secondly, it has brought a lot of standardizations and interactions of protocols because, obviously, they are paying for the future. They pay for what kind of work happened in the past and how that path has actually effectively helped the patient to recover. And if the recovery is seen by the doctors or the insurance panel, then they're going to further in you know, give their reimbursements back to to to the continued care providers like us. So this has really brought a lot of structure. You know? It goes back to the reason, actually, I started Sukino as well. One of the reasons is we don't have a great insurance framework over here, which is, you know, structured the healthcare industry. Right? We only are in hospital, and you're at home. Nothing in between.

Dhruv Sharma: Can you tell us about Sukino's capacity as of date? How you're ramping up that capacity? And as you ramp up that capacity, when I mean, is there a way for, for you to administer the same care or similar care in the comfort of people's homes?

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Yeah. I mean, you see, the way Sukino has grown. We we started with baby steps, you know, started with about five beds, 10 beds, and moved on all the way to 850-odd beds. Now setting up another additional capacity of about 450 more, which will be on by this fiscal. You know, but, Dhruv, it's not about the capacity. It's not about the bed capacity, you know, that excites me. It's about the outcomes of the patients, but that's something that that excites me. I I didn't build so, you know, just to keep on adding capacity. It's more about ensuring that, you know, patient the readmission rates to the hospitals are lower. People are able to get their mobility, back. The caregivers or the families are able to get back to the work because traditionally today, as you see, the caregivers lose a lot of employment days. And if you see the Indian context about twenty to thirty percent of the strokes, victims in, all the patients today are below the fifty year mark, which means a good amount of people who are employable actually not being employed because of this particular reason. So for me, those things matter a lot. But from a, from a capacity perspective as to how do I standardize this scale, you know, quality of scale is always going to be difficult. You know, it's like running an old class business airline, throughout the year, and that's what its own challenges. So what what helps Sukino and what has helped Sukino in the past has always been the fact that there has been a very structured protocol that has been followed. And that is something that has always helped us to, ensure that we don't operate as fifteen, sixteen centers, but we operate as one clinic. So wherever you go, like McDonald's, you know, wherever you go, the taste remains the same, the size remains the same, and you get the same experience.

Utsav Somani: So two phrases as, I mean, stood out to me, structured protocol and cost structures from your previous statement. So what does the protocol or what does the center look like, and how is your cost center different from, say, a traditional hospital?

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Yeah. I mean, this is on a protocol perspective, also, you know, as I told you, when when it comes to rehab, it's not like a hospital, setup. Right? The in in our case, it's very clear that when the patient gets admitted, there is a plan of care and the goals that one has in mind the family has in mind. Not everybody can go through a complete structured program of three months, six months because of the various economics that that that comes into play. So what I try to say is that, you know, my papa has to walk or my papa has to start eat, on his on his own independently. He has to go to the washroom independently. So these are some of the goals post in which they kind of keep. And our protocols as a tool, we saw all about ensuring from so we have three things in our in our kitchen that we offer in our centers. One is the recuperative care, which is the clinical care that we offer, which is where all the clinical parameters of the patient is, you know, seen, overseen, supervised, so that we don't want the patient to get into an inter relapse mode. At the same time, as you maintain the patient and you and better the patient, you're also trying to understand the mobility of the patient is kind of, you know, secured back. This is where the physical rehabilitation and the mental rehabilitation, the psychological counseling, all this comes into play. So typically from a center perspective, if you see Sukino, whilst we follow all the the paraplegic services that you see in a hospital, where you have qualified doctors, you have nurses, your ICUs, you have well tech, all these kind of and your therapist, nurse I mean, pretty much entire services that you see in a hospital is found in Sukino. The difference being that in our case, people stay for a very long period of time. So the compassion and empathy has to be kind of, you know, spread out over a period of two to three months or six months. That itself is a is a challenge. From a hospital perspective, as I told you, it's all about acute care where the patient just gets treated and and and goes back. That's a part of the difference between both.

Utsav Somani: Do any final closing question?

Dhruv Sharma: I do have one, Rajinish, which is who makes the discharge decision? Is it voluntary? Is it is it made after clinical assessment?

