Full Transcript

Dhruv Sharma: Hey there listeners and welcome back. This is our first live stream of May. We are sitting with the founder of EloElo and now Story TV, Saurabh Pandey. Saurabh, welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Thanks Dhruv. Thanks Utsav. Thanks for having me.

Utsav Somani: Welcome Saurabh. So let's introduce the group to our listeners. You have a live streaming game show. You have Master, which is the education vertical. And then you've got the micro dramas, which is of course, Story TV and it's blowing up. So how do these verticals fit in together?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Yeah, I think that's a great segue, you know, as a group itself. So we like to think of ourselves as building sort of the entertainment destination for the entire next billion user set. Sort of like reimagining traditional television for a very mobile first audience. If you think of traditional television, it had two, three very large components. One used to be the general entertainment channels, which was your soap operas, GCs, as you may call it. That for us is micro dramas, because it's the same vibe. It's the same equivalent where you're watching something which is very engaging. It is typically fiction. It will involve family dramas, corporate dramas, many, many genres there. Then there used to be the thoughts and opinions, discovery channels, news channels, which will give you information and opinions and hopefully satiate your curiosity. That's where master comes in. Master is like, think of it as an edutalk product, where within one minute, we are able to land a concept to you, which could be around learning English, learning about a government service, learning about how do you succeed on Instagram, YouTube, etc. So simplifying concepts, typically through AI generated or human assisted videos in one minute. And we have the interaction side. Think of that as channel V, RJs, VJs, who are communicating with people. That's the elo elo connector side, where there are creators who are streaming and having their own live channels together. We're trying to build like this AI enabled entertainment ecosystem.

Utsav Somani: So I think before we go into the industry and your separate products as well, I think I want to ask the most important question. Your numbers, they're pretty, pretty insane. I mean, 23 million to 230 million in ARR. That is impressive. So what is behind all of this growth? And you started monetization late in your journey as well, I believe 2024.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: So I won't comment on the numbers fully because we'll wait for our, you know, reports and our filings to sort of happen more formally. But, you know, the growth has been phenomenal. The team has out executed in every sort of domain. Couple of factors which have contributed to this. One has been really sort of sticking to our competency of understanding entertainment and video really well. We started as a video cross entertainment product and we picked the highest friction as a category. The toughest category to crack is usually live. That taught us a lot about how do you build live IPs? How do you solve for latency? How do you solve for entertainment in a category which is appointment viewing led? From there, we branched out to async, which was through micro dramas. And that really hit a huge inflection point for us. And in the last few months, we've been able to get to micro learning as well as a category which sort of completed the entire tripecta. So the growth has been interesting, but the growth also comes with the really phenomenal unit economics. And genuinely, what I'm really excited about beyond the growth has been some serious engagement and retention numbers. So what's been really heartening is especially on story TV, right? The average user now is spending close to about 85 to 87 minutes per DAO per day. So that essentially shows that you're able to get meaningful mindshare from users, which will eventually translate to wallet shares and more retention and repeat revenues, etc. But the mindshare that is coming on to this category with story TV leading from the front has been what has been most impressive from the way the team has executed and the way we've been able to get harmony going across content to tech to performance all coming together in the last sort of financial year has been really, really good. So stay tuned for our results. That should be very interesting for everyone.

