Utsav Somani: Alright, listeners. It's Wednesday, September 30. Today, I'm sitting here with Arihant and Dhruv. Arihant of WLDD. Let's welcome him, and then we'll do a quick introduction as well. Stream 145. Here we go. Hello. Arihant, welcome to TON. A special story here because your team designed TON. So I think it's, I mean, an honor to have you on the show. Big shout-out to Tanya from Imagined for helping us deliver this product and get this out to the world very, very quickly. I think they turned around in 30 days, and they understood the brief. And it was what you've been posting about as well, like, sort of this new media attempt, from our side.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Yeah.

Utsav Somani: And, they've done an exceptional job. We love the colors. We love the branding, and we love the brand language that they created for us. So kudos.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): We're honored to work on this.

Utsav Somani: We've seen. Imagined joined WLDD. So let's start with WLDD. What is WLDD? Is it a media company? Is it an agency? What is it? You run a lot of channels. You acquire companies. So give us a picture.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): So WLDD started off as a company to make quick money so that we can start a food business, but then, it turned out to become one of the largest content distribution and redistribution companies in the country. Over the last three years is when we really understood what we are doing. And we now, operate in the space of attention infrastructure. People spend close to three to four hours on Instagram and YouTube every day. Right? And brands are fighting for share of scroll. So we enable with our infra to help brands create as much share of scroll as possible on these platforms. We work today with the likes of an Amazon, OnePlus, ChatGPT, Netflix, Spotify, a couple of hundred companies right now. We're a team of 400. And, yeah, we are continuously building, aggressively scaling, and creating new formats altogether where brands are parking, the way they used to park money for television, radio, and everything. They now park for social attention, and that's what we are trying to do here.

Dhruv Sharma: Fantastic. Arihant, great to have you on The Offline Network. Can you speak about the first few brands you started working with, and how has that journey evolved from there?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): So we started working with Xiaomi. It was our first client. They still are our clients, so it's been eight and a half years of, retention of this client. And we grew massively, from word-of-mouth. But that year, I'm sure y'all might have watched Mirzapur, the TV show. Right? And, that year, we did memes for it, and the show blew up. And that show blowing up did all the marketing for us. Everyone was like, who did. Who made this viral? And there was one name that was WLDD, which was thrown across counters. And, yeah, that's how we started scaling. That's how we started understanding. I was 22 at that time. This is my first company. I had just quit college and was learning these things. So learned how to do HR, learned how to do build teams, learned how marketing works because I come from a small, city of Belgaum. So I didn't know anything. And the first five years went into just figuring out things. And last three years is when we started scaling.

Utsav Somani: So you mentioned a phrase attention infrastructure. That's fairly interesting. So talk to us a little bit about that. So you run close to 60 channels, and why not, rent to creators or partner with creators versus just doing it all at your own, end?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Yeah. So very interesting. We actually do everything. You know, we work with close to 1 lakh creators. We work with 1 lakh clippers, and we run our own a couple of hundred channels in house. Right? And what we. What I mean by attention infrastructure is, for example, you run a YouTube, a YouTube show, a live show. Right? But you need a complete infra on how the start and the end can happen continuously. Right? So we believe that brands will need complete infrastructure, owned media, partnered media, sponsored media. Right? And all of this coming together in a seamless, synchronized manner that can achieve different parts and different goals of a brand is the attention infrastructure. So TON does one part of your job. Your LinkedIn does another part of your job. And when this all comes together, we believe the infra is formed. Surprisingly, India is not thinking too much about attention infra, but I believe, the. What TikTok did in America, the entire live commerce, entire, social commerce, that entire element coming back to the country, back to India via Instagram and everything, people will start building these infrastructures, and we will be the first ones to build it for them.

Dhruv Sharma: Speak to us about something very interesting on your website, Arihant, which is, you say that, you can give brands something that traditional media never could, which is relevance in culture. Correct.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Yeah. So, what the difference here is traditional media is only a one way stream. You only consume it. You don't interact with it. You don't really share it. You don't really, relate with it. Plus to find something, that you have seen earlier and see its threats, that also becomes difficult. In the world of social, you know, I can create a series of, events. Right? A series, of the way that has to be consumed by multiple different facets. For example, someone in Karnataka should be consuming the content in a different dialect and a different form. And someone in Gujarat should be consuming that content in a different dialect and a different form, but the culture can be the same. I might use the same Gujarati music to put those content pieces out. And that's how you can play. You can interact in many more ways, than how traditional media earlier interacted with the audience. Today, there are so many formats to continuously interact with the audience and keep them hooked, keep. Make them the messengers. We like to make the audience our messengers, and that's where the word memetics comes from, where people share the content on their own without any pressure. So we do that.

Utsav Somani: I think we lost you there for a second. But, so you have to tell me more about the clipping economy. When we started, we read a lot about how clips have hooks, how they are engaging, how they keep people. I mean, that attention economy, but, like, distilled down to these very basic units called clips.