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Well, you know, if it again, it depends upon, you know, which kind of condition they're talking about the globe. For example, if talking about a stroke or anything. As I told you, today, information flow is such that the families know what they need, what they have lost, and what they can recover. They're very much aware of it. So the decision typically is that, you know, they they talk to the doctor. The primary doctor understands what kind of care is needed for the patient. So while the deciding factor to admit a particular patient still rests for the family, but the treating physician is one who decides and who can advise the patient party on what is best suited for him. And accordingly, the patient family decides to pursue the the further care in our center. So he becomes the primary, but the doctor forms a fulcrum around which the entire care is being offered to the patient because we do not want to offer anything different from what the primary physician would have had in mind had it been now placed.

Utsav Somani: Congrats on the recent milestone as well. You announced a 31,000,000 raise by, Bessemer and Rain Matter as well earlier this year. What are the next milestones you're looking forward to?

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): As I told you, you know, for me, both in the funding and the capacity addition, I wanna see how much we can bring this across to, you know, now to South India, then to the larger part of North India, West and East. You know, as I told you, there's just about one fifty or centers, in the country also. And, if you see the global numbers, you know, we have just about point six therapists for, 10,000 odd people. You have, close to the incidence of stroke if you see among the smaller age crowd is much higher in India. So for me, what would what would the really, matter would be to ensure that this protocols are much more standardized, much more, broad based, and we are able to expand from an outlet perspective of the current one of our 15 odd centers that we have, about 35 to 40 centers. That's the goal that we have, but I would love to see that the patient count and the patient outcomes really goes better.

Utsav Somani: Extremely impressive. Thank you so much for coming on our show. Wishing you a very good day.

Rajinish Menon (Sukino): Pleasure. Thank you very much.

Utsav Somani: Alright, listeners. We're moving on to our third guest for the day, Puneet of Mirae Asset. Puneet, Puneet, welcome to the show.

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Hi, guys. How's it going?

Utsav Somani: Good to have you with us, and congrats on the ₹1,125 crore first close. That's a big, big number.

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Thank you, and we are very excited.

Utsav Somani: And you also joined, I mean, earlier this year, by the way. Right?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): January 1. I wanted to make it now. Wow.

Utsav Somani: What a New Year start. So what is, you know, I'm investing in right now? Like, what do you guys wanna invest in? Like, what is the thesis behind the fund? Like, give us the lay of the land.

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): See, the where I see the biggest opportunity in India and, unfortunately, the gap is the growth investing. Fundamentally, I think Indian early stage ecosystem has started to make sure there are a number of dedicated funds that are focused on India. A lot of the larger funds, but a lot of new precede funds, a lot of sector specialist, like, let's say, Yali Capital or especially focusing on deep tech. So you look at, like, a founder when they're trying to raise anywhere between 1 to 10,000,000. I think this is, like, plethora of options. But the growth investor always relied on the US guys, you know, whether it was Tiger at some point or AlphaWave or SoftBank and others. And right now, I think everybody is very focused on US AI, and rightly so because you can deploy tens of billions of dollars in a single round. So you don't need to worry about $2,020,000,000 dollar deployment and small, small checks far away from their core geography. And that's what presents the opportunity, and that's the core thesis of our fund is, filling the gap and dismissing middle, be focused on high growth companies. And, and be sector agnostic. Like, we want companies to be new age using technology, but it doesn't mean that we only wanna be focused on AI companies. India, value creation is happening across sectors, and we wanna be focusing on all of them. I would say the core focus for the fund will remain tech platforms, new age brands, AI, deep tech, and advanced manufacturing. So those are the five areas that we have defined, and there are a lot of subsectors that we cover out of them. But that's, like, at, like, high level. Happy to go deeper wherever you'd like.

Dhruv Sharma: We need to also when I are early stage guys, we have some sense of how the early stage landscape has evolved. I think you're a rare guess in in in in being a growth investor on the show. Tell us how the growth investing side of things has evolved over the course of the last, say, call it five, eight, ten years in India.

