Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners, and welcome back to the Friday stream of the Offline Network. Today's show is the kind of show that Utsav and I absolutely love. The reason for that is we have three founders building in, you know, absolutely distinct domains. We've got sleep, space, and then the world of B2B procurement. Before we introduce our first guest, we actually have a video from his company. So our first guest today is Abhishek Sahu of DreamSpan, and we have a video of his company. And I think that video will be the best way to get an introduction to Abhishek and his work.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): For billions of years, our biology evolved in response to our environment. But in the last 300 years, technological progress changed our environment faster than evolution could ever match. The gap between our slow evolving biology and rapidly changing environment is what we call the evolutionary delta, and is driving many of today's greatest health challenges. DreamSpan is an evolution research and product company. We build technologies that bridge the evolutionary delta to advance the human health span. The foundation to a great health span starts with sleep. But evolution left us with a bug. During REM sleep, the stage of sleep that restores us mentally, our hypothalamus, which controls body movements, becomes less active. So we don't act out our dreams. But the hypothalamus also regulates body temperature. So when it's less active, any deviation from ideal body temperature pulls us out of REM sleep, quietly undermining the quality of our rest every night. So that's the evolutionary delta of sleep. If you look at the personal health industry today, it's just about tracking. Wearables were the first generation. But the problem with wearables is that they are passive. Health improvements depends on acting on your data and insight. But wearables, they only surface the data and leave acting on it entirely on you. So currently, human action is the limiting factor to the health improvement loop. But what if health improvement didn't depend on human actions at all? We've been building something fundamentally different. Human biology is made up of numerous adaptive systems. If technology has to become truly symbiotic with us, it must be adaptive too. We're creating a new generation of adaptive technologies that don't just measure your biosignals, but intelligently optimize them. And we're starting with that one space that hasn't changed in decades. The space where we spend one third of our lives, our bedroom. We believe this is the key to bridging the evolutionary delta of sleep.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I mean, I have to, I'll ask you separately off-air, how much did it cost to make this Apple- style launch video, but Abhishek, welcome to the show, good to be connected again. Let's start with the atomic unit that you're discussing here, sleep. What are we Indians doing wrong? We've understood this as a very passive thing where we sleep for seven, eight hours and we wake up and we're supposed to go about a day. But what are we Indians doing wrong? And you've studied sleep very closely, built a product for it, REM, deep, passive, light, sleep, all of these things make sense of this for us before we go into the product.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Great to reconnect. To answer your question, you know, I don't think Indians are doing anything wrong, right? Like every health influencer, every wearable company just tells you, you know, go to sleep at this time, you know, wake up at this time, take like, like, I'm just fed up of that personally. Like, I don't know about you guys, like, by the way, for people that don't know this, in my past job, I have worked on these wearables. I have worked on building the CGM sensor that was first launched in India. I was the engineer behind it. Also on the smart ring that maybe WhatsApp is wearing, so I've worked, you know, right now I'm on a whoop phase.

Utsav Somani: So I keep alternating between whoop and attribute. So right now I'm on the whoop phase.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Post this, it will be dream span, hopefully. So I'll tell you generally, like my learning as an engineer, you know, on this was, you know, like wearables are literally the first generation, right? It actually, it drove curiosity in the consumer market that, okay, I can track my sleep. The first time I, the first wearable that I used was a Fitbit Versa, I think four, four and a half years back. And the first time I saw that, okay, I slept at nine 29 and I woke up at like six. It was interesting to see that like somebody can track my exact, you know, time of sleep and, you know, wake up time. So I think it, and wearables are popular because it drives that curiosity. But then like telling people, okay, go to sleep early, go to bed early or wake up at this time, do your 10,000 steps. I think this is a very primitive way of solving health, right? That is what we are basically, you know, I would say changing. And I have obviously a lot of things to share on that. So just to summarize, people are not doing anything wrong. We will build technologies that will, you know, automatically improve health and in this case sleep. And that's the view that I take. You know, I don't like to tell my father to eat less rice because he's like biologically wired to, you know, enjoy the rice because I mean he's like literally living in an ancient body, right? His reward system is like millions of years old. At that time there was no rice, there was no agriculture revolution, right? So it's like nobody's doing anything wrong. We are just, you know, living in ancient bodies in a futuristic world and we will build technologies that that will fix this, right? So that's basically the evolutionary delta and yeah.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. Adaptive technology. I think that's what you're trying to describe as well that, I mean, what we've been getting is basically data, but like this is technology that adapts to you and sort of helps you sleep better and build better habits around it.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great segue to adaptive technology. Since we have been an investor in health tech, you would know these two catchy words, preventive healthcare, curative healthcare. We are building in preventive healthcare, right? All these catchy words. So just for the viewers, preventive healthcare is basically, you know, the supplements, the vitamins and things like that. I mean, some of these work, but yeah, like there's no proven way to literally say that what I ate actually helped me and, and, and things like that. Right. Whereabouts are preventive healthcare. Then there is curative healthcare, which is basically your medicines, your surgery, your things like that, which happens at the hospital. What is it? Middle of these two is basically adaptive health is what we call it right now. Let me give you an example that is already there in the world. It's a very big example. What what actually is a peptide called Ozempic, right? It is basically a chain of amino acid. It works like a GLP one molecule. I mean, for the viewers, what does, what does Ozempic do? Ozempic basically does four things. First, it reduces the amount of ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone in your body. So basically you feel less hungry. Second thing it basically does is it actually activates like more insulin. So you know, your blood glucose actually get absorbed by yourself. Third thing it actually does is restricts the liver to produce more glucose. I mean, all of our livers have glucose stored in it. And the fourth thing it does is it slows down the, you know, digestion that happens in our intestine. So we feel, you know, you know, satiated for a longer time. So isn't this adaptive health technology and that's why it's, it is, has massive, you know, distribution. Everybody wants to be on Ozempic, whoever, you know, wants it, right? So basically this is the first variant of, you know, adaptive health technology. Ozempic, famously, there's a meme now, did more revenue, GLP1 drugs did more revenue than, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic combined, right? So that's where we are headed. So that's, that's how I will define, you know, adaptive health technology. We are building the first one, which is basically, you know, on sleep. So I'll talk more about that, but that's just what adaptive health technology is.

Dhruv Sharma: Abhishek, how did you sleep last night?

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Tows the sleep score. Sleep score? I don't remember watching it.