Dhruv Sharma: Correct. So

Utsav Somani: talk to us a little bit about this clicking. Clipping economy, how do you work with clippers, and how can we as to and improve, our clips as well. So promise now, yeah, be those clips for now. We have next week.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Percent. So, you know, Instagram today is a place which has three different course. Core number one is friends and family. These are the people that we follow, and we want to see their posts and everything. Core number two is influencers and celebrities. We might have followed them for some reason. They might be relevant. They might not be relevant. Their movie might be coming. Their, league might be happening. This score number three, which is 90% of social media, is clipping channels, is faceless pages, is this entire engine showing us content that is already produced by someone else. Right? So that is where people are. So if someone spends one hour a day, out of which for 54 minutes is going for this economy. Right? And that's where everything happens. That's where that's where we see a Palantir news coming on our feed. That's where we see, Ather's, live, of their new scooter launch come randomly on our feed. And that's where this clip that we are talking about, this might become one of those clips that will get populated from a random channel called attention media one two three. So clipping is a way to capture this 54 minutes strategically on Instagram and YouTube as a platform in the country. I hope I answered it in the most easiest way. No.

Utsav Somani: No. I think it's, perfect. And, I mean. But people are looking for mirch masala. Right? How can TON do our clipping better? Like, if you were to give us one piece of advice.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): I think TON should not do the because people are also looking at intellectual work. Right? So the moment you create 10 channels and do the intellectual stuff on those channels, people will start following, and people will start getting engaged. Because I know that I can I can derive my intended output from these channels every day? So automatically we get into it. It can happen without the as well is the thought. Yeah. But, of course, like, how Nikhil Kamath podcast blew up was not but was a fact that Rameshwaram Cafe is make. Is cutting these many bills every day, and this might be their potential revenue. And that news became viral in the country. And the source of that news was WTF. So similarly, one random day, a guest might come and spill a bean on your show that can become clippable. And then because of that clipping can become news, and there will be multiple ways of redistribution of that content. So we have to just wait for that day.

Dhruv Sharma: You're saying be restrained six days of the week, and on one day, just, you know, use shock and all. Very interesting. Arihant, I have a question about. So we've been talking about the attention economy, attention infrastructure. Now for a lot of founders, let's ask this question and answer it for them. For a lot of founders whose companies, whose products depend on, you know, the distribution, the GTM, the monetization that will come from being very tightly coupled to the attention economy, how would you actually segment the attention economy? You know, for the Rio economy, the Internet economy, Sudip has is often cited India one, India two framing. For the attention economy, how do tastes, you know, consumer preferences, purchasing power, etcetera, how does it vary when you move from one part of the country to another and so on?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): So I think it is the most difficult in the attention economy. Right? Because, I don't know what is happening in Delhi. Right? I don't know what the culture is like. I don't know what the content is like. Right? And because we are not so earlier, pre three years back, we were in the era where. Of the followed era. We used to get content where we followed. Today, we are in the algorithmic era. We are into interest based, algorithm. Instagram and YouTube shows us what we like. So it is so difficult to tap into new audiences using attention. But there are ways. There are tricks. Right? Sometimes a format can be a breakthrough to a new audience. Sometimes a new channel can be breakthrough to a new audience. Right? So this is actually one of the most complicated and a wild question, which will take 40–45 minutes for me to really break down the world of attention, really break down the world of how Indians consume social media content, how a celebrity consumes social media content, how a person with more than ₹5 crore of annual income, watches content, how a person with ₹30,000 per month and, income consumes content. It is a different world, and that's why I believe it is going to be. When I say attention infrastructure, the infrastructure then enables this different pockets to consume that content in the right way and then convert.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. And you've done a bunch of in. I mean, acquisitions and investments in quick succession. So ScoopWhoop, Imagined, and a sneaker brand as well. What's the common thread between all of them?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): So the common thread is ScoopWhoop for culture, relevance, and brand. Imagined so that we have our own tech and design capabilities. 7-10 to understand the consumer finally. Right? And we. Using all these leverages, we raised our second round where we now use all our data thesis and our understanding now to give it to the larger audiences and larger brands that we have, on how attention converts. The entire idea is how attention converts, where it converts, why it converts. Thesis over the last eighteen, twenty months.

Dhruv Sharma: Like, in the attention economy or maybe in the social media game, what is the social media game. In the social media game, what is the one thing you really want, you know, to see exist? And before you answer that question, you know, it's even I haven't been to Belgaum, but we were once in Bengaluru treated to the delicious food you have in, you know, North Karnataka. Also, you remember the. I think it was September, October 22.

Utsav Somani: Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: And we. So. Yes.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): It is beautiful. The food is amazing. Really? And I will come to. Maybe after this, if we have a minute, I'll come to the food very interesting because it can be your breakout reel. But on your question, what I would like to see is how we see a mandate of WPP wins a ₹₹500 crore mandate, for Netflix. It's it's won by Dentsu recently. Right? We believe that there will be an attention mandate where a brand will hand over ₹₹50 crore, ₹₹100 crore attention mandates to companies like us, and that is something like. Because that is in my favor. I would like to see something like that. Coming to the food, there is a new place called Kapibar in Mumbai. Right? It's close to 100 square feet doing ₹18–20 lakh revenue per month. Line of 20 odd people in the audience, in the, in the driveway there. And, yeah, these are the places that are blowing up.