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): See, I remember when I was with Nexus Venture Partners in 2018. At that time, also, my hypothesis was very similar that, you know, growth investing at that time was actually just one investor, Lee Fixer. I think all of you guys have been beneficiaries of, him at some point or other, but he used to come to India. And he was a great investor. He'll invest in 10 companies in a day and go away, and I call it suitcase investing again. And it felt like the Indian growth investors would stay here, would actually look like you, me, WhatsApp, and, and would have deep understanding of India. That was the hypothesis when I was joining Steadview, and that hypothesis remains pretty similar. The challenge for growth investing is twofold. Right? One, as a first like, there are a lot of people who are identifying this opportunity, so it's not like I'm unique and I'm the only one who is seeing this opportunity. But to go after this opportunity, it's just the fund math. Right? As a growth investor, you would want to have 12 to 15 investments in a fund. And if you wanna have the average check size at $101,150 crores, you need a 2,000 crore fund, 1,800 to 2,000 crore. Only then you can actually go after this opportunity. And that has remained the challenge that number of first time funds either can't get to that scale and they revert to the early stage. Or in India, there's never too many franchises that breed at growth stage investors. Right? Like, today, a number of funds are getting started. Ultimately, Flipkart gave a bunch of entrepreneurs. Freshworks gave a bunch of SaaS entrepreneurs to India. Early stage funds have given a lot of early stage VCs, to India. I think there are not too many dedicated franchises on growth stage. So even the new funds that started, most of them started actually people who are from the private equity background, and which meant that they remain very conservative in their approach. And they they almost try to look like mid market private equity and not like true growth investors. So I think, we need to find our answer for high growth companies. And that's, I think, how the landscape is evolving. A number of people have gone after this opportunity. A 91 was, I would say, the first breakout that started with the bang $325,000,000 fund. But, see, success in this business leads to increasing the size of the fund because you can raise more money, which also means that if you collect more fees and can potentially make higher carry. And I think and so people who become successful in this end up actually raising $6,700,000,000 funds and moving up to, like, 50,000,000 checks. And that's, I think, what's happened. So today, I see very few funds. Us, maybe SIG, exponential on the consumer side and few others who are focused on this.

Utsav Somani: And let's talk a little bit about your LP. So most of this is Korean Capital, Krafton and Naver, I believe. And, you announced the front end with Mr. Piyush Goyal also, being president of the meeting. So are you trying to set up a corridor between Korea, India? Is there some strategic, thing at play here?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Absolutely. And, see, Korean corporates are very excited about India. I think they see as a great growth frontier, and there are a lot of synergies in number of ecosystems here. I think Krafton obviously has strong presence in India, top up GE and BGMI, but Naver wants to do more in India. And so our goal is, as I said, given our South Korean heritage, I think we want to be that bridge between capital available in Korea that can be deployed in India. So, yes, you're right. All the money in the first close was mostly from, Naver Krafton, and, also, we, as Mirae Asset, have put in large scale in the game. But this effectively, I would put it as a Korean capital. And I think the goal would be that now from here to ₹1,800–2,000 crore, we raise more domestic money, and it's a good balance to have 60-40, 60% Korean, 40% Indian money. I also personally think that we are in a vintage which is gonna generate high IRR, so it'll be a disservice to Indian investors if we didn't give them this opportunity, to be part of this value creation journey.

Dhruv Sharma: Puneet, I'm also thinking about, you know, at at this like, let's talk about this moment in growth investing in India. Where let's talk about the opportunity set. What kind of companies can absorb growth capital right now and then deliver the kind of performance you guys are going after?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): See, there are obviously some subsectors that have always remained interesting, and they continue to remain interesting. But let's focus on what has changed. So the first one is, I would say, vertical quick commerce. Right? Like, fundamentally, quick commerce is disrupting retail in India. And if you think of it in India, Indian retail never got organized. It has always remained fragmented for brands. It's always remained at the mercy of large distribution network that they have to build. Like, there must be some model that will formalize that retail. Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto, and others BigBasket and others are the answers to, let's say, the kiranas. But if you think of, like and, again, I don't know whether which model will be successful, what will be the exact model. But if you think of home materials, right, there are a million home material, building material shops in India. Do you think does that make any sense if you were to redesign the country today? How would that look like? So I actually think retail is going to get formalized, and it's not just quick. There's a new form of commerce that is emerging, whether it's quick or not, but where you have a dark store and you are able to provide the f packet efficiency of a large big box retailer, but the front end efficiency of convenience of a neighborhood store. So I think we'll we'll see a lot of people emerge in that, so we're pretty excited about that. AI, obviously, I think if you're an investor and you're not looking at AI, I think you're sort of, like, you know, in, missing the frontier. So that's second, I think, especially AI services from India will be an interesting team where, at least I believe, there are modes India has. And third, if I look at deep tech, I think, especially advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, and defense, Those are three areas where we are actually seeing a lot of good opportunities come by where we can spend a lot of time and deploy capital.