Utsav Somani: Yesterday was launch day, so I'm guessing you didn't sleep that well. Or maybe the adrenaline was so high that you couldn't sleep properly. But I think end of this segment, like the next 15, 20 minutes, if you can convince Dhruv To get a wearable, I think that will be at least one way to get a wearable.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Yeah, I'll at the end of this, I'll convince you to not get a wearable. But anyway, I'll tell you why.

Utsav Somani: All right, over to you, Dhruv.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, so Abhishek, I mean, let's take what you said, right? Well, so Utsav's first question to you was, what are we doing wrong? And you said, we're doing nothing wrong. Let's take your word for it. But we are, at the end of the day, a product of our own environment. What has changed about our environment, right? Air pollution. I mean, you look outside, there's light pollution. There's just too much light all around us. And then there's also noise pollution. I mean, Indian cities, it's again, no secret, can be incredibly noisy. If it's not traffic, it's got to be the DJ who's just going past your window. So with the environment, what merits an intervention like yours?

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Sure. So I think, Dhruv, you have brought out the central point here. It is actually the environment that has changed drastically, right? To my earlier point of, you know, we are living in ancient bodies in a futuristic world. This is what has happened, right? And it's actually fixing the environment rather than fixing the behavior. So I basically come from engineering and product background. We are basically taught to, you know, build products to actually influence, you know, users' behavior in a positive way, right? I mean, for example, the product team at Instagram deals influences you in a wrong way, right? The product team at a health company tries to influence you to lose weight, to go have 10,000 steps a day, right? The real thing, why, you know, health industry has not taken off, why is a health company not the biggest company in the world? That's a question that I keep on thinking, right? I think the real reason is because at the end, human motivation is what is blocking us to actually do health improvement. And Ozempic showed us that we can actually engineer something much more interesting that doesn't tell you what to do, right? So basically, coming back to your question, it's actually the environment. So I'll give you two, three examples. Like we have coined a term called evolutionary delta, which is basically the mismatch between the current environment and our biology, right? Let's start with air pollution, right? That's a very interesting topic. You know, combustion engines, as far as I can remember correctly, were invented in the early 1900s. You know, the PM1 2.5 and PM10 levels that we track. If you don't track, you can track it on the DreamSpan Lucid Pro shameless plugin that I mean, the PM1 and PM2.5 particles actually started appearing in the atmosphere because of, you know, burning fuel. So it's very recent, right? And our lungs didn't actually see this particle more than 200 years or whatever back, right? So this is what is actually causing damage. This PM2.5 enters your lungs. PM1 actually can enter your bloodstream through your lungs. And that's what causes cancer today. So it's actually this. I mean, what is the cost that we pay for technology? This is the cost that we pay for technology. I'm not saying technology is not good, technology is amazing, but we need to then build technologies to actually, you know, remove these things that has come up as a side effect. So I would say that's basically what has changed in the environment. And yeah, that's how we are trying to tackle it.

Utsav Somani: And you've gone ahead and launched your first product yesterday. Pre-orders are open, guys, on DreamSpan.co. But let's talk about one line that you said that India can assemble, but can it build? I think that went viral and you were making a case on how your product is using 10x more sort of components, processes than any other consumer health hardware in this country at this point of time. So share your journey with us and why this is such a complex problem to solve. And then we go into the product. Sure.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): So two things. One is let's talk about the fact that India can assemble, but can it manufacture? Apple is actually assembling here. You guys know this, right? I mean, Voxconn, I mean, assembling in South India, here, assembling it here. If you actually talk to a few factories, I mean, who are in the business of manufacturing, they will actually tell you this, that, you know, they just start as a PCB assembly, you know, EMS, basically electronic manufacturing, you know, supplier, and then they basically become a box build. I would say a manufacturer who then assembles the rest of the companies. So that's where we are at in India. I'll give you one specific fact. Even the USB-C cable that you get, the metal in that, even that is not being able to be manufactured in India. And you know why? Because the precision that is required, like once, let's say you want to produce 1 million of those, you know, metal parts, the precision that is required, the tooling that is required, requires a lot of investment. So that's why it's not available.

Utsav Somani: Interesting. And talk to us about the product itself and how you're going about building this. When can customers get their hands on it? What should they expect when they get the box? I mean, the video looks very, very slick.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Thank you. Thank you. So our first product, DreamSpan's first product is called DreamSpan Lucid Pro. It's the world's most advanced sleep system. We would have already been used to tracking our sleep. Now we are going into the generation of actually letting the technology improve our sleep in real time, rather than just tracking it. How does this magic happens? First, it's actually temperature. You know, temperature plays a very important role in our sleep, right? Our body temperature, if you would have tried that with your wearable and people have wearables, right? Your body temperature actually falls as soon as you go to sleep. That's actually a signal to your brain that, Hey, I'm in a well comfortable rested space. You can start the recovery process. And that's basically a signal. And the brain starts the recovery process. You go into deep sleep, you do all those things. And then in the morning, just three to four hours before you want to wake up, the temperature starts rising again. It's again, a signal to the brain that, Hey, I've gotten sufficient sleep. Now let's prepare our systems to take off, which is basically, you know, wake up. So because temperature is such a fundamental thing, let's, let's look at, again, let's, let's think about us as Asian creatures, thousands and thousands of years back, there was no bedroom. There was no bed. We were, you know, sleeping inside caves outside, you know, there was no light pollution through. So you would have liked that time. You would have gotten like no noise and light pollution. So at that time, you know, when we were sleeping outside, the temperature was cold because the sun was not there. Like it's a very fundamental thing. And as the night progressed, the, you know, sun came up and it warmed us up. So that's how the circadian rhythm was actually evolved.

Dhruv Sharma: And then the clock was born, uh, which is, uh, I mean, as an aside, so Utsav and I were like we were away on a trip just last week. And when we met, he's like, dude, how do you sleep? I was like, I sleep really poorly because these days when I set an alarm and the anticipation of that alarm, I'm waking up four or five times through the night. So also when you talk to us about Lucid Pro, please talk to us also about the week protocol.