Dhruv Sharma: So how do you how do you guys think about these different products that are coming under this this entire family of products? Are you guys really building three products for three distinct users or essentially for the same user?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Yeah, so the way we think about this group is that for a for a Bharat user or for a vernacular first user, the entertainment will have multiple use cases, right? When you wake up in the morning, the larger category that somebody would engage with would be infotainment because you're most motivated. You want to understand a little bit about how do you be more productive? How do you sort of have a learn a new skill for that particular day or for that particular period that you're going through? It could be cracking interviews, cracking English. Now think about this, right? The larger audience that we're talking about is a middle India aspirational user, typically between the age group of 18 to 32. So much younger, super ambitious, wants to succeed, also has very highly stressful days, so wants to decompress as well, right? So you have to manage those two sort of use cases. So infotainment is where somebody would start. And that's typically where you see usage for a product like master peaking like 9.30 to 10.30, 11 is where we see that really peaking. Typically, we see a product like Story TV being used a lot in your break times. So think lunch break, think chai time breaks, think dinner breaks. That's where on the go entertainment consumption happens. Now, if you take a step back from all of this and why we are doing it, I fundamentally believe that nobody, just like none of us now read magazines anymore, right? Do we read magazines? We don't read magazines. I think fundamentally five years later, nobody's going to watch linear television. TV as a dated concept will move away and majority of the entertainment will be very vertical and mobile first. When that happens, most categories will be disrupted in the traditional sense. So micro drama is that where entertainment is moving from appointment viewing or long stretches of viewing to on the go consumption. And that's where Story TV sort of serves that audience. And then beyond that, there are interaction conversations where people want to speak to other people or they want to speak to AI companions. That's where you have Elo, Elo and Connecto. So our products are intended to entertain, inform and engage the middle India audience. That's the code that we're sort of really targeting. And they seem to love us and spend the most time with us.

Dhruv Sharma: You know, what's really interesting about this sort of is that you guys also think of yourself, if I'm not mistaken, as a digital third place. And physical third places kind of change shape, form and character through the course of the day, as do you.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: That's actually the bang on insight. And that's something we talk about a lot. So think about it in this way, right? India doesn't have, so we don't have a cinema infrastructure, like, or we don't have a very large offline infrastructure of parks, cinemas, where people can truly go unwind and decompress. Given the kind of area that we have and the aspirational nature of people and the mobile penetration, our third place has to be digital by default. That's where audiences can congregate, have a great time, truly unwind, decompress. And that's the audience we're building products for. And you're very right. At some point of time, that digital third place is a cafe. For some time else, it's a sports bar. For some time, for another time, it could be another place altogether. And that's where this happens. So sometimes it's micro learning where you're engaging, you're seeing what others are watching and you're getting inspired. Sometimes it's a drama where you're imagining yourself as this billionaire who inherited a fortune and had a different life altogether. Or sometimes it's an interaction. So I believe these digital third places will be where people will hang out, people will talk, maybe they'll talk or maybe they'll just passively engage. But it's going to be a way for people to spend meaningful time. And that's what we're sort of trying to build.

Utsav Somani: And in terms of various subscription models or monetization models, you think different products have different monetization models that have worked well? Like pay per episode? Or is it a subscription or ad award? Or like, what do you think is working? And how do you think you've learned across the journey about different revenue and monetization models?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: All three, all three will have a place in this. So we started with a microtransaction model. And I think we understood microtransaction better than anybody because we were able to crack the free to paid journey very well. And how do you create paid to somebody who becomes like a whale user for you, right? Somebody who's spending a lot of time, who's then becoming a power user, etc. From there, we also tried subscription. So a lot of story TV and master a subscription. Now we are also, I mean, this is the first platform we are talking about. We are also in stealth trying to launch an ad supported product, where we say that there has to be look, this product should be used by hundreds of millions of people. And there has to be a population use case, which will be a combination of microtransaction subscriptions and ads. And through that, there is an opportunity for having millions of Indians using our product on a daily basis. So ads is also something that we'll do. But, you know, traditionally in India, ad CPMs are a little lower. So it's hard to build a very large business on ads alone. So when you blend these together, you can, I think, build a very meaningful business with solid unit economics. So unit economics become the foundation of any business model we look at. If that makes sense, we go very deeper into that.

