Summary

Episode 96 is a Friday three-guest special. Vedant Gupte of Trackk (formerly Trak) discusses building India's Gen Z investing app — goal-backward investing, opinion-based stock discovery, and 63% signup-to-Demat conversion (15-18x industry average) with 33,000 Demat accounts on AngelOne and now their own brokerage license. Investors: Lightspeed and Infoedge. Vinay Agastya of SeeThrough (Ctruh) presents their browser-native XR platform that converts flat product images into photorealistic 4K-8K 3D assets using their proprietary 3D engine (SVD texturing patent) and Versa AI — delivering 70-72% abandoned cart conversion for brands. 32 enterprise clients in India, US, and Middle East. Ajay Rao of Emiza shares the story of India's largest 100% variable 3PL warehousing network, serving 180+ D2C brands across 27 facilities with 1-1.5 lakh sq ft buildings, planning to scale to 75 facilities. Episode also features an India tech news segment: Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 launch and $65B raise at $965B valuation (surpassing OpenAI).

Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hello there listeners, happy Friday, we are streaming live. This is episode 96, today with Siv and I are chatting with Vedant, the very young and bright Vedant, who's building a company called Trak, which is Young India's investing app. Vedant, great to have you on the offline network.

Vedant Gupte (Trackk): Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Utsav Somani: Good to have you with us Vedant, thanks for bringing the young energy to the show. It's a Friday. So let's start off strong. How are Gen Z's investing? I mean, I thought Grow and Zerodha were catering for full stack, but you were 22 and you're building a young Gen Z led app, which is letting people invest. And how are they investing differently from somebody who's say 35 and using Zerodha, Grow and other brokers out there?

Vedant Gupte (Trackk): I think when we had started building Trak, I used to trade and invest in the markets when my 10th standard got over. And I remember chatting with my school friends, people that I know, and they were like, there are so many friction points that they were facing before taking the first trade. And I started speaking to them and started understanding that they want more context before entering an investment or a trade than the previous generation. The second thing that I realized was their investing pattern depends mostly on the goal that they are wanting to achieve. So it is more goal backward investing, where they firstly set up a goal that in the next six months, I want to, let's say, buy this certain shoe. And now what are the stocks that are helping me sort of buy that shoe?

Vedant Gupte (Trackk): So the two behaviors that we honestly picked up: the opinion behavior and the goal-based investing behavior. One of the example would be, let's say, would Durandar be a hit or flop? And on basis of what you answer, we end up showing you a stock with an insight. So let's say you say Durandar would be a hit. We would show you the stock, which is PBR, with an insight saying when Kabir Singh had hit the box office, PBR ended up going 5 to 10% up.

Vedant Gupte (Trackk): For the first three years, we built the entire product on top of AngelOne's APIs. But in terms of what changes is, we actually ended up getting our own brokerage license. We saw 63% people from signup to convert into a Demat account. From there we saw around about 50% people doing their first trade on the platform, which is 15 to 18x better than anyone in the industry. And we feel by this year end, we would be at anywhere between half a million to a million Demat accounts.

Utsav Somani: But let's do a quick readout of the news today. Anthropic came out very, very strong. Two big announcements from them. The first is the new flagship model, Cloud Opus 4.8, which they're pitching less on raw IQ and more on honesty. And the bigger headline is they raised 65 billion in fresh funding at 965 billion. So that's just shy of a trillion dollars and pushes Anthropic past OpenAI, which is sitting at 852 to become the most valuable startup in the world.

Utsav Somani: Alright listeners, moving on to our next guest. We've got Vinay. Vinay, welcome to the show.

Vinay Agastya (Ctruh): Right. So thanks for having me. See through is basically a browser native XR platform. So just to sort of give context, creating 3D virtual augmented or mixed reality experiences today is very hard. The time, effort and money it takes to sort of curate and deploy 3D or XR content today is very, very high. SeeThrough basically enables people to create 3D content and XR content with super ease without understanding anything around design code, etc. It's a completely new platform enabling brands and users to sort of curate 3D and XR content on the browser and deploy it on the browser.

Vinay Agastya (Ctruh): So imagine this like Shopify 3D on steroids. Once you integrate your catalog into the SeeThrough's ecosystem, we basically take a flat images and videos and start creating 3D assets of your products. We have something called WordSci. It's a foundational model of SeeThrough, which basically takes text, image and videos as input and converts them into 3D assets. We have close to 32 enterprise clients in India, US, and the Middle East. The conversion is more than 70%, 70 to 72% for most of the brands, especially the abandoned cart campaign. One thing is pretty clear, we are going to do away with photos and videos in the next couple of months or years.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. All right, listeners, moving on to our last segment, we've got Ajay of Amiza. Ajay, welcome to the show.

Ajay Rao (Emiza): Hi, nice to meet you both.

Utsav Somani: Good to have you on the show and thanks for being a friend of offline. So, 2015, you jumped ship from logistics and decided to enter the Indian warehousing industry. What was the challenge or the white space that you saw back in the day that you really wanted to solve with Amiza?

Ajay Rao (Emiza): Yeah, so I was, before I left and before I joined Amiza, I was in a 3PL and there we were basically doing warehousing for large enterprise, auto brands, chemical. And e-commerce was emerging at that point in time. And the white space we saw was that with e-commerce coming in, distribution was getting democratized. A small brand could reach an individual customer, which was never the case earlier. And that type of a business required a very, very different sort of a fulfillment platform to enable them.

Ajay Rao (Emiza): We are actually like an office or a WeWork of warehousing. A small brand can come in and start with just maybe 100 orders or 500 orders with one or two racks, whereas or maybe occupy 50% of the warehouse. And it's all completely variable. We are the only 3PL today in the country that's 100% operating on a variable and a multi-client model.

Ajay Rao (Emiza): So I think we definitely owning the asset has a huge advantage because that is the asset ownership. In an AI world where businesses are getting disrupted left, right and center, I think asset ownership is critical and that is what gives us our edge. We're going to continue to build assets out. I want to be at 75 facilities because to me, this is assets with recurring revenue.

Utsav Somani: All right, Ajay, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a wonderful weekend. Thank you. All right, listeners, that's it from us. We'll see you on Monday at four o'clock. Have a wonderful and a safe weekend. Bye bye.