Dhruv Sharma: In the Yeah. Animal Capybara, there was a very catchy earbud also song that had gone viral, like, a year ago. Alright. Yeah. Thanks for that. Thanks for the recommendation. Also, back to you.

Utsav Somani: Tell us about solo and The LIT School. Those are two different verticals within the business also.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Actually, solo is part of WLDDT. Solo is our creative partnership app where there are creators and brands, and creators can, apply to the brands of their choice like LinkedIn and then work with them. The LIT School is our creator first college. We teach content marketing and entrepreneurship. It is in lines of a Mesa and masters union. We currently were. Operated of a 50,000 square feet building in Bengaluru. We plan to expand it to, five more cities in the next three years. We believe there's a massive space in new education, because education has to be experiential and challenge based rather than classes and exams. And. Yeah. And that's why we also have The LIT School.

Dhruv Sharma: Fantastic. While we while we have you here, Arihant, we have to obviously, ask you about memes. You know, there used to be that old saying that pictures speak louder than thousand words or some such thing.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Interesting. Have that meme dealer. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: The great thing about memes is excuse me, picture, pay words, like, you know, then suddenly, those two things coming together make them so culturally relevant, and, you know, they can just say so much without saying, you know, too much. What has your experience with memes been like? Like, what do people really like? Sometimes, can you even. Can you predict what's gonna, you know, what people are gonna take fancy to?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Memes are always spray and pray.

Utsav Somani: Pray. Yeah.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): We need to keep. We need to put a hell lot of them outside, and some things kick, some things don't. Sometimes we work one day on a meme, and it doesn't click. But something that is made in 30 seconds goes viral. Ministers and celebrities are retweeting it. So the world is very, very variant. There's a high variance out there in what clicks and what doesn't.

Dhruv Sharma: So you have to tell your meme dealers to keep them coming, basically.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Yeah. We have a meme platform now. It's called meme. There are a couple of lakh users on the platform, and they are our meme dealers now. They supply the memes.

Utsav Somani: And are you dealing memes for any famous personalities without naming any names?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): We stopped personality business one and a half year back. Yeah. Because..

Utsav Somani: Has been posting quite actively. But, I mean, tell us about crisis management. In social media, I think a lot of the Gen Z, folks and employees and colleagues end up taking a lot of risks sometimes or want to take a lot of risks. But, say, us millennials, which do not want to. Right? Or we're just risk averse or risk off. So crisis management in comms or something going wrong, like, how do you handle it? And how should a customer of yours handle it?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Yeah. I think crisis management has two different legs. One is crisis on social, and versus one is crisis that has happened in Rio that is translated on social. Okay. So, the second part is now fairly avoided, the crisis on social. Earlier, I remember we used to work with OnePlus, and, a teammate of mine tweeted from an iPhone. So that was crisis on social that gave us sleepless nights and. But then we learned how to avoid these kinds of things. But today, crisis that happened in Rio life, get 100 x on social. Very difficult to tame them down. So it is. At the end of the day, that is the PR side of the world. We don't really dabble into that much. But, yeah, social media is a wildfire. You never know what happens.

Dhruv Sharma: You know, one thing that's super relevant to start ups is these, incredibly well made and, I believe, very expensive launch videos, Arihant. Likewise, are you guys working on those yourself, like, your point of view?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): We actually don't make launch videos. We make them viral.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Right?

Utsav Somani: Yeah.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): So, we work with a lot of people who make their launch videos and then use our distribution network to make them trending. So sometimes a launch video works by itself if the video is very cool. Like, you know, the first launch video was actually Dollar Shave Club. Yeah. Payback in time. Right?

Dhruv Sharma: So take us behind the scenes. Like, what does it take to, you know, take one of these launch videos viral?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Have you. You're talking

Dhruv Sharma: to a science is maybe the question here.

Utsav Somani: I read that most of it is not science. It's actually just money, basically just getting all these Twitter people, personalities to hype up.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): It is actually science plus money. Science is

Utsav Somani: I mean, it was cool when Dollar Shave Club did it for the first time and then maybe some of the first few ones. But now everyone is doing a launch video, so I don't think there's, like, a wow factor left anymore.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Fair enough. But, you know, did you see the recent video by m, the new kitchen startup from Bengaluru?

Utsav Somani: Apparently, that went viral. But whenever I see a video, I just, like, skip, I don't know through. Is that a tendency that you also follow?

Dhruv Sharma: Are you asking me yourself?

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Yeah. No. I have similar tendencies. Skip, man. Like.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. Yeah.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): No. Possibly. I don't have a lot to say there. But I believe it is science plus cash. Science, what video. Even after we put the monies behind it, what video will stick and have a replication factor behind it? Because if it doesn't have that, no matter. No amount of money can actually make a video viral.

Utsav Somani: So. Interesting. What are. Like, one, two things, like, in that video which were working in your opinion?

Arihant Jain (WLDD): In m, I think the entire Bengaluru vibe, the entire, leaving the. You know, the. It was very unhinged. The entire video was unhinged. It was unpolished. It had it had, cuss words. It was talking to. Talking in the general audience segments. It had name throwing around in the video, and that really struck. In fact, I ended up signing up for the platform. I didn't get in. That's separate. But, yeah, that video worked very well for me.