Utsav Somani: So I think all three about the unit economics, like how does it look for a microdrama category for other categories, other verticals as well?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Yeah. So at this point of time, what is very important for unit economic measurement in let's take microdrama or microlearning, one thing we tend to measure very closely is whatever monies you're deploying on performance, when is the first payback happening? That's the first big sign that your unit economics are solid. So that's something we measure fairly closely. And right now we're in a place where typically by month two or month three, we've already had our first full 100% payback. That means that anything you're going to get on top of that is going to be incremental revenue, which will lend very well to your LTV by CAC ratios. So that's something that has been true for both microdrama, microlearning. On ad models, it's slightly, the break-evens might be slightly later. But if you've built a product, which is very retention first, you will end up getting more repeat revenues and you won't have to spend money on retention. So that's something we are very consciously looking at. And our content costs have always been sort of very frugal because we've been able to have the best partnerships across the most impressive studios who work with us. And we work on very large bulk content production. So we are able to compress costs a little bit there.

Dhruv Sharma: I want to ask a related question, which is, you know, in the era of appointment viewing my guess is, you know, production teams had a long enough ramp to keep producing episode after episode. Now with microdramas, is there a lot of stress on production teams with or without the use of Gen AI to keep on putting new stuff out there?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Yeah, I think that's a great question. Let me put it this way. As looking at some data, there are users who are our top 10% users, right, who've spent the most time on Story TV. And this is a very Story TV specific example. Our power users in the last three months have consumed over 150 unique dramas. Like they've watched 150 dramas. That essentially means that they've spent like thousands of minutes on the product in just the last two, three months alone. And what that means is the appetite of consuming content is very large. So people love consuming content. It decompresses their day. They really enjoy. This is a format. Think of it in this manner as well. Why production teams become important here is this is the first time that premium content is being made for your phone. Never in the history has you only had UGC content being made, which was the TikTok era. This is the first time where professionally studio generated content, no UGC is being made for a vertical screen. So it's a whole new way of looking at content. Our mode hence ends up becoming velocity as well. Like a lot of people talk about how many new episodes did you ship? We don't talk about episodes. We talk about how many new series or how many new dramas did you ship? And that becomes the mode. So we're currently shipping like 500 minutes of content a single day. That's five new dramas, five or six new dramas. So when you operate at that. Yeah.

Utsav Somani: What sort of engine do you use or thinking do you use behind the scenes to learn with what former formats or genres or what series, what language, what direction is working in some of this content?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: So a large part of this, the real inherent workflow or the inherent mode here is your 1P data. Because at our vintage, we already have data of millions of users of understanding where did they click? Did the cliffhanger land or not? Was there a hook point that came too early or too late? What was the episode completion? As much as whether somebody pressed back on this episode or did they swipe and skip it all together? That helps you design a script engine, which will end up creating very close to what one would call a hit making machine. And it's a tall order, but that's what you need to create to be able to succeed.

Utsav Somani: Average completion rate on a series, on a popular series on the platform?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: A good series would have an average completion rate of around 70-75%. So that we're talking about a 100, 110 minute, 100 minute series, having an average watch time, AWM of about 70-75 minutes. That's massive at the kind of mouse scale we are at. So when you have to aspire to that, your mode becomes your data. Then how are you able to green light content, which has a better hit rate probability? And how are you able to do that at a certain velocity? Because your users want a lot of content. So typically we have a section on Story TV. It's called Just Launched. And whenever we do user calls, I've seen users, I'll call them and they will say, I've seen those 4 episodes, I've seen those 4 series already. And this is just one day after launch. So that's the appetite that people are having for this format. That means your velocity and green lighting has to come together.

Dhruv Sharma: I'm going to say this in jest, but I think the true test for master is going to be if it gets the same completion rate out of users that Story TV is getting.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Yeah, I think, you know, the only thing is that fiction and nonfiction have very different behavior altogether. Nonfiction is where a user needs to be motivated enough to pursue that skill because you can use, yeah, it's very human motivation. Fiction will always have more watch times and completion, but nonfiction has more usefulness and value that the end user is also getting. So you have to balance the two. And like master, I see as a very unique vantage point here because look, as a company, we understand video, we understand text. So it's almost the common infra. The video infra is common. The CMS is common. The payment SDK is common. The feed engine is common. If you build it like that, you can create a couple of products which can become market leading in that sense. One could have very high completion. One could have decent enough or very impressive watch times which lead to more retention and frequency. So that's sort of the way we at least like to think of it.

