Summary

Episode 91 features two founders. Anushka Sharma of Quenzy discusses building a functional prebiotic soda brand in India — zero added sugar, 5g prebiotic fibre per can, priced at Rs 99. Founded from personal IBS pain, Quenzy is 7-8 months old, selling 22,000 cans/month across Amazon, vending machines, corporate pantries and fitness spaces, with plans to launch on Instamart across Delhi/Gurgaon/Noida. Nakul Kelkar of Affogato AI (San Francisco-based, India team) discusses building a generative AI platform for brands to create ads, social media content and videos — serving 1.5M+ creators and businesses at $24-$250/month subscriptions. Affogato pioneered face-lock (character likeness consistency) and discusses AI content's future, the blurring line between AI-generated and real imagery, and how generative AI democratizes creative access.

Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: Anushka, welcome to the show. Before we begin, can you explain what a functional beverage is to our listeners?

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): Of course. So, functional beverage is practically your daily beverage but with added benefits in it for your body. So, it has to taste great. It is great for your body and so it's a much better alternative to your everyday drinks, sodas, the legacy drinks that you have.

Utsav Somani: So, would kombucha be in this category?

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): Definitely, kombucha is the functional beverage.

Utsav Somani: Is like a whey protein shake also in this category?

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): A whey protein shake? Yeah, for sure. Why not? I think it's just if any beverage has an added benefit to it, then it's a functional beverage. So, whey protein is definitely a functional beverage.

Dhruv Sharma: Is chaat a functional beverage, a good old-fashioned functional beverage?

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): No, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's been there in our culture for like yeah.

Utsav Somani: So, we tried, Dhruv and I tried getting your products on India, I mean our Delhi and Gurgaon quick commerce portals but we couldn't find it. So, hope to see you in Delhi soon.

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): I'm very soon. I think 30 days, I think June 14th we'll be live with Instamart across Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida. Yeah, and we're launching three other flavors which also will be live starting first week of July.

Utsav Somani: So, let's dial it back. Amazon, L'Oreal, that's your background and now you decide to launch Quenzy. So, how did you come about this idea?

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): Yeah, so it came from a personal pain point of my life. I've had IBS for as long as I can remember. So, I couldn't find healthy foods or gut friendly foods or drinks at all in my life. So, when I joined Google, I had to quit Google because of some personal reasons within 60 days and then this idea came to me that okay why not, why don't we start something that's from my own personal pain point. So, that was one reason but the other reason is also that the soda market in India is 13 billion dollars today. The healthy soda market alone is touching 1000 crores this year.

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): Probiotics are basically the live bacteria in your gut that help in digestion and prebiotics, which the soda has, is the food for the bacteria. So, prebiotics and probiotics have to exist in the stomach in symbiosis for a healthy gut. This has five grams of prebiotic fibre and everyday consumption of a human is about 30 grams. So, we provide about 17 percent in one can is what I believe, yeah.

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): In fact, yeah, we've run out of stock once in October last year. We sold all of the next batch in four months. We are again running out of stock this month. Raw material procurement has been hard because the quality.

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): Cucumber mint. This is one of our flavours, one of our best-selling flavours in Noida, actually. No added sugar, less than 15 calories, five grams of fibre and zero preservatives.

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): The MRP of each can is 99 today. Our operational MRP has been like roughly on an average we sell it at 85. Last month, we closed about 15,000 can sales just last month. This month, we're closing 22,000 cans of sale.

Anushka Sharma (Quenzy): Quench plus Gen Z, quenzy, that's how the name came. We went through all kinds of names. We went through Gutsy, Peppy, Kenz, whatnot, I think 83 names before we got here.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next segment. We've got Nakul from Afogato. Nakul, welcome to the show.

Nakul Kelkar (Affogato AI): Hey, what's up!

Utsav Somani: So at Afogato, we allow brands, agencies and marketers to create ads, social media content or any kind of pixels if you need them. We started with images, but we have slowly moved on to doing a lot more. And now we do videos and like we do finished videos using our agent, a lot of other bunch of stuff.

Nakul Kelkar (Affogato AI): Right. So we are we are not. OK, so you can think of the whole generative media, at least the video world into two segments. There are the ones which are editors. So you've taken pixels and like media that you have captured from cameras and then you cut them. And the other one is generative. So it's not reductive, it's additive.

Nakul Kelkar (Affogato AI): Right. So so we would be one of the first platforms to sort of like crack it. So we started pretty early in 2023 when the diffusion world like the so like AI world can be classified into like diffusion and LLMs. The world has like moved on from that spaghetti eating video of Will Smith, if you guys remember that, right? So the first thing that came to us was like unanimously from all the market was we cannot create a story if we cannot keep the character same.

Nakul Kelkar (Affogato AI): Pixels are pixels, right? I mean, like an image is an image. People discriminate pixels generated from AI a lot more than they should. I think people will start accepting the content at scale. I mean, like people are already starting to accept the content, to be honest with you.

Nakul Kelkar (Affogato AI): I think as long as technology empowers creatives to create more content, to create better content, to express themselves, I think that's all that matters, right? Ultimately, I mean, like this is where, this is like the good part of AI, right? I mean, people can now create YouTube channels who do not even have a camera, who do not even have like a decent mobile phone.

Utsav Somani: Okay. All right, listeners, that's it. Short and sweet from us today. We'll see you on Monday at four o'clock. Have a nice weekend. Thank you.