Utsav Somani: And even, I mean, the fact that we, I mean, Dhruv and I were discussing that we can't sleep any better on any other beds apart from our own. My sleep quality goes for a toss when I'm traveling and in a hotel bed, I think it goes for a toss.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): The reason that happens is because your body knows this is a unfamiliar territory. Your body thinks that you're going out to hunt basically. And now you have to sleep at a unknown place. That's why it happens primarily, not the exact reason. So talking about the other two things, yeah, wake up alarm clock was an invention of the industrial age. That was the first time you wanted to synchronize labor, get them to wake up at a single time. There was like people were, you know, synchronized to live at a certain space. A big alarm clock was put. So it, it runs at 6am and everybody wakes up. It's that's industrial age. Uh, what lucid pro does is basically, you know, it gently vibrates just your side of the bed. So by the way, me and my partner, my partner, she likes to sleep slightly late. I actually wake up early. So just my side of the bed, you know, warms up and vibrates gently. So I wake up and I don't disturb her most important part of the sleep, which is REM sleep. Do not ever wake your partner up early in the morning she's having she or he is having the most important part of their sleep. So this is the alarm protocol. So temperature is adaptive based on your sleep stages. If you go into deep sleep, the bed will detect that automatically. Our bed can sense sleep every like every sleep stage and it cools down the bed. So you stay in deep sleep longer. When you go into REM sleep, it warms up the bed. So you stay in REM sleep longer. So that's temperature alarm. As I told you, the third thing, I mean, a lot of people, uh, you know, have sleep apnea and storing issues, right? And actually it disturbs your, you know, sleep of your partner. So lucid pro, uh, basically also has a base which goes under your mattress and that elevates your head off the mattress automatically when storing is detected. So roughly it can, you know, uh, reduce storing by up to 40 to 50%. This is basically our early trials, but yeah, it has the power to even, you know, reduce your snoring. So these are the three pillars of lucid pro and finally, uh, bedroom health is a very big thing, especially in India, the kind of air quality that we are sleeping in, the levels of CO2 volatile organic compounds that we are actually sleeping is very high. It's invisible to us. Just a short story. Like I was living in Abu Dhabi before this, you know, like rich country, all packed buildings, centrally air conditioned. The first time I bought a CO2 monitor, I was actually sleeping in like very high levels of CO2. Like all this money people are earning and they're sleeping at high levels of CO2. And that's why you don't feel rested when you wake up, because your body didn't get enough oxygen when you were recovering. That's the most important part. So that is something we have built in the product and it can connect to your smart home devices to change your temperature, automate your purifier. So when you go home, your sleep environment is at the perfect level and you just sleep. Don't do anything. Don't change your behavior. Just sleep. That's, that's the company and that's the technology we are building.

Dhruv Sharma: Can you talk to us about the magic behind the scenes of how lucid pro can do this contactless bio-sensing and we're not going to bed by it up.

Utsav Somani: And also talk to us a little bit about SpanOS while you're at it, I think, right? I think that's the name of the software.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Yeah. I'll start with the sensing technology. I'll start with SpanOS. So SpanOS, you know, I mean, there has been a lot of talk about, can there be an operating system that can be in charge of our health span? I think Brian actually brought it up initially that if an operating system tells you what to do, but in, and you do everything and you, in return, you get less than 10 extra healthy years. Would you choose that? Right? Uh, so that's basically what we are building, but we are not telling people what to do. That's not what our job is. We are just building technology. So can we build a technology that can automatically improve things that can in turn improve your health? That's what SpanOS is. This is just the first, you know, a pillar that we have kept and we'll be building on that. And coming to the contactless bio-sensing, this was one of the most hardest engineering problems that I have solved in my life. And I've solved a good amount of engineering problems in my life to be able to detect somebody's heart rate, breathing pattern, snoring, right. Without any sensor on their body, it is a very difficult thing to do. Right. So our sensors, we have flexible sensors under the mattress cover, non-detectable. You can't feel it. Like that actually works by, you know, so by the way, like wearables work by throwing light into your skin, absorb that your blood absorbs the light. And that's how you basically, and the reflection is basically calculated to see your heart rate.

Dhruv Sharma: Flickering behind.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Yes. Yes. That's the green light. Yes. We actually sense, you know, vibration. So when you sleep, like I can, I can feel my heartbeat, right. Because my skin is also a vibration sensor. So this vibration sensor is actually what is inside the mattress cover and we detect everything. We even detect breathing disturbances, which no wearable can because they can only detect light. So harder problem to solve. We solve it. We took two years to solve everything, but it will give us so much more insights than any wearable can. So yeah, that's, that's basically, that's basically it.

Utsav Somani: My dog or my baby sleeps on the bed from time to time. Will their data, will their data also be tracked?

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): I mean, if, if three people are sleeping, then yes, their data will also be tracked. It might confuse the system, but at this point, we have designed the system for a couple, like two people sleeping or, or, or a solo sleeper, basically.

Utsav Somani: So I'm going to put my Indian consumer hat on and ask you two tough questions. The price is, I think, starting at 1.49 lakhs. And there is a subscription as well. And then the second argument with my wife made on when I pitched her the idea that I want to buy this mattress is like, you're going to put something with electricity on our mattress. If we burn, then what happens? So these are the two arguments that she made that a subscription after an expensive product, and then something with electricity on your bed, like how will you come to them?

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Yeah. I'll start with the second question. You know, when electric cars were introduced in the market, this is exactly what people said that, Hey, why should I sit in a car in a cage where there is 440 volts of battery running under my legs? I'll just burn and things like that. This is what electric cars also, you know, people said about electric cars. Secondly, actually the whole of thermal regulation is actually water powered. There's no electricity involved. It's actually hot and cold water that is circulating in the mattress that is doing the seating and cooling. So it's perfectly safe. Uh, this class of products have been existed in other countries, have been used for multiple years. It's all certified, cleared. So there's no issue in that.

Utsav Somani: Not to clip this and send it to my wife.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Please do. Please do. I'm happy to chat directly as well. The other question is basically, I mean the price and subscription, first of all, uh, for the pre-order customers, for the initial batches, there's no subscription. Everything is free lifetime as a gesture for early believing as being an early believer to the product and coming to 1.5 lakhs. Um, so, you know, there's a funny joke. So people have, you know, like bought cars that are like 30, 40, 50, 60 lakhs and more. They spend less than, you know, 15 hours a week in that car, right? Uh, you spend one third of your life on your bed sleeping. So, and if the product actually gives you one more quality of sleep every night is basically roughly 45 nights of extra sleep in a year, right? Uh, is that worth less than 1.5 lakhs or more?

Dhruv Sharma: I have another way in which I made that argument every shake. I don't know if it's going to be helpful, but it's like you can either spend all of this money and give it a Nike or your gym membership or dream span, or you could give it to a hospital chain, you know, towards the fag end of your life. So decide the money is going to go out anyway. Who do you want to give it to?

Utsav Somani: Selling it, baby. 150 years of health span for droves right there. But talk to us a little bit about trends as well. Like, I mean, GLP ones levels ultra human there's eight sleep globally as well. And people are now injecting also the peptides. What do you think is a hype? What do you think is substance in the next two, three years?