Utsav Somani: So Mirae Asset has invested in Zomato, now Eternal, Dhan, and many others. Are there any investments that you've announced recently from this fund?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): From this fund, we just announced the first investment, is NexEdge. That's in Velvetech. It's a very seasoned team. Andrew Taparia, he's, he was CEO for or co CEO for three sixty one Belt. And, he and few of his colleagues along with, another founder from Standard Chartered, have joined Hansen. And they're really creating an AI native UHNI focus. Like, while there are a lot of AI native, wealth platforms that are mushrooming, which are focused on, let's say, not you because you would come in UHNI category, I think, but people like me. I think, but, but these guys are focusing on that cream of the market, but how do they provide a new age wealth service to them. So that's one investment we've announced, and we are in the middle of actually two, three other investments right now.

Dhruv Sharma: And, Puneet, you know, talk to us about how do you how do you actually go about building a concentrated portfolio? Again, I said as I said earlier, like, in early stage, I think the portfolio is gonna be a lot more diversified. So how do you contend with risk in a relatively more concentrated growth portfolio like the kinds you guys manage?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): No. Absolutely. I think, like, see, fundamentally, the approach is in early stage, you you guys are sitting with a machine gun. And and, basically, the rate of firing per second is what matters, I think, and and effectively because the cost of missing a great opportunity is very high. So you wanna be, like, with that machine gun and making sure that you

Utsav Somani: Shots on target, basically. Yes. Calculate it.

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Calculate it. Yeah. Absolutely. But I think growth rate is a lot about sniping. Right? That you have to effectively be very, very targeted. And the goal what is my goal? Right? And what do I keep thinking about? And what do I wanna be accountable for? Is that how many category winners of all the different early stage funds can we capture a new fund? Because, effectively, that is what we are hoping to do that let's say, each fund will have two, three core winners in their a fund, and we will basically be capturing many of them.

Utsav Somani: And

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): that and that's where we spend a lot of time, which means that we get to actually meet every company in the space that is, like, in in any industry. Right? When there is one company getting created, there are at least three, four companies being funded, and we get to meet them. And what we have to be accountable for is that how many winners did we catch, in each of the categories.

Utsav Somani: And in terms of, like, target returns, IRRs, like, I mean, I'm guessing, like, it varies. I mean, for our listeners, I think, just to get a broad sense of early stage, late stage. Early stage, I think people are expecting between 20 to 30% IRR on a good, Indian denominated fund. But as we go up and up, like, what is the expectation that people should have?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): See, effectively, the way I think of IRRs is, see, it's risk return. Right? Let's say a risk, whatever, a seven to 8% is your FD return in India. If you think of venture debt, that's somewhere around 14. If you think of actually, like, Nifty is compounded in rupees at around 13%. So a sophisticated investor is at least looking for, like, an illiquid instrument, at least 700, 800 basis points alpha, which means that they need to get IRR in the twenties, which means that if you take account for all the things that come with the fund, you're looking at, like, 30% of gross IRR, one way or the other.

Utsav Somani: Alright. That's it for me. Dhruv, any final, closing words?

Dhruv Sharma: I do. I guess I do have one question for Puneet. Puneet, in your previous seat at Steadview, I guess, you were doing a combination of public and private. Is that correct?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Yeah. As a fund, we did both, public and private. Also, my focus and my personal interest has always been privates.

Dhruv Sharma: Privates. Okay. Oh, no. The question I was gonna ask you is are you still tracking publics, or are you are you totally a private citizen? More more on the personal side. But

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): I'm still tracking publics, man. I think, ultimately, I think we all need to get it at least bit of the market and Perret has a pretty large publics folks. So I get to learn a lot from our mutual fund guys because they do this day in, day out. So it's been it's it's fun actually to have I think same was true for Steadview. And for many, it's fun to actually have a franchise that does both because then, at least for me personally, from a learning standpoint, it's it's a great experience.

Dhruv Sharma: I think your colleague, Aditi Agarwal, used to be a close personal friend. Maybe give August, we give him a quick shout out on the show while we gather.