Utsav Somani: And m is one of those, I think the personal assistants, I think, or home manager, digital home managers

Arihant Jain (WLDD): or They manage your kitchen, not home. Only kitchen completely. The food, the fridge, the cooking. Yeah. I think a bunch of things. They ensure that we don't have to enter our kitchens anymore.

Utsav Somani: As a final one. Yeah. Sorry.

Dhruv Sharma: I already started the final closing question. That's a.

Utsav Somani: Many, many, many, many,

Dhruv Sharma: many, many, many, many, many. I wanted to ask, how do you stay ahead of trends? Like, you know, how do you do that? And at this point in time, are there channels, creators, even social media managers who are, you know, very underrated? But you were. You're keeping an eye on them. Feel free to give them a shout out. Maybe we get to follow and learn from them as well.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Yeah. So we have an entire engine built around this. Our. My average age at my company is 23. They're all social

Dhruv Sharma: upload. Screen time.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Screen time. Screen time.

Dhruv Sharma: Screen time.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Screen time.

Dhruv Sharma: Oh, no.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Social media time.

Dhruv Sharma: A visual detox break complete.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): We do. We try to tell. But people, you know, they're just hooked to the screen. And, on the platform, they end up finding. So we have bunch of groups and automated systems where once the creator goes into that group, it comes to our dashboard. We start understanding why this works, why it doesn't work, which are the segments that we can partner up with on. And the best way. It's like, you know, It's like that. A lot of people know which creator will click and what content with this creator will click.

Utsav Somani: As a final one, while we wait for our guest to join back in, you mentioned that AI ads and GEO is the next, big thing. So talk to us about those things.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): GEO. Ads, I don't. I believe AI ads are good. They're fun. But GEO is where the game is. Right? And I didn't know this. But I'm a person. I'm a very technologically backward person. Person. I don't understand a lot of tech. But when I was in Mumbai and I used Instinct to book a barber for me, right, it made a booking. It did everything on its own. It found the best barber in Bandra, and I went there without seeing anything because I thought Instick just did the job for me. And that's when I believe that people like me and a lot more people are going to ask a hell lot of questions to all the platforms. So GEO is going to be the most important and as. And then always on engine for brands. Because without GEO, they will be lost in the world of AI.

Utsav Somani: Alright, Arihant. Thank you so much for joining us.

Arihant Jain (WLDD): Thank you so much.

Utsav Somani: For joining.

Dhruv Sharma: Thank you

Arihant Jain (WLDD): so much for having me.

Utsav Somani: Bye. Alright, listeners. Moving on to our next guest. We've got Ankur of Rio, who's just announced a round and coming to share his story with us. Ankur, welcome to TON.

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): Hey, guys. Thanks for having me here. Thanks,. Thanks, Dhruv. Love to be on the show.

Utsav Somani: Glad that, Boris connected us yesterday. He led your recent round as well, so congrats on the milestone. Tell us what Rio is doing now.

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): So, Rio is basically quick commerce for medicines, as simple as that. And, at Rio Health, we are building. Just give me a sec. So at Rio Health, we are building pharmacy dark stores. And Delhi NCR is our first market that we're targeting. So our motto is very simple. Speed and fulfillment are the two pillars that we're building Rio on. And by speed, I mean, we deliver within 20 minutes. And by fulfillment, we stock up 20,000 SKUs. So we want to bring reliability to users where we say that whenever you need any medicines, you can simply put it on Rio, and you will get it within 20 minutes.

Dhruv Sharma: Fantastic. I think you're finally putting quick commerce to the one use case that it should have been, you know, solving in the first place. Great stuff. Ankur, what about prescription medication. Like, I mean, the obvious question. Right? What about prescription medication, which is gonna form a bulk of what people end up ordering? What's the process like?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): So, see, majority of what we deal into is also prescription medicines itself. And, in India, there are, regulations around it, and the way that you need to operate is that you need valid prescriptions and the methods to validate that. So we have doctors and, AI systems in place to validate the prescription and accordingly, you know, send medicines with certain restrictions on NRX medicines, which we don't deal in as you are not allowed to sell those online.

Utsav Somani: But, I mean, so what are the other restrictions? Because why wasn't this done earlier? Like, what Dhruv said that this is the most obvious useful use case of, quick commerce. Right? Correct. So why wasn't it done earlier? Were regulations the blocker? Were some. Was something else the blocker?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): No. Not exactly. See, I'll tell you how we think about it. So as per us, I think there are two categories which are natively quick commerce even before quick commerce existed. So one is grocery and one is pharmacy. And why I say so is if you look around yourself, everywhere in India, you will find a grocery store and a pharmacy store. So there are around 10 million grocery stores and 1 million pharmacy stores. And even before Blinkit, Zepto, kind of, were born, we and you and everyone were getting either their groceries or medicines within half an hour, one hour, or say two hours. We were not dependent on next day or two day of deliveries. And when quick commerce began, they. So, like, what they did was they took the product to 10 x better experience. So consistent deliveries, faster deliveries with amazing assortments. That is what they built. And I think the same, principles we are using to build Rio And the main idea behind this is that in India, people don't like to plan. And when it comes to medicines itself, see, it is divided into two categories, acute and chronic. And also as you asked, earlier, of the of ePharma kind of focused on chronic medications. Where their thought process was that people will order their monthly medications and plan it and order for two, three months in bulk. So you can deliver those in 3–5 days and build the whole business around pricing. But if you talk to customers, I think the behavior is very different. See, the acute patients, if you have fever, if you have headache, if you have viral, you go to a doctor and you need your medicines now. And even for chronic patients, say somebody has BP, somebody has sugar. Typically, how people deal with their medicines is that for them, it's a regular activity. And when my strip is about to get over, I simply, you know, call my neighborhood pharmacist and get it delivered within an hour or so. So very rarely people plan, and that is why the online penetration of medicines was in the low single digits. What we are changing at Rio is that you need. Don't need to plan anything. Whether you are an acute patient, whether you are a chronic patient, whether you are you are looking for, say, wellness products, nutraceuticals, protein, anything. Anything health related, you get in 20 minutes.