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): I think, uh, you know, uh, wearables had a good start to the health span revolution. Actually wearables go back as early as 2013, which is when, you know, or us first prototype was built. Whoops. First prototype was built.

Utsav Somani: So data collection, I think that loop needs to be closed.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Exactly. And that's the decade we are in itself. Uh, you companies have shown us that, and we are really taking that charge and moving and running with it. Like that's basically, we don't want to build any wearable. We don't want to do anything that is hot. We want to focus on hard problems that can actually bring meaningful, you know, impact the customer's life. Right. And, uh, if you guys would have seen the, you know, vision video, we literally reveal all the other technologies that we are building at the end of the video, right? We are not a product company. We are evolution research and product company, which means we are building adaptive health ecosystem. And I think, uh, I already mentioned peptides. The only other thing that I will mention and people who are, you know, following his panel longevity knows this, that, uh, there's also work happening at the cellular aging level. So if you follow David Sinclair, uh, their team recently got FDA approval for this drug called ER 100. It's a gene therapy drug that basically, you know, targets your, uh, cells, uh, to basically, you know, I mean, they basically are trying to reverse the age of a cell by targeting the epigenome, which is basically, which basically controls gene expression, like how the gene will basically express itself to the cell. So ultimately, you know, all roads go there, right? So we start with health tech hardware, which will be adaptive. We'll be building multiple of them. We go to peptides. Like if we are really good engineers, why can't we engineer biology? That's the question I ask, right? So peptides is next and the third ultimate final boss battle is cellular aging. And hopefully these three phases will take us to 150 years of health span.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on our show, Abhishek and wishing you all the best.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Thank you so much. Uh, also looking forward to your purchase.

Utsav Somani: Done, done, done. I'm going, uh, getting through also to purchase one for sure. He's made the sales pitch himself. So yeah.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): Thank you for having me.

Utsav Somani: We should have a special discount code for TON listeners.

Abhishek Sahu (Founder & CEO, Dreamspan): We can get the team to send you over right away.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Perfect. Thank you for coming on our show. All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next guest. Uh, the second one for today, Naman of Now Purchase. Naman, welcome to the show. Naman, I think you're on mute. Hi Akshav, thanks for having me on. Always happens on Zoom calls. So let's introduce the business, uh, for our listeners.

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): So sure. You know, everything around us in the physical world is made out of metal, whether it's cars, whether it's electronics, whether it's data centers, the ability to procure raw materials, which manufacture these metals, and the technology which goes behind making these metals is still very primitive. It has not gone through much change in the last few decades. And Now Purchase is sitting at the intersection of procurement and production for the metal manufacturing industry. In India itself, it's a $140 billion metal manufacturing industry. We help them source raw materials like scrap alloys, additives to our platform and supply chain, as well as provide them with the AI and IoT platform to enable efficient manufacturing of these metals. So that's essentially what we do.

Utsav Somani: And what part of this marketplace or the procurement platform is vertically integrated? Like you go from manufacturing or sourcing, like how do you, what do you complete end to end for your customers?

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Sure. Sure. So the way we think about it, right, like we started off as a pure marketplace with these products and we started looking at what are the problems in each of these categories and started building different extensions, different supply chain capabilities in the same. So for example, in metal scrap, we realized being a pure marketplace does not work. So we operate two recycling yards today and we're setting up two more, which gives the ability for us to chemically, physically segregate, sort these metals and convert it into a particular shape and size as required by the customer. So almost think of it like it's going from scrap, which is not really a standardized SQ, but it goes to becoming an SQ. That's how we think about it. And that's the reason we set up these yards. That's one sort of intervention we have done. The other intervention we have done is for certain products. We realize that currently the market is just either large MNCs, charging premiums for some of these brands or add a huge plethora of folks who do not have any standardization quality layers on top of. So for that, we have created our own range of private label brands by working with partner factories in India and abroad. So these are the two interventions we have done currently around these two currently contribute around 30% of our business are 70% still through the marketplace. And I think as we keep growing and keep evolving, we'll figure out what else needs to be done to get to the right user experience.

Dhruv Sharma: Now there's a near endless debate on vertical versus horizontal marketplaces. Now you've actually built and scaled a vertical marketplace. What would your advice be to founders who are still very early, still contending with that question in their respective categories?

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Sure. Sure. So, you know, I started off as a horizontal player for the first three years within the B2B space. So it was still B2B and it was horizontal. And we were selling right from bearings, tools, tackles, motors, pumps, electricals, safety, you name it, primarily all maintenance categories of all kinds of industries. It was a very horizontal play. And we did that for three years. And then pivoted to this vertical play, which has scaled up much better for us. So I'll speak from both these experiences. So a few things, right? In India, some of the horizontal categories, if it's not purely industrial is getting attacked by the larger players, like the carts and Amazons of the world. That's one. Some of these horizontal categories in India does not work for two more fundamental reasons. One is we are a more dense country. So that means people and shops and factories and shops are much closer to each other compared to say a North America or Japan or Germany, where some of these horizontal have done really well. And so these are the two primary reasons. And third is still people do not really value time and cost. That equation has gotten better with some of these conveniences and the quick commerces. But still, you know, when you think about time versus cost, the founder before me was trying to justify basically a $1,600 mattress, right? And we still having the time and cost equation still a little bit lopsided, I would say. So with those things, I think horizontal works really well if you can attack really wide spaces. So a lot of people are building in specialized chemicals now in India where they're building chemicals, right? From cosmetics to metals, to whether you needed lubricants. So that's a very horizontal play, but it's a place which is relatively wide, you know, a blank space. Otherwise I would say typically vertical is the way to go. And that's pretty much my approach. And I think in B2B, especially a vertical is what really scales well, given you build more expertise, you're more deeper, you know, the whole story around network effects, etc. This comes from density and enough depth, right? If there's enough people in a smaller market using you, then they automatically end up talking to more people about you, right? So, and then the whole library starts working as well. Yeah.

Dhruv Sharma: Great opportunity to also ask you the scaling and expansion question, right? Like what really works in a B2B context in India? Is it finding clusters? Is it, you know, becoming friends with industry association? What really works?