Utsav Somani: What are the categories that are doing well for you and master? Were you seeing good retention and good completion rate?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Two, three categories that are looking very interesting. One has been categories around personal growth. So what I've realized is wherever there is a category that speaks to a user's ambition, it does very well. So think, how do you earn money through side gigs at home? Like could you become a reseller in a particular platform? Can you start like a big search category that we realize we are getting is how do you start a business from home? Starting a dropshipping business, becoming a reseller, learning how to do a side hustle while being at home. So that's speaking to the aspiration of users. That's personal growth, personal finance. That becomes one category. Second that's doing well is upskilling. So learning English, learning AI. I realized that in India, people don't read as much as they like watching videos. So our chat GPT is going to be video GPT. It's not going to be text if you want to make it to a more population scale use case. So people like learning about AI by watching a one minute video about it. How can I learn that skill set? So that works very well on master. And then the usual sort of categories about information. So what if anything changed in the global world order or anything in government services, how does that change your life? So those three, four categories then follow.

Utsav Somani: But apart from like say other players in the market, you're also competing with attention from like Instagram or anything under the sun, right? Instagram also has this infotainment or education content as well. I mean, creators are active pretty much there also.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: I think anything, my view has always been also that anything that you're building in the attention economy is going to pretty much complete with everything including your sleep. Netflix, Reed Hastings very famously said that my competition is your sleep because I want you to complete that series. My view is that mobile premium content viewing is going to be more bite-sized and break-based in nature. So whenever you take a break, I want one of our products to come top of mind for you as a user to say, okay, I can spend these 15 minutes watching a story TV series. Like we want story to be the generic word for dramas there, right? When you feel like talking to somebody, hopefully we have a product which you use. When you feel like learning about a new skill, the edutainment category is something that master can own because you want to master some new skill there. So we're trying to own those break times for a user and provide them meaningful value at each time.

Utsav Somani: Talking about users, there's a live YouTube question. What is the audience split across demographics? North slash South and city tiers, tier one, two, three.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Yeah, that's a great one. Tier one plus tier two combined. So we have a measurement where metro slash tier one plus tier two, that together is about 67, 68% for us. A lot of people think that our audience must be tier three, tier four, which is not the case. It is actually tier one, tier two, 67, 68%, the rest being tier three. So because each of these products have, we don't do free products. They either have a paywall or they have microtransactions. The natural proclivity is more tier two, tier one favorite. So the city that is using our products the most is Delhi. Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, they are loving our products the most. In terms of gender split, we measure that very closely on story because that helps us make better dramas. It's almost 60-40, male, female. That helps us make better decisions in terms of what dramas to showcase and who to build for and a very younger audience. So that's the demographic. Like typically between the age group of 18 to 32 is the sweet spot.

Dhruv Sharma: Saurabh, I think great opportunity to get your insights on the most commonly misunderstood behavioral and spending patterns of the next billion users.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Yeah, one thing that we tend to misunderstand and where I feel a lot of products have gone wrong has been that we tend to price it very cheap and think that if it's a discretionary entertainment use case, somebody is not going to pay 30, more than 30, 40, 50 bucks. We tend to think from ad-supported lens from the very start. I fundamentally believe the opportunity is much larger because look, there's going to be about, if you cut across the entire population strata, there's about 450-500 million Indians at the center at an average of $2,500 GDP per capita. If you take about 2% of that or 1% of that as the discretionary entertainment expenditure, that's about $25, $40, $50 depending on what you cut it as, let's say $25. You're talking about a $12.5 billion discretionary entertainment category from middle India, where somebody is comfortable spending $2, $2.5 a month on just this discretionary entertainment. That's how you have to then look at your pricing, your revenue retention, and your workflows. Historically, we've looked at the missed opportunity has been that we have always looked at entertainment from a very UGC lens. That's never really worked. So from Story TV, we were very clear that we will be premium from the start. We will offer really curated premium content, known faces, good production houses that helps you spike in users, engagement, many, many other metrics.