Dhruv Sharma: And from 8 AM to 1 AM?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): 1 AM. Yeah. Correct.

Dhruv Sharma: I had a. I'm no shade to anyone, but I had a different question for the, answer to the question that it's the vast horizontal quick-commerce players. They were, like, snacks. But. No. No. But serious question for you, Ankur, and that joke was for us. You know, with. When you look at the backside of medications, a lot of them will say, you know, store away from direct sunlight. And I'm I'm assuming there are lots of different storage conditions that you have catered to. So take us behind the scenes. I know you can't, like, just take your camera with you, but maybe paint a picture. What is the. What is, you know, the warehouse or, you know, the storage facility look like? What precautions are you taking? Is there refrigeration, cooling, so on and so forth?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): So our, warehouses are completely different, from a typical quick commerce warehouse, because of two reasons. A, medicines are sensitive products here. And as you rightly said, there are multiple, you know, guidelines and precautions that you need to take when you're dealing with medications. So there are medications that you have to store at certain temperatures. So we have full built-in systems to monitor those temperatures and make sure that there are backups available so that the medicines are always stored at that temperature. Plus, even during deliveries, we keep those temperature consistent by using ice boxes and similar packaging so that when the medicines are being delivered as well, there are no temperature variations so that the effectiveness of medicines don't change. The second is in terms of the packaging. So you need to be very consistent about the packaging and how the handling works. So there can't be, you know, rough handling of medications. So that is also something. So at our picking packing stations, we have given, like, a 30 seconds to a one minute breather to our packers so that they're able to handle those medications perfectly. And the third and the most important thing is batch and expiry tracking. So, for FMCG, you do not need to do that. So when you are billing, say, an FMCG product, you can simply scan a QR code and bill it. But in medicines, you need to keep track of the batch and expiry to the distributor chain itself so that when I am sending you meds, I can prove that it comes from a valid manufacturer and a valid distributor, and the medicines are genuine.

Utsav Somani: But even FMCG may track Twitter thread where somebody's got an expired mail called, like, a cockroach and something.

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): And that is why, you know, it's, difficult to deal in medicines. Actually, you know, setting up those operations are very, very hard. So, for example, traditionally, with specific batch number and expiry. And when they were, you know, punching them out, they used to scan those QR codes. Not that. Process is very labor oriented or more time consuming, and it's difficult to maintain. What we have done is somewhere, and since now, we have elements in hand or AI use system Every time my packer is packing medicines, he takes photo of those strips. And we use LLMs to extract batch and expiry so that we know what exact batch and expiry is delivered to the customer. And then we maintain fee for accordingly. So that is pretty much in Rio time that we do, and that is how, you know, we, avoid sending you expired medicines. So you want an expiry which is, like, say, 12 months, 15 months down the line. So if something is even near to expiry, we don't dispense that.

Utsav Somani: Tell us two other things, that you're proud of as a team, while building Rio. Any two other innovations in this whole cycle of delivering, medicines via quick commerce?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): So the biggest innovation I think that we are and, obviously, we are in process of doing this is assortment. So we have been able to cater to a right assortment of delivering medicines. See, both are. If you, you know, place orders to other place as well, typically, but then you will get the deliveries either in one to two hours or next day. We are kind of innovating the assortment in a way where we know the therapeutic profiles of the customers and doctors prescribe. See, in India, doctors prescribe you brands, not molecules, like, which is very different from US. If you go to US, doctors will prescribe you molecules. There are no brands out there. In India, that's not the case. And people have an affinity to simply buy what the doctors have prescribed. I simply don't want to swap. So you need to know what area you are operating in or what area doctors prescribe. Like, a doctor prescribing a medicine in Jaipur would be very different from somebody in Gurgaon, would be very different from somebody in Bengaluru. So you need to build that intelligence, and that's what we're working on. And which enables us to deliver, like, eight to nine orders within 20 minutes. Assortment. In medicines, I think, fulfillment is an, more important metric. And then comes speed. Speed is the second metric. If I don't have the right medicines,