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Sure. Sure. So I would say it's a combination of the fundamental old school stuff, which is working closely with industry associations, the exhibitions, the webinars, they still are very high value because in B2B you will hear the word relationships, right? And I have a relationship with this guy for a hundred years and things like that. So this relationship is nothing but someone who trusts you, right? And the way they trust you is because you're part of some common ecosystem and it's important to become a part of that common ecosystem and replace that trust with speed by becoming part of various such ecosystems in a short period of time. So that is one part of which works very well. But once you become a part of that ecosystem, what are you bringing new to the table? If you're going to be talking similarly about seeing that other best price, best quality, best delivery does not really work, right? Because every supplier on earth says the same thing. So what really works? And that's where having a technology layer really helps because they want something new. Unlike consumers, which are, you know, I would say bombarded with new tech, new AI tools every morning, every day, industries, the factories are not so bombarded by AI tools, right? So they, if someone really thinks about them and build something just for them, they really value it. So the layer of trust by being a part of that ecosystem and network, and then providing something valuable to the technology, I think that combination has worked for us in the last few years.

Utsav Somani: And I think, I mean, you're working with 200 plus foundries and given that you're closely involved with, I mean, metal is a huge part of anything that manufacturing industry has to do. So where is the India manufacturing store right now? We've had over the last, I think, post COVID, China plus one, various BLI schemes and many other things that have happened, government initiatives and just the geopolitical scenario as well on ground, what's the reality through your exposure, through these foundries and other industries and sectors, like where do you think are the offshoots and the green shoots in our manufacturing story right now?

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Sure. So, so I just missed the first three, four seconds of it, but I think the balance of the question is pretty much the same thing.

Utsav Somani: It is. It is.

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Okay.

Utsav Somani: India manufacturing story basically, where are they at? Like what are the exciting things to look out for?

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Sure. So, you know, I have visited factories in not many countries, but I've visited in China, US and India, which is, I would say, good segment between the three countries in terms of where they are. In terms of looking at the data between India and China, it is still very, very stark in terms of the adoption of robotics, adoption of tools, technology still just, just way higher. And in terms of that's also happened because they're much on a higher depth rather than diversifying small factories. Each of them are going with very specialized niches and really going deep into it. So that's one thing we've definitely learned in, from a US experience, I would say, US is trying to revive their manufacturing economy, but the cost of manpower is just so, so expensive that I think even with the best of technology, they'll still find a hard time doing so. India sort of has this, you know, unique space where we have the ability to get much more cost- efficient manpower, have the ability to adopt technology, which we have shown multiple times in the last decade or so, and there's government incentives. So it's, you know, sort of a medley of what should really work. In terms of on ground, I would say, of course, you know, we read about all the great PLI schemes, thousands of crores. So I would say there are these large pockets. We're still being dominated by some of these large enter factories, which is going to dominate what will happen to the rest of the ecosystem. In terms of the medium-sized company, I think still there is lots of delta in terms of what really can be created in terms of incentives, subsidies, benefits, and not just being created, but I think even in terms of education of these incentives, sometimes they're on paper, but the ability or the ease of getting that subsidy or that loan or that, you know, knowledge is still pretty much missing. So that is what my learning has been. Of course, some of the clusters around Kolhapur, around Pune, around Coimbatore will really surprise you because you see some amazing stuff happening in these clusters where people are extremely driven. They are extremely industrious and actually creating a huge delta. One large factory owner I met around two months back, he said that India is probably operating at only 60% efficiency, even when they're at full capacity. And that is where the problem is. So, you know, we set up a factory thinking we'll manufacture 20,000 tons, which is what the machine specs said, but we somewhere adjusted for 3,500 and sort of blamed the ecosystem. Almost like when we buy a car, car says 20 kilometers per liter, we're like, Oh, in on-road conditions, it's going to be probably 14, right? And we sort of make peace with that life. I think that has happened a lot in the Indian manufacturing ecosystem as well. So I think that is somewhere a huge delta could be driven as well.

Utsav Somani: And you announced an 80 crore round from Bajaj as well. So congrats on that. What is the scale of the business now?

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Sure. Thank you so much. So yeah, Bajaj we serve as a legacy round with participation of our existing investors and co-adjudicators, as well as a bunch of family offices. From a business perspective scale, we sell over 50 crores worth of raw materials every month on the platform. We have over 200 factories who are using our technology today. So that's pretty much on the scale. We are primarily active in East, West and South in around six industrial states right now. We plan to keep going deeper into the states rather than spreading ourselves too thin. Our goal primarily is with, you know, expand our scrap recycling infrastructure, expand our private labels, as well as expand our metal cloud platform. That's primarily the three things we plan to do with this new raise.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Dhruv, any final closing questions for Naman?

Dhruv Sharma: Yes. Naman, no discussion on about B2B procurement can be complete without bringing up working capital cycles. And what has been your experience in the, you know, in the metal space? Also, I mean, metals are a commodity. Commodities sometimes have rallies, sometimes have shortages. Do you guys see supply chain fluctuation? And if so, how do you, how do you deal with that?

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Sure. So within the metal space, right, we deal with raw metals going into making metals. So we pretty much would not deal with the pure steel. So we're not selling pure steel. We're selling stuff like scrap alloys and it's going to making metals. You can think of them as derivatives of metals. So yes, they are having some impact, but not as much as a pure commodity. Majority of our businesses still supply 70% in just in time. The rest we do hedging through some platforms to be able to mitigate some of the risk around price fluctuation. Coming to your first question, yes, working capital is part of every B2B trade business. And it's part of our business as well. So what we've been, you know, very cognizant of is a few things. So one is that, you know, look at why are people buying from you? So are people buying from you because you're a lender in the garb of a procurement player or are you really a procurement player? So I think there are some categories where it's typically like, you're called a procurement platform or even, you know, you're really, you're just a financer actually, not a really a procurement player. And that's happened even with the brick and mortar traders. So it's important to understand where you sit and try to continuously optimize for playing in categories where you have enough delta over the interest cost, right? So internally we continuously look at, you know, what is the delta we're getting beyond cost of capital? Because if you're just getting the cost of capital in some small gravy on top, then you're just a lender. So that's how we look at it. And that's how even we decide, I would say, which categories to service, which customers to service. And that actually is a big part of our decision-making framework in terms of customer pools to target, category pools to target as well.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Noman, thank you for coming on our show. Wishing you all the best.

Naman Shah (Founder & CEO, NowPurchase): Thanks Utsav. Thanks Rup. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Bye.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, to top off the week, we have our final guest today, Awais, who's a returning guest and he's coming out of a week, which is a very big week for the India space tech industry. So Awais, welcome to the show. Always glad to be back. Thanks for having me here. Man, what a week.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): What a week.