Utsav Somani: Preet, I think one more question. I saw your LinkedIn post about using this tool that's gone viral in the US and apparently raising it to point 5,000,000,000, Instinct. Yeah. So what's been the experience like, Waseer?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): See, I'm I'm actually using Instinct and RockBot, both agents actually pretty parallelly right now. Instinct is quite interesting. I actually still think I'm enjoying RockBot a little bit more. But I what I love about Instinct is it's very proactive, which means that if you connect the system to it, it'll send you a message that, oh, this thing is coming up. Be there, and which which I love. And it's actually great at actually doing ecommerce. I was actually trying to send flowers to my friend. I've tried to shop for our 18 old child using Instinct, and it's quite interesting that it actually gets to the card creation page very easily. I think it gets the right assortment as well. I think the payment is still need to be solved. I think that's maybe on the show I should give an idea to your listeners. I think I do think somebody will create a payment instrument for agents.

Utsav Somani: Somebody actually came on a show, Prava Payments. They were doing payment trails for agents.

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Yeah. So I think it's a pretty interesting idea. I think that how do you create an instrument, I think, where you can, where you have some control, but you're also comfortable giving this to an agent. Because, obviously, I don't wanna give my personal credit card to the agent.

Utsav Somani: And Grokport, some use cases that you've used it for?

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Grokport is actually interesting because you can you're creating different bots for different use cases, and, effectively, that declutters things. Right? Like, Instinct, what I don't like right now is that everything just comes in one place, which means it becomes pretty clundered. But, but in Grok, like, I have, what, 15 bots for different things. One for my x, one for my LinkedIn, one for my email. Like, it's actually interesting. Lot more compartmentalize that essentially helps, do work, I think, better. I don't think Claude is better for research still, but what is better for, I'd say, getting execution done?

Utsav Somani: Alright. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Wishing you the best in this role.

Puneet Kumar (Mirae Asset Venture Investments): Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

Utsav Somani: Yes, Vineeth. Bye bye.

Dhruv Sharma: Good, sir.

Utsav Somani: Alright, listeners. Our final segment, we've got Samay of Alteon joining us. He announced a round yesterday. We read the TechCrunch article. We saw the video. Let's welcome him to the show. Welcome to the show.

Dhruv Sharma: Hi, Samay.

Utsav Somani: I think you're on mute.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Can you hear me now?

Utsav Somani: Yes. We can. Say The classic problem of the calls. Congrats on the new rates.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Thank you.

Utsav Somani: Alright. So while we continue talking, I'm gonna play this video. I'm pulling it from your Twitter. Pretty cool stuff. Like so talk to us about what the company is doing and what the company is building.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Impossible for these airplanes to do this flight maneuver called dynamic soaring to harness energy from the wind while they're flying so that we can charge the aircraft without having to land and essentially keep it up for more than a year. So that would like the tweet says, that would mean that if it takes off in this year, it would land in the next.

Utsav Somani: That is insane. And it's, I mean, inspired by a bird, albatross.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It I think I think the first mentions of dynamic soaring are centuries ago.

Dhruv Sharma: Talk to us a little more about you know, because it's I've mentioned the Albatross. Samayr, talk to us a little bit about the flight cycle, of the Albatross and, you know, what you guys have likely built into, your aircraft as well.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Yeah. So the flight cycle is, called dynamic soaring. The fundamental physics of how that works is very similar to how a wind turbine works or how a sailboat works or any of that, where you essentially just have a lifting surface that is parallel to that is in a crosswind. Now what the bird does is you have as winds blow over the open ocean, they form something called a wind shear, which is just a very rapid change in wind velocity. So right above the surface of the ocean, you have incredibly slow winds And then those very exponentially pick up over the next few tens of meters. The bird leverages the difference between those two to essentially go in circles, and be able to get energy from the wind. The bird does it, I think, I've I've seen I've seen it does it for, like, more than 800 to a thousand kilometers a day, to to essentially catch something. Now while the bird uses it for essentially migrating from place a to place b, you know, catching fish, what we do is we instead of there's the cool difference. If you scroll down, you'd see the graph where the bird does what's called an S-cycle. And what we do is called an O-cycle, but, fundamentally, the physics are the same.

Utsav Somani: So this bird, what kind of payload does the bird carry and what kind of payload will your aircraft carry?

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Where it's the the bird carries food and fish. What are aircraft like, there's the the way we're operating right now is that we're at, like, more the technology level, not the product level just yet.