Dhruv Sharma: That's been a misunderstood factor that we wanted to clear. I think that was the observation even with just regular television and cinema as well. The day they start taking their users or listeners or viewers for granted is when OTT just shot through the roof. Absolutely.

Utsav Somani: And there's one number from China, I think that surprised me. So I read this stat where in China, these micro dramas, where I think they originated from as well, they're bigger than the box office, the movie, regular theatrical box office as well. Do you see that ever happening in India?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: I see that happening as early as in two years or three years from now. I'll tell you in China, another mind boggling stat is a single player now has become bigger than their entire box office. So micro drama now is close to about a $9 billion category there, where Hongo alone is about six, six and a half billion dollars. Hongo is the product by ByteDance, their app for micro dramas. And they have just sort of scaled to a different level altogether. Again, all three models, micro transactions, ad subscriptions. Look, fundamentally, I believe this category comes bang in the middle of Netflix, like PGC content, but the form factor of Instagram reels, which is, I think, very fitting to the modern day attention span, the modern day feeling of getting to the chase or getting to the point very quickly. So the category fits in. The kind of things that are coming in this category are super aspirational. Stories around rags to riches, billionaire, alpha. I think all that will evolve. You will see an evolution from micro drama to micro content only.

Utsav Somani: So Sensor Tower's 2026 report, I think, flagged something like this, where short drama apps in India were being downloaded almost equally and occasionally more than mainstream platforms. So you see that trend is already happening. I think it's a revenue curve question. When does it add up?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Basically, 100 percent. And in that trend as well. So if you see Story TV there, we are the largest homegrown platform which has been downloaded the most. We are, I think, number four there, but ahead of the bigger guys like Hotstar, et cetera, as well. There's two big reasons for that. One is the kind of love that users have shown to micro drama because of the source of discovery. The source of discovery is still very much Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, where they discover a drama, hear about us, and then download us. So the love they've shown in terms of just engaging with the platform, word of mouth with others, leading to more downloads has been one. Second has been that this form factor has really caught on to the Indian audience because I think this was the missing fabric in the entertainment side. We had UGC and we had OTT. There was nothing really in the middle which could be satirized, which could be very engaging, and which could be for break time entertainment. So the Sensatar report very accurately captures that three out of the top 10 platforms which are most downloaded are micro drama platforms. So yeah, micro drama has been picking up very aggressively. And I think to one and a half billion dollars is the size of the entire film industry in India, one and a half or two billion. I think about two, three years, the size of this category can actually cross that.

Utsav Somani: When are we getting the TVF of micro dramas?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Hopefully very, very soon. You will hear the next big frontier would be when this truly becomes population scale, not limited to just one particular tier.

Utsav Somani: Are there any breakout stars like in the micro drama category as well? Like, I mean, there are movies and OTTs.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: So we have a series here, which is a corporate drama called Hacker King, which really broke out. We ended up doing a prequel, a sequel, and the actor there now, Jai Suni, is a very famous TV star. He's now being widely recognized only as the hero of Hacker King. He keeps telling me that that's become my core identity, which is always very heartening that when you get associated with a character so deeply. So you will see the applauses and TVFs of this coming in, hopefully they themselves or new production houses will sort of become that. So you'll see that moment in micro drama very soon. And hopefully we become that platform of choice for everyone.

Dhruv Sharma: It's almost like IPL in a sense. Saurabh, I have one closing question for you. I don't know if Utsav might have one after, which is that your users trust you or entrust you with their attention. And what's your philosophy around, you know, editorial, what's the editorial philosophy and around censorship because they trust you with their attention?

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: So one thing, that's a great question. And one thing we've been very, very clear about, Dhruv, is that we want to build family content for the entire Story TV audience. So you will never see us compromising on quality or doing anything which will remotely not be suitable for family content viewing. Although it's a very personal consumption product, I would want you to be super comfortable watching this micro drama in front of like tens of people around you. So one is being super comfortable around that. So that means that we embrace categories like political dramas, family dramas, Raj Churuchu's, Billionaire, etc. Rather than traditionally relying on the romanticy genre, which was what was usually doing very well in OTT in India. So one, skipping that and doing these other genres. Second, a certain high bar of quality. So while we may ship 500 minutes of new content every day, you will always see us keeping a very high bar for what shows get greenlit, what kind of production houses we work with, what are the scripts. So you'll not see us compromising on camera, editorial, glossiness, lighting, at least keeping a very good bar for what we would call as production grade quality. And hopefully we keep getting better at that. So given the trust that users have given us on both mindshare, moneyshare, many, many factors, we take retention very seriously. And our retention signifies that people are really loving us in that sense.

Utsav Somani: Thank you for coming on our show. Wishing you all the best, Saurav.

Saurabh Pandey - Founder & CEO, Eloelo Group: Thanks. Thanks, Utsav. Thanks, Dhruv. Great to be here.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. All right, listeners, we're moving on to our next segment. We have Kiran with us from Sahamati Labs. Kiran, welcome to the show.

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on the show.

Utsav Somani: No, no. So why don't we start with a basic explainer for our listeners here on what the account aggregator framework is and what work Sahamati is doing to promote it.

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: So the account aggregator framework is India's open finance framework. It has been named account aggregator, you know, which went back almost 10 years ago. The account aggregator framework enables consumers, people like you and me, to share our financial information from banks to other financial service providers for services. So it could be for a loan. It could be for insurance. It could be for personal finance management. It could be for wealth management and so on and so forth. So what you do is you share your data via an account aggregator who is essentially a consent manager where you connect your bank account and you share the data from your bank account to a service provider. Let's say it's a loan provider, for example. Your bank statements go digitally in real time instantly to the provider or service. So it solves a lot of problems. It solves problems of, you know, instead of you having to download PDFs and then send an email or uploading it on some app, this goes digitally directly. So it solves a lot of problems for the user. It's fast. For the loan provider, it ensures that the data that they're getting or the PDF or the data that they're getting from the bank is completely fraud free. So it comes straight from the source. So there are several benefits that the ecosystem gets and the users get.

Utsav Somani: And what kind of innovations are you cooking up at Samathi Labs right now?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: So at Samathi Labs, there are a couple of things. You know, the ecosystem has scaled significantly in India. So we have over a thousand participants, banks and financial institutions. You know, you can name them and all of them are on the ecosystem right now. So our job is to figure out how we're going to take this to the next level. So there are programs and projects that we look at solving ecosystem problems in the first place. And secondly, we're looking at how do we connect open financing ecosystems globally. So, for example, if I were to talk about the global connection, it's can we enable NRIs to share their data with a loan provider in India for a home loan in India without having to set up a bank account in India so they could share their financial data from the U.S. bank, for instance, and get a loan in India. That's one of the projects. Other project is the next level that we want to take the account aggregator is naturally into the agentic AI world and build out the next version, which is an agentic AI based framework itself. So these are some of the projects that we're working on. But of course, there are many more that we keep researching and start getting into it as we go forward.

Dhruv Sharma: Kiran, we'd love to ask a few quick follow ups on all of the things that you said, right? So number one, a lot of us on the outside think of account aggregators as UPI's natural successor. And by definition, it's got to be more ambitious. But in many people's minds, it's not seen the same adoption curve as UPI just yet. Can you explain to us why that is the case and what's the inherent complexity and how this is just going to have an adoption curve of its own?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: So UPI is in the payment space. Of course. It's a consumer, it's in the consumer space largely. It connects B2C model. Account aggregator is a pure B2B business. So you don't see B2B every day in front of you. So as a consumer, as a person, you don't experience it every day. Even the way you discover an account aggregator is when you're going through a process of obtaining a loan. So you go to, let's say, a loan provider, you are applying for a loan, and that's where you discover an account aggregator. So people don't even know that that is actually a separate entity that exists, and that is part of the framework. So the framework is largely hidden to a great extent. So the total number of loans that are closed to the ecosystem is about 24,000 crores a month, right? The usage is huge