Utsav Somani: Like, I mean, every day, like, I think there was like big announcements in the space tech week. I think PM Modi was posting about it. I mean, Sky Route has done exceptionally well, but you started off with a bang this week. India's first orbital data center satellite. So why is it important before we go deep into the Pathfinder mission, or the Pathfinder satellites, talk about why are they important?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Absolutely. And I think as they say, right, there are years where nothing happens and then there are weeks where years happen. Seems like one of those weeks for the Indian space tech ecosystem. But coming to the data centers, why are they important? I think for a long while, there's a few different ways to answer this. Number one, I think, you know, when humanity talks about how advanced a civilization is, there are different curvature of scales. And scale two is supposed to be where we can harness the entire power of our solar system or the sun. And the way to do that is to be able to, you know, have the solar panel generation from the suns. And then what do you use that for? You use that for compute for a civilization that needs a lot of stuff. So I think one, if you fast forward like a hundred years, it's just very sad if you don't have big infrastructure built there. But the more pertinent answer to this question basically is that AI is the word everywhere. You can see all the hyperscalers and the major frontier labs clamoring for more and more compute. And building data centers is getting more and more difficult on ground, right? You need more and more power. There are different regulatory concerns. There are different displacement concerns around the communities and what's causing to the environment around those data centers. So where do you go when you need more power? You know, there's no more power than what the sun provides us. And once you go into space, we have almost unlimited amount of it. If we have solar panels generating those power. Second, there are no regulatory concerns. There are no NIMBY concerns that you can't build it in my backyard. And number three, I think there's just limited and in terms of a lot of heat that is being generated. If you build the proper thermal systems for things in space, you can radiate out that heat into the vacuum where it's affecting no one other than affecting various localities. I think that's generally why I think it's important that we start to put more compute in orbit. It's how Jeff Bezos says that we should keep the Earth as like a national park protected and all the heavy industry stuff should be moved off into space. And there's a step towards that.

Utsav Somani: 200 kgs in space with, I mean, data center class GPUs and your hyperspectral imaging. What is truly happening in terms of technicality that allows this to beam data after processing it in space?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah, so I think the important consideration here to keep in mind is that, you know, lots of satellites have what you call edge computing or some kind of GPUs, but these are very edge computing optimized GPUs. They don't take a lot of power, but then they don't have as much computational power or capacity as well to manage it within the constraints that you have on a satellite. So by putting data center grade GPUs, the problem is that take a lot more power than your other computing devices. And they also dissipate a lot of amount of heat that you can't just like, you know, dissipate it away in space. Yes, it is vacuum, but you need to conduct it through your satellite thermal platforms and then radiate it to radiators and things like that. And so it's not a rudimentary problem. So I think the idea with the satellite was, OK, one, we need some kind of use case for it to work like it's cool technology and everything. But if you're putting orbital data centers up there, who's going to be paying for it? And then it kind of made sense that, look, we have our own cameras that are up in orbit that capture so much amount of data. There's no reason why we have to bring all of that data down, analyze it here. We could run it on a model on board the satellite itself. So now use case number one for a data center taken care of for our own satellite. So it made sense there. And then putting these GPUs and the intention with the satellite was we have to prove all the technical aspects of the satellite. If you're able to prove it as pixel as an Indian company, then we can scale it up to thousands, 10,000 or hundreds of thousands of satellites. SpaceX wants to launch a million of these. Even they haven't launched a proper data center satellite yet. So for India to not fall behind, the idea was let's test out the technology number one and solve all these issues that theoretically solvable. But, you know, can we practically show them that they're solvable and use it for our own purposes and our Earth observation satellites as we go about it? So this is going to be a demonstrator, right? Where's the first pathfinder? This is the first one. Yeah. And the idea is we keep on scaling the satellite to larger, better bigger ones.

Dhruv Sharma: Will it go join the existing fireflies in orbit?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): It will not be exactly a firefly. It will be, you know, it's like a it's like a camera. It has a camera on it and has GPUs on it. So it's it's it adds capacity to our hyperspectral constellation, number one. And second, it proves out this concept. So we're trying to, you know, hit two birds with one stone.

Dhruv Sharma: We'd love to ask you a speed question, right? When did this first come up? And if you can, like, who did this actually? Where did the idea originate from? Was it on Sarvam's side? Was it on your side? And from from that first conversation to putting the announcement out, how much time has it taken? And what's your estimate on when the first pathfinder will be ready?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah, I think the Overton window on data centers really shifted when Elon started talking about it and saying SpaceX will do it right. They're raising 75 billion or something like that for their IPO. And a large chunk of that, if not all of it, will go towards putting these data center satellites up there as a completely new business line for them. That really changed, I think, how the world looked at it. As someone in this industry, we obviously looked at a potential data centers and things like that. But we hadn't really said, OK, we need we need to do it. But when when these announcements are coming in, you know, U.S. has its plans, especially with SpaceX and a few other companies. China's announced similar plans. India wouldn't be left behind. So we said, OK, let's at least do this. And I kept running into Pratyush at several multiple conferences. And every time we might be used to just be like, hey, we got to work on something together. And it just kind of ended there. And so when this came up, I just, you know, texted him and called him and said, hey, you're doing all of these sovereign AI models. And, you know, we want to test out orbital data center capabilities. Why don't we partner to see if your models and inferences can run on a satellite? And that way we can prove out that these are not only satellites for space based applications, but they can actually be used to replace or augment or add on to ground based data centers.

Utsav Somani: India based on a good use case. I mean, the first example that I'm going to give is this partnership came out of a conference like most conferences are usually amounting to nothing. But thanks for mentioning at least something positive came out of a conference.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah.

Utsav Somani: Yeah. But I mean, part of the AI stack. So someone's taking over the software. You're going to do most of the hardware as well. What kind of GPUs are you using? Like, I mean, give us a little bit more about the technical stuff. People are getting interested in this stuff as they read more and more about this. The Anthropic XAI partnership as well has gotten people excited about clusters, numbers, all of these things.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah, you can think of it like a GPU node that goes on on an orbital data on a data center on the ground. And each data center has multiple nodes. And when they work together, it becomes this computing behemoth. So this is basically going to be functioning as like one node of what is eventually to come many, many satellite constellations. Just to be clear, we don't plan on investing and having our own data centers. The idea is that since we design, build, provide satellites to organizations that need their own satellites, we do it for imaging satellites. We do it for other satellites. There will be many organizations who have their own ground data centers or maybe not. They want to put their data centers that they own in space. We come in and build the infrastructure for them. So the idea was, let's build one node and show that it's possible. And then whoever needs it built, we can build it for them. So what goes into the satellite is I think one, obviously, you have the NVIDIA H200 or the Blackwell GPUs that will go up there as as more satellites and bigger satellites will put on, you know, more powerful GPUs. But for now, I think it would be the H200 class GPUs that are still used in a lot of data centers to be able to train AI models and be able to infer things. So I think that's number one. A lot of things around it is, OK, you have these GPUs on board and you know, how do you provide the power? So the solar panel generation and the conduiting to make sure that they have the power for the entire duration of the orbit. And lastly, the radiator part of it that will make sure that the heat that is being generated, one, you know, how do you keep them cool? And second, how do you dissipate out the heat and radiate out into the deep space? That is what the hardware will be on these satellites. All of these are the same building blocks. What you can do in the future is now you can increase the capacity of your node and you can also increase the power generation of your satellite. You can increase the radiator size and all of that comes next step. But this proves all of these things work together as a system.