Utsav Somani: Fair enough.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): There's probably going to be a very wide range of payloads we can carry from, like, doing doing surveillance, doing, obviously, offensive offensive neutralizing threats I've seen, to even to even, like, putting better payloads on it to get incredibly good better data, but a very wide range. You know, the shape

Dhruv Sharma: of your aircraft, Samayr, reminds me of the of the famed u two Dragon Lady, that still soars in the skies. But, of course, the u two would fly incredibly at incredibly high altitudes. My sense is your aircraft are literally gonna hug the, the, you know, the the ocean surface. And so you two used to have this problem. They used to call it the coffin corner. In other words, you can't flew fly too low. You'd stall too high. You're testing the aerodynamic limits. For you guys, the margin of error is really, really slim. So talk to us more about the wing, the aerodynamic forces, the engineering behind all of this.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Yeah. I'm not personally familiar with the YouTube, but most just by nature of how wings work, how aircraft work. For maximum aerodynamic efficiency, you just want a very thin, very long wings, which is what our aircraft have. We operate at this very interesting intersection of having to be incredibly aerodynamically efficient because if we waste energy, we can't harness that, and yet having to maneuver like a fighter jet. Our aircraft goes to operates in sometimes the range of, like, seven to 10 g's, which is insane. So it it you you you would normally see the gliders that are super slow, super efficient that that are on this side of the spectrum. And then you see fighter jets that have super short, stubby wings, but they can really quickly maneuver. We've built an aircraft that's at the intersection of both.

Utsav Somani: 200 test lights. What has nature taught you?

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): We've done we've done more than 200. 200 in the last thirty days. But the way we're approaching a lot of our testing right now is when I also came across Dynamics already, this was probably, like, two years ago now. The thing that was obvious is, hey. If it's known for centuries, why hasn't anybody done this? And the feeling that we had was it's there's a limit to how much sitting behind a computer and doing math teaches you. And at some point, you just need to get out of the real world and start flying a lot. The challenge for us to be able to build these airplanes that can stay in the air for so long is twofold. You obviously have the autonomy problem, but then you also have to build an aircraft that doesn't need maintenance for more than a year. Otherwise, it would have to come back up. What we're doing with a lot of these

Utsav Somani: specs send, like, different things. Right? I mean, if it stays in the air for a year, like, I mean, it must pass through all seasons, I guess.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Yeah. So that's what we're testing with all of these specs. We're just putting it in the air, seeing what breaks, collecting data around that, and just using that information to iterate on figuring out, hey. This breaks at this point. This breaks at this point. We should probably fix it in x y z

Dhruv Sharma: way. I'm assuming the aircraft, obviously, has a motor just to get airborne and sometimes if it has to, maneuver in the absence of wind, etcetera. Yeah. So,

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Yeah. So, to be explicit here, like, this flight that you saw was fully powered. Okay. The next step is to do it unpowered. But even in the even in, like, the final version of this that will actually fly for more than a year, it's the same motor that generates electricity and thrust. It's just running the motor the other way. So we'll obviously we'll always have that capability to be like, oh, something's going wrong that we didn't expect. We can just turn turn on and, like, go and become powered and fly a red graph like a normal aircraft.

Utsav Somani: And have you explored other sources of energy? I mean, you're going after the dynamic solar, but has, like, solar crossed your mind? I asked this question to Navaan of Fairmont as well who introduced us, for the show.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Yeah. Solar solar is solar is a great way of generating electricity at scale. It's not a great way of generating electricity on an aircraft. The most common the most the highest endurance aircraft today is this, aircraft called the Zephyr. I forget how many days it's exactly flown for, but I think it's more than a month. It's somewhere between a month and two months, if I'm not wrong. But to put this into context, this is an aircraft that is that has 25 meters wingspan and can carry a five kilogram payload. A Gulfstream private jet that seats 13 people is 30 meters wingspan. Now what that means is you have to you have to just it's just very different technologies. It's so big. It's so expensive. And the other interesting thing that comes here is that solar planes just have to fly really high, which means that you can't use commercial scale technology. You can't use commercial scale sensors. You can't use commercial scale payloads because you are looking down for from tens of thousands of feet and trying to extract something meaningful out of that.