Dhruv Sharma: Talk to us about the growth and expansion plan, Ankur, because, you're also going against a system that is somewhat entrenched at this point. Pretty much every apartment complex. You said, Gurgaon, everyone has their local pharmacy. People have been buying medicines. Obviously, the. And so what will it. What do you think it will take to, you know, grow at a pace that you want to at this stage?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): See, I think, as a category, if you look at medicines, I think, say five years down the line, and that is my thesis, I believe that it could be a category with the highest online penetration. So for example, as of now, that position is taken by mobiles. And, I think, five I guess, down the line, medicines would be the top category. And the very simple reason is the few learnings that we have is, a, going to a pharmacy is a negative experience. You would want to be near them rather than going out and buying medicines. And any which ways, medicine is a commodity product. We value add. See, nobody. There is no touch and feel. There is no try. Nothing like that. So it's the most suited product for delivery. The second thing is that the behavior is same across age groups or TGs or purchasing power. See, all three of us, if we go to a doctor and a doctor writes a scalpel, we simply go out there and buy it. Nobody is looking for 10 variations or 10 different antibiotics and then buying one. So if played right, I think it would be one of the highest penetrated categories and that is where we are coming from. So, like, if I put certain numbers, I think the LINCR is one fifty to 200 or dark store market, which is, like, 3 to 4,000 crores in itself. And if you look at top 10 metros, I think the market is around 15 to 20,000 crores with, like, 800 to thousand odd dark stores that you can set up. So that is what our target is in the next one year. We are eyeing somewhere between $1.50 to 200 crores of one rate for which we have raised the current round.

Utsav Somani: Amazing. True.

Dhruv Sharma: I don't know. I was just, I was just thinking, maybe on. With groceries, etcetera, people still miss that time when you go walk down the aisle and, you know, good old days, etcetera. I don't think anyone misses their run to the pharmacy. And pharmacists I think they have super immunity. Anytime I've gone as a healthy individual to bring back medicines, the return gift is some infection that I didn't

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): have in the purpose. So I love this. And, Drew, interestingly pharmacy they still operate on a counter mode. Every other category has switched to an ideal model. Only pharmacy prescription

Utsav Somani: pharmacy prescription we need any WhatsApp

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): Correct. This

Utsav Somani: thing. So that I think is self prescription in India is a big problem. Like, I think we're running into a situation where antibiotics and antiviral medicines will stop working.

Dhruv Sharma: Yes. Yeah.

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): That's that's a lot of abuse, and we also keep track of that. Yeah. So for example, in our systems, we make sure that we are not dispensing the same medicine above the required time to the same individual. So, like, we have developed certain checks. Same the way certain frequencies which is not prescribed as per doctors. We won't dispense the medicines to you. So, yeah, I think as an individual as well, there are lot of cases. So my, dad is a doctor, and I come from a family of doctors. So every. I was the first engineer in my family. Everyone before me was a doctor. So I have seen such cases, and, we have been very particular in, you know, using medicines ourselves. So, yeah, you're right. I think that should not be done.

Utsav Somani: And the other thing. I mean, your numbers are very good. Like, 600 to 800 AOVs and, 80% repeat usage. Tell us a little bit about how the unit economics of e, medicine delivery service work versus a quick commerce for grocery. Are they different?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): Yeah. They are different. Actually, there are two, three things. One is essentially AOVs are naturally high in medicines. So what simple reason? I'm either buying a prescription. Just maybe three four medications as written by the doctor. Or typically I'm buying for one, two, three weeks of my regular medications. So the AOVs are naturally high. Gross three, I'll take it out. So there, they have to fight or they have to develop systems, like, for example, minimum order, delivery charges, and all of that to push AOVs. Despite that, the AOVs are in the 600, 700 zone. And once we start to do that, I think it can climb even higher. Margins. Even in branded medications, it's a 35% margin category. Gross margins. And if you look at generics or private label or nutraceutical wellness products, the margins are even higher. So, as a ballpark figure, I think it's 35 to 40% versus, say, grocery, which are in the 15% zone. So, essentially, in quick commerce, see, you have one consistent cost, which is the cost of delivery. Whether you deliver a 50 rupees order or a 500 rupees order or 5,000 rupees order, that 30 to $40, you will always have to incur. And therein, I think medicines have an advantage because of those higher a. We saw, like, at $708,100 bucks.

Utsav Somani: It's used space to play around in c m one, c m two.

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): Correct. So you will get a healthy c m one with. At around $200, and then you can work your way down from there.

Dhruv Sharma: Fantastic. You're also fresh from a raise. Autonomous drone

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): deliveries Yeah. Autonomous drone delivery. I think, the market is not ready for that. I think regulations and all, are yet to come to have, like, to make it commercially viable, but I think, unusual spikes. So like in grocery, spike Obviously, the orders will spike. Medicines, that is not the case. So we get a consistent flow of orders, and that is why we have been able to optimize our delivery cost better. So, like, being, such an early stage, we are, like, at our first dark store, we are around $45.50 bucks of delivery fees. So that's an advantage in medicine. And then we'll definitely try that out here.

Utsav Somani: Ankur, thank you so much for coming on our show. What's next for you?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): So, target is very good.

Utsav Somani: On calls. I mean, doctor on call will also work. Right?

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): I don't know yet. I am very focused on medicines as of now. The simple target is to become the biggest player in Delhi NCR, and that's what we are focusing on in the next twelve to eighteen months.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on our show and doing this good service.