Dhruv Sharma: And this is, of course, the most recent, most exciting announcement, but there since the last time you came on, there have been a slew of announcements. So what is this thing you guys have signed with NRO? What's the partnership with Cosmoserve about? The partnership with ExoTrail? And also, what are the recent updates from Gigapixel?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah, I mean, things keep happening every month, so hard to keep track now. But I think the Cosmoserve one is a cool one. Cosmoserve is a US-India startup that wants to basically remove debris from orbit and they want to help service other satellites up there as an extension of the technology they're building. They're building these robotic arms that can go and do that. Where we come in is we provide the satellite platform for it. So they are the experts at the robotics and what they need to do for grabbing debris or being able to service other satellites. We are good at building satellite platforms that are reliable, that can work.

Dhruv Sharma: You know, even space, right? I'm just kidding, but like, wherever people leave a mess. And so talk to us a little bit about space debris, like for someone who's hearing about it for the first time, what constitutes space debris?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah, so I think a lot of older rockets that used to go up there, they had these, you know, second, third, fourth stages that they just left up there that are still sort of going around. Sometimes you would have a satellite that didn't end up working many years ago and, you know, it didn't have the fuel to come back down and burn up. So they're still going around there. Or there are also some of these, you know, micrometeoroids and things like that that are also orbiting the Earth. But most of it is assets that were launched many years ago or decades ago that at that point in time, there were no regulations that the satellite has to be able to come down and burn up in the atmosphere. Today, when we are launching a satellite. A car as well, right? I remember him sending a roadster. That's thankfully not in Earth orbit. That's going around a heliocentric orbit around the sun. But, you know, maybe some point there will be an intersection. But as of now, thankfully, thankfully, we don't ever deal with a car in the orbit that we deal with. In fact, there's an orbit called a graveyard orbit. So what this orbit is, is when rockets used to launch satellites into space and the last stage, they used to park it in an orbit called the graveyard orbit. Predominantly for geostationary satellite launches. And there are many stuff right up there. Some of them, you know, keep on sort of coming down. But mostly it's these older satellites and remnants that need to be brought down.

Dhruv Sharma: Was the deal that when you became defunct, you had to like maneuver your way into the graveyard?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah, you had to deploy the satellite and then you had to park yourself in the graveyard orbit. You know, the rocket had to walk itself or fly itself to its death.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I was going to ask you a philosophical question. I think we're deviating. Do you plan on going to space on any of these vehicles that will launch? One thousand percent. Yeah. I mean, I think that's one thing that you would not be surprised by, but say we would be surprised by. Like, I mean, Dhruv and I, a few years ago, we would be surprised by something that you would not be surprised by in space. Being a space tech entrepreneur, like from that POV.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Oh, that's a tough question to answer, but I think probably. I think the fact that, you know, everyone thinks about the launch and you know how you go up and how scary it could be. But it's really the re-entry that's even scarier, because when you're coming down, you you're reorienting your heat shields towards the earth and it's like really burning up. And then at some point through the windows, you can actually see fire. And so you're entering the earth in an orb of fire. And I think, you know, now you might not be as surprised about it if you're going up and coming down. But I think most people don't think about the fact that your return journey is more exciting or more thrilling or more dangerous than you actually launching up to space.

Utsav Somani: All right, we're going to turn back to track. I think Gigapixel was on the queue and something else also threw.

Dhruv Sharma: Let's maybe plug Apollo 11, like the Netflix movie on this, because if anyone heard what Avesh said, that's where they can. Avesh, while we're still on our sides and we get to the get to the meat of this. Have you yet met Group Captain Shukla, the Indian astronaut who just got back from space?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Absolutely. We hosted him actually at the Megapixel facility that we have. He was very kind to come on over. And we spent he spent almost a couple of hours at the office, 90 minutes of which was a panel where we asked him questions. And, you know, almost everyone from the team asked him questions. He took photographs with many people. And and so he was very kind about it. And he showed us some exclusive videos about his travel in space and how it was. And also this very cool video capturing when when the International Space Station was coming over to India and the lights that show here is Bangalore, here is Chennai that you can clearly see from space. So we got to meet him. We got to hear from him his experience. It was very cool.

Utsav Somani: All right. Back to track. What's Gigapixel manufacturing? How many satellites will be manufactured there? How much of it will be pixel capacity? How much of it will be external? Yeah, so when we started Megapixel. Depends on any like other agencies like ISRO or any other global agency. All of them.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): All of them. We work with quite a few agencies now. So Indian Air Force is one of them. There's the Department of Space. There's many other organizations that we are working with, both on the government side, but as well on the commercial side, like Cosmos. So a few other announcements on the way. So I think when we set up Megapixel, the current facility, the idea was, oh, we just had this one clean room where we could do two satellites at max. Let's build something that could do 25 satellites at max, because maybe it'll take a few years for us to get there. So the idea was this would last us at least five to seven years. But thankfully, business has really boomed and there's so much demand for satellites, both for ourselves, but also for the government of India and some other customers that we have run out of the capacity for 25. Right now, we currently actually have those many satellites at different stages of production and anything else that we want to do. And, you know, with these data centers and other things coming up, we will need a much larger facility. So what we envision, at least over the next two years, the end of this year and early next year is to have 100 satellite capacity in parallel. That's almost 4x the current capacity. And in an optimized fashion, we can turn them around every quarter. So basically it's 100 times for 400 satellites in an ideal state. Ideal state is very hard to achieve. So we'll be happy if you're able to get like 200 a year. But the new facility will also have additional space and land that if we exceed these bounds, we can quickly add more clean room and we can add more labs and we can almost double, triple that capacity as well. Not just the fact that we want to do more satellites, but we're getting into bigger and more powerful satellites as well. So mostly till now, we have dealt with satellite that are 250 kilograms or lower than that. But with this new facility, we'll be looking at upwards of 1000 kilograms or a ton class satellites where it can generate many tens of kilowatts of power too.