Dhruv Sharma: So maybe it's a little premature to ask this question, but in its end state, it appears to me that this the aircraft is gonna have a very, low heat, you know, signature, virtually none, eventually, and a very low sort of radar cross section. In other words, it's just gonna be undetectable. So and are you already starting to think of surveillance applications? How are you gonna maintain standoff distance from, you know, sort of enemy aircraft and so on and so forth?

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Yeah. I don't think we need to be stealth. I don't know if we can be stealth. That's what but I don't know if we need to be stealth where, like, there's this interesting concept called the panopticon. I have a really

Dhruv Sharma: good idea, which is just painted like an albatross and people may not even have a really good time. Sorry.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): No. Yeah. But,

Utsav Somani: are you a bird watcher, by the way? Correct. Is that now you got inspired for this company?

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): No. So it started with, there was this company that started in 2005 called Makani. They were building they were a Google X company. They were building these really giant aircraft, that would essentially harness energy from the wind and send it down on a tether. So they were essentially trying to build cheaper wind turbines. This is obviously before solar came up. When they shut down in 2019, the technology worked; the economics didn't. And they made a really long documentary on everything they learned and how the whole journey was. I saw that and I got inspired to be like, we should probably try that again.

Dhruv Sharma: If I'm gonna extend my joke any further, if I ever see a news item that says albatross is spotted near the Malabar Coast, we know that Samay was we know that Samay was testing all the quiet.

Utsav Somani: How did you get Lachy Groom to invest over a 30-minute call?

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Nava, it was really and then and then it wasn't really in my hands. I mean,

Utsav Somani: what was the pitch, basically? You showed him a video, you showed him, like, some product, or it was just, like, more high level stuff?

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): It was more high level. Basically, we basically talked about what the world looks like if we're able to build this. And, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of interesting things we can do. Clear surveillance, we can there's the grand vision for Anter is to essentially extend human agency offshore, where today, you have today, the only way you'd really go out is boats are, like, really large on the floating infrastructure that's super expensive. The most common destroyer in the US Navy is $17,000 an hour to run. When we bring that down with our technology down to single digit dollars or eventually tens of cents per hour, I think we will go through, like, a very SpaceX moment for the oceans where, obviously, we used to go to space before, but stuff used to be really exclusive, really exquisite. And because SpaceX has reduced the cost of launch so dramatically, you're able to see so many things emerge that you wouldn't otherwise. I think a very similar thing will happen when we're able to be offshore at ridiculously low costs.

Utsav Somani: So there any final closing? Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna ask a very general question, some of which is a lot of people, a lot of us up in in awe of, you know, you and Norman and and your friends, people who are very, very early, you know, very young rather, and with unbounded ambition. Where does this audacity come from and how you guys I mean, all of us remember what we were doing when we were 20, 21, 22. How do you guys spend time? What do you, you know, what do you talk about? How do you when you hang out, what do you guys do?

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): We play a lot of secret Hitler, but, but I don't think that has much to do with the audaciousness. Yeah. I I honestly don't know. My my gut says it has probably something to do with because not just us, but you see a very, like, fairly large class of really young founders. And what I think is fairly common is most of them really started what they were doing or started doing something productive usually around the COVID time. And if if I were to just extrapolate, I feel like it would and I'm thinking on the spot here, but it would probably come down to I think if you're isolated, you got a thing from first principles. And there's no, like, social limitations, at least for me. Because otherwise, if if, like, if you yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's it. I don't know. I got a lot of time to sort of play around during COVID, and I think that certainly helped.

Utsav Somani: That's why I think all the Nordic countries have, like, these great details because they're all I mean, the weather is so dark and dingy. They're, like, making this electronic music for themselves. I've always wondered that. But we'll have Kushi from Aspera Industries on our show as well, I think, next week. She will put out a good video.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): And at

Utsav Somani: some point, you have to put out a manifesto. I was listening to the vision and five Google X story. Number one, put out a very nice manifesto. I think it's time that you get, crystallizing with those thoughts as well, pen to paper. Yeah.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Thank you

Utsav Somani: so much for coming on our show, Samay. I think, this is fascinating and wishing you a very best ahead.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Oh, it's

Utsav Somani: very best. Awesome.

Samay Sanghvi (Alteon): Thanks for having me. Great to meet you. Bye bye.

Utsav Somani: Alright, listeners. That's it from us. Stream 133 ends here. Have a wonderful day ahead. We will see you on Friday for 134. Bye bye. Have a nice day.