Ankur Agrawal (Rio Health): Thanks, Pratav. Thanks, Ruf, for having me here. It's a great talking to you guys.

Utsav Somani: Likewise. Alright, Dhruv. You and me, let's talk about some news. Lots been happening. I think the last time we spoke about personal agents and stuff, we were discussing news and seems like world listed in just ten days. But before we talk about news, have you seen this?

Dhruv Sharma: This declaration, have you seen, if it's possible, like, very, President Trump's signature, what is that?

Utsav Somani: Unite States signatures or a simple spell check

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. I think we're okay.

Utsav Somani: Basically. Alright. Talk to me about this. This is now my new favorite wallpaper.

Dhruv Sharma: Have you. You've changed your wallpaper? I hope.

Utsav Somani: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool stuff. How is this? Unreal.

Dhruv Sharma: Unreal. Exactly. So this is Starship flight 14. It's. The picture is clicked at Starbase, which is in Texas. Boca Chica is the name of the place. This is the first orbital flight, and so. And you'll see two stages over there. So if you if you sort of zoom in, you'll see the upper stage, the black one, and then, you know, the booster, which is the second stage. So the original flight time, I think, a flight plan for this was to go up there and do things for about ten hours. It had to be cut short to three hours because there were a couple of issues with some of the Raptor engines, etcetera, but it still came back safely. The, you know, the deopening was took place by the book. This time, they didn't do that. They didn't catch it with the chopsticks. They did a ocean splashdown. I believe originally, it was supposed to splashdown somewhere, and the upper State was supposed to splashdown somewhere near Chile, but then eventually, because the flight plan itself changed somewhere in Hawaii, etcetera. And, while in orbit, they obviously, you know, they

Utsav Somani: This is the first paid flight. Like, I mean, they made revenue from this.

Dhruv Sharma: They made, yes, first orbital paid flight, and they released a payload of some 26, Starlink v three satellites. So, yes, a lot of compute up in space. And the one thing I was reading, but I'm. I definitely wanna read more about this is this is also something that is, you know, in the in the run up to the Artemis mission, which is The US again putting humans back on the moon. And so they'll have orbital depots and just, like, you know, you do mid air refueling, they'll be doing in orbit refueling, etcetera. So that was also in the test plan, and, yeah, I think that's a very quick summary of what went down.

Utsav Somani: And that's what is exciting about SpaceX business. Like, they're launch business that they can be their own customer. The Starlink generates more revenue than the launch business now, and, that's what some of the startups that we've hosted. And many of the investors as well we've hosted have mentioned that, they want the Indian government and Indian businesses also to be a big buyer of these, services that these companies are gonna create as capacity.

Dhruv Sharma: When you're doing, you know, very risky, you know, something that's super risky may work, may not work, but it's still very capital intensive. You won't guarantee demand, at the end of it. And that's why, you know, maybe your anchor buyers, again, gotta be the government because they wanna promote. So it's not just investing in you, but also buying from you so that both ends of the equation are balanced.

Utsav Somani: No. No. Fascinating. And, we had Niraj from Astrobase as well come and speak about, I mean, FFSC engines and, Raptor, Kebab, that's literally gonna be the. I think the third. I mean, we're the third country to have it. Russia didn't, use this. Talking about massive numbers to. Like, this is insane. 4,600,000,000 in revenue last year and a net loss of 42,000,000,000, which includes, of course, their CapEx and everything. So operational loss of 8,060,000,000, but they've already hit approximately 22,000,000,000 in revenue in the last quarter. So it's not looking all bad. Yeah. Yeah. '96. So numbers are really, really looking great for them. They're hitting the market, apparently, for an IPO later this year. This is. These are all leaked numbers. This is not a public filing, and OpenAI is also delaying their IPO. Now they're doing a pre IPO raise of 30,000,000,000. Yeah. At some 1,400,000,000,000 valuation. So there's lot of action in these, yeah, apps.

Dhruv Sharma: Has delayed their IPO by, you know, in debt..

Utsav Somani: Has also delayed their IPO.

Dhruv Sharma: So everyone's. I don't

Utsav Somani: know. Conditions.

Dhruv Sharma: People are getting cold feet. Again, market conditions. But.

Utsav Somani: There is only so much. Like, I mean, I read a statistic that if you were. If you joined open. Anthropic even two years earlier, like, from not. As of today, you would have stock worth 100,000,000. Imagined the kind of liquidity that's gonna get unlocked if this thing hits the market. Like, SF, everything is expensive now. This is gonna take it to the stratosphere, basically. SpaceX flight. Apple Pay is now in India. Today, I think Twitter's been talking about it. It's only live with Axis Bank. I think one thing to note is. I read a good note on this on why this is not live with other banks because it seems like such an obvious simple thing to do. Of course, this is very geared up for the tier one audiences. Apple still has a 22% market share for smartphones in India. But, typically, banks, or the card issuers end up getting approximately point four to point 5% of the total MDR or the total transaction value, basically. And what Apple wants as a nonnegotiable fee is point two of that. So, basically, half of what banks are getting, they have to share with Apple if they wanna enable Apple Pay. So Axis Bank was the first one to buy it. It took twelve years for Apple Pay to come to India after, announcing it to the world and people loving the service globally. It's a super safe, secure way. You don't have to share anything. And, it's finally come to India, but Axis Bank is the first one. Apparently, HSBC is gonna be the next one, and, hopefully, HDFC and others to follow. I don't know if you've tried it, but do give it a try.