Utsav Somani: Wow, I think we're almost about to hit time. So a couple of questions.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, let's let's get one in there. So Avaiz, the picture of the Raptor engine, right, how it got simpler over time. I think someone recently called it like that's the modern Picasso. What is the equivalent of that been for Pixel?

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): I think the equivalent has probably been for us. Booking a launch has become as easy as booking a train now almost earlier. I think, you know, let's go back 10 years, maybe booking a launch meant either you had to book, you know, a base amount to build you an entire Ferrari or an entire rocket for yourself. And it was dedicated to you or you had to figure out who else was paying for it and ask them for a ride share. That can I just, you know, get a lift on this thing that you're building and I'll pay for my share of the seat. And it was very irregular, infrequent. What has now happened with SpaceX, especially is that it's like a train. They have these transporter launches that happens at least once a quarter and we make sure we pay for it and we book it out like a few months in advance. We just show up on time and we have a seat allotted for us. And if we miss that, then we can just attempt again in two or three more months. And that's really made it easy for us to say, let's focus on building the satellite. Let's go fast. Let's book the earliest launch slot available, because, you know, if you miss it for not a lot of more money, we can then just launch it to the other one. There's flexibilities there. So booking launch now is as easy as booking a train ticket. And that's, I think, made it really possible to go faster and harder.

Dhruv Sharma: Elon will hate it if he hears this, but the space launch business of Tesla is closer to FedEx than anything else.

Utsav Somani: Yes, it is. Yeah. Awais, thank you for coming on our show. As a final shout out to Sarwa. One thing that impressed you about their capabilities, if you want to just give a shout out to them because of your recent partnership.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Yeah. Yeah. No, I think they're very ambitious folks. Right. So I think, you know, most most companies would would not even explore something like this. You know, this is not part of their core business today. It would end up being a game changer five years or 10 years from now when things go into orbit. It could have been very easy to say, yeah, no, we just focused on building stuff. But what they've done, they have, you know, indigenized a lot of the tech stack and build it properly from scratch, not just take an open source model and say, we will build something on top of it and call it indigenous. So very strong team. They move really fast. But the most, I think, important thing was the ambition, matching our ambition and saying we want to try out something that might be useful many years from now. And you want to partner with us on this and try it out. And they said, yeah. And I think that's that's not something many companies do. That's something only companies that want to be the most ambitious want to do.

Utsav Somani: Perfect, Kavesh. Thank you for coming on our show and inspiring the next gen of space tech entrepreneurs throughout India, wishing you all the very best on this journey. Thanks. Thanks, Dhruv. Thanks. It's always great to be here. Cheers. Awesome. Dhruv, I don't know why we do this, man. It is just phenomenal. The kind of learnings that we get in a particular week, like just the show itself. We've had three founders, space tech, manufacturing metals and of course, Greenspan in the beginning as well. So, I mean, what a week we've just had on the show.

Dhruv Sharma: I think it's a function of what's happening in the ecosystem anyway. So if anything, it's a reflection of all the work that that is happening on the ground and then work that deserves to be surfaced and celebrated.

Utsav Somani: And when we started the show, I didn't think that we could do this three times a week and talk about so many different stories and bring so many founders on the show. But I think people are loving the format. But also, I think it gives them a platform to come and explain the business as it stands today, what they're excited about in the future. And not just the stuff that's covered in the headlines, the text based articles that you see. And I think people debating all of this on Twitter. But I think it's just it's just become, I think, I don't know, we're on episode 89, I think, right now, and it's just become a great place. And I'm enjoying this. I've been doing this three times a week with you. So shout out to you also.

Dhruv Sharma: Well, thank you. And shout out to you. And yes, now and now.

Utsav Somani: Some more space stuff to cover. No episode is complete without AI news. And Elon Musk, of course, has to be in there. Anthropic and Elon Musk have made up after all the Elon comments. Now they're getting SpaceX Colossus One, which is three megawatts of capacity, two lakh twenty thousand media GPUs. So I think crazy stuff happening. Why is this partnership finally coming to light?

Dhruv Sharma: So Elon has picked a winner that clearly doesn't like open AI. He's actively engaged in a lawsuit with them. And then we've covered this on the show. But Colossus One. Now there's also Colossus Two, had all of this spare capacity. And a few weeks ago, it looked like all of it was going to go to Cursor. Then Anthropic came and it looks like it's swooped in and taken 300 megawatts of capacity. The 22, I'm sorry, two lakh twenty, two lakh twenty thousand. Yeah, two hundred twenty thousand depends on Nvidia chips. And yeah, and so that is great because Dario was at a developer conference recently and he said that they have even their revenue growth has surpassed their own expectations. Here they were thinking they're going to ramp up like 10x, but they have about 80x and they were running out of compute. In fact, that's why a lot of people were making observations, anecdotal observations about a market, you know, lag and the performance of anthropic models, because they were they were kind of running out of compute. So it seems like they have solved that problem for now. And then SpaceX AI, the new superorganism, is shifting to Colossus Two and Colossus Three is already. I mean, work is underway to bring that online.

Utsav Somani: And they will be the sole tenant, I think, of Colossus One. And I think somebody did the maps on X where they said that XA is supposed to get approximately five billion in annual recurring rent from anthropic, if you might.

Dhruv Sharma: Come for the models, stay for the data center.

Utsav Somani: But Skyroot becomes India's first space tech unicorn. I think this is a big one. PM Modi posted about it. Elon Musk was congratulating him for this achievement as well. And kudos to the founders. I mean, they've built a solid, solid company. They've tested out a bunch of stuff before as well. But now they're taking Vikram One to suborbital area, I think.

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, they are. And I think, I mean, it's their unicorn now with new money in the in the bank. I think the launch vehicle is going to, development is going to, you know, see a huge boost and then their launch frequency is also going to go up.

Utsav Somani: I mean, what's interesting is that Ram Sriram is returning as a big investor to lead this round while Sharpalo Ventures, he was famously known as the Google's, one of the first round investors. He made quite a bit from that investment as well.

Dhruv Sharma: And for the support of Larry and Sergey and their mentor.

Utsav Somani: I mean, other quick things that people should know. Lockheedroom has invested in Pronto, which is Insta Househub. So something, we've covered the space. Something else is happening, which might be more easily accessible to all of us via consumer apps. And there's an Indian IPO that people are celebrating today, Kisht, which had a 20% pop on listing day. So I think it's a good roundup of the week and we'll see you on Monday at four o'clock. Thank you.

Awais Ahmed (Founder & CEO, Pixxel): Bye. See you.