Summary

Episode 93 features two founders. Siddhant Agarwal of SportVot (previously SportBot) has built India's leading grassroots sports live-streaming platform, having streamed over 500,000 matches across 35+ sports including Kabaddi, football, cricket, sailing, water polo and Sepak Takraw. The platform serves 70,000-80,000 Kabaddi athletes and has raised 30 crores. Kabaddi players discovered through SportVot have gone on to play Pro-Kabaddi, and IPL franchises use their data for scouting. Rohan Chaudhary of Rumik AI is building India's first AI companion app, ERA, with 1 million monthly active users generating 7-8 million conversations/day. Rumik focuses on human-like memory architecture (short and long-term), emotional companionship, and safety guardrails around self-harm, harm to others, and NSFW content.

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Happy Friday listeners, episode 93 of the Offline Network is streaming live and today Utsav and I are chatting with Siddhant Agarwal, who's the founder of a company called SportVote, like kind of like cricket shicket. But Siddhant, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome to the Offline Network.

Siddhant Agarwal (SportVot): Thanks for having me guys. Nice to be here.

Utsav Somani: Welcome to the show Siddhant. So you already sold the company before this Game Week in 2016 to Nazara and you wanted to become a sports founder again, what's made you choose the same field again?

Siddhant Agarwal (SportVot): I did not sell it to be honest. Nazara was kind enough to buy certain licenses off and it was just a friend of mine and me just building a game, basically. Most of our user base was from Africa and we did not know anything about that sort of a user persona, profile and we felt that I don't think we can do much beyond this.

Utsav Somani: What is your new company doing, Sportbot?

Siddhant Agarwal (SportVot): Yeah, it does a lot of things to be honest, today, we started as a talent discovery platform. Our intent to build Sportbot was to be a talent identification system for, or a platform rather for upcoming athletes. And from that, we felt that rather than capturing just pure numbers and numerical data on athletes, why don't we start capturing videos and from a video capture lens, we started building this whole video creation suite, which turned into a live video production software, which turned into a whole end-to-end live streaming solution today. So today, upcoming leagues, athletes find Sportbot as the mechanism to be able to tell or showcase their talent. Sportbot serves as a massive visibility platform for the 99% of sports that generally do not have any platform to broadcast or stream their games.

Siddhant Agarwal (SportVot): We've had about more than 70,000, 80,000 athletes of Kabaddi on our platform. And we can say that from our initial few days of streaming, we've had at least, I would say, 10 people today, 10 or 11 athletes that are playing in the highest league in India, which is the Pro-Kabaddi League.

Utsav Somani: So that brings me to our final closing question and congrats on the new race. You've raised 30 crores, so congrats on that milestone. So it shows that things are working. But tell us about the business. What's the scale? How many matches have you streamed?

Siddhant Agarwal (SportVot): Yes, so in our lifetime, we've now crossed five lakh matches, five hundred thousand. In terms of unit economics, our streaming packages start as low as one hundred rupees an hour and can go up to about two and a half, three thousand or even slightly more.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next segment. We've got Rohan joining us from RUMIC AI, RUMIC and Rohan. Welcome to the show.

Rohan Chaudhary (Rumik AI): Hey, what's up? Hi, good to see you.

Utsav Somani: Thank you for coming on our show. What does India's first AI sentient being mean?

Rohan Chaudhary (Rumik AI): We are building the most human AI, like now there is two things we can divide from this. First thing is we do the research side of things. So this entire concept of building the most human AI comes from this 1995 study of Picard called Effective Computing. Right. Because there is an AGI side of things where you build intelligence and there is emotion side of thing. That's that's pretty much called Effective Computing, called AC. That's on the research side. And then our consumer manifestation looks like a companion app called ERA that a million monthly users use on a monthly basis.

Rohan Chaudhary (Rumik AI): Companion is very different in this world because it doesn't fulfill a task that was defined like a product has to do a task. It is something that enables you to do something that you would not be able to do before. So this is the clear distinction that I see with assistants and companion.

Rohan Chaudhary (Rumik AI): So we have we have this feature where you have spent, let's say, more than we figure out when it becomes very unhealthy to use. And that's the time you just said, OK, I'm going to sleep and you also go to sleep and we'll talk tomorrow.

Utsav Somani: As a final parting question, Rohan, what is the scale of the business now?

Rohan Chaudhary (Rumik AI): So we are we are right now at one million monthly active users and we do approximately around seven, eight million conversations a day right now. And so that's the scale.