Dhruv Sharma: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I

Utsav Somani: remember.. Agent.

Dhruv Sharma: That's something with Goldman as well. There was a there was a. I wonder what became of that, but Apple and Goldman had come together to, you know, do.

Utsav Somani: The partnership didn't last. Partnership didn't last. They offloaded that card, to somebody else.

Dhruv Sharma: Somebody else. Yes.

Utsav Somani: Dot some open AI card?

Dhruv Sharma: Asha, the personal agent race.

Utsav Somani: The personal agent race is live and active. This is by OpenAI. They have their. Had their dev day yesterday. They've announced a 500 x pro plan as well, like, some $500 plan which gives you, like, unlimited. This thing. But I think the note that I read. I mean, more thing. I mean, about their pricing from Tivo and a few others and people dissected it. Now the subscription model in the next two to three hours is gonna come close to acting like just API pricing because what they've done is subscriptions are subsidized. Now people have got. Gotten hooked on to this. And you're probably gonna end up with, I mean, less subscription fees, but more actually API based or usage based fees. So, actually, what developers pay or products or companies actually pay when they're using these LLMs, that's what we'll end up paying as consumers if they hit the public markets and are judged on a quarter to quarter basis. Do you think there's any truth to that, Drew?

Dhruv Sharma: There could be. You never know. They've probably been boiling the flog. A frog. I'm sorry. And this happens to us always. It happened to us with Uber. Now it's happening with us, you know, to us with AI. But I'm just very fascinated by the personal agent So we had. Tell you.

Utsav Somani: I mean, give us the lowdown. We've discussed OpenClaw, previously, but, start the full timeline history.

Dhruv Sharma: That was the first one. In fact, we covered it on our show if you wanna. You know, if, if our listeners wanna go back in time and see the segment that we did. But OpenClaw was the first one. And, then for a period of time, I think Natasha Malpani of Boundless, when she came on the show, she spoke about her message and, which I'm pretty sure a lot of people are still using. But those two were. They were open source, and self hosted and, therefore, bigger hits with technical audiences. And then. And I'm a little hazing in the timeline who announced this first. It was either Grokbot or Muse. Muse Grokbot first.

Utsav Somani: Grokbot. Grokbot.

Dhruv Sharma: But the lab starting. Started getting to. And big tech companies started jumping into this head first as well, and they obviously have massive distribution, huge product services, like, where people can use this as is. And where..

Utsav Somani: Instinct and poke with her on messaging as an interface.

Dhruv Sharma: Instinct will be here. And in fact, our first guest, Arihant was talking about how he, you know, used instinct for. That company is apparently growing at what 10% a day—or month. I don't know. Like, it

Utsav Somani: was Absurd. I mean, they're providing it for free since. I think they're probably the fastest run up to a $10 billion valuation. So Sequoia and I think a bunch of other companies' funds in The US have backed it already.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah. But I was trying to set dot up and, you know, of course, 4,000 plugins, but it asks you for too much information. And if it's somehow linked to an enterprise account, you get a little nervous for a while. So I'm gonna take my time with this. I don't, like, jump on the back and immediately. But.

Utsav Somani: So dot. I mean, I would experiment with this, but on a very different device. Like, so what they're doing is basically giving you a virtual cloud machine, running a Linux environment, 32 GB of storage, 8 GB RAM or 16 GB RAM, and you can give it a task. It keeps on doing it at the back end, makes calls for you, takes text messages, all of that stuff, and then it can just complete task and come back to you with a status update. So it's somewhat like what autonomous, agents should look like. They should not be reliant on you keeping a laptop screen open or texting from your phone and, basically doing task end to end.

Dhruv Sharma: Which is actually always by your side, always looking, always doing. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. And they, like. And they announced a bunch of different things, but I'm I'm excited to try it out. But like you said, not on my main machine. Like, I. You never know what, they end up leaking as data and stuff.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah.

Utsav Somani: And you can customize them, give them all this thing because news is this cute new thing where Alexander Wang is tweeting memes, and it's become this very relatable, this thing that started doing TV ads for that thing. So when you start doing TV ads for the one month old product, it's definitely hit mainstream.

Dhruv Sharma: I think that might be cute on purpose, by the way. Cute, cuddly, colorful on purpose. It's to. You know, whatever AI anxiety you have, I think it's just to quiet it a

Utsav Somani: little bit. But, I mean, Alexander Wang, I think. I mean, I'm gonna make a not safe for work, Joe, but all of these logos actually end up looking like a butthole. Right? Uh-huh. So, yeah, I think, that's what, he's taking a stab at with his memes as well. So he's, got a meme dealer on his side. Alrighty. I think that's it from us, Faz. Should we wrap up?

Dhruv Sharma: Let's do it.

Utsav Somani: Alright. See you on Friday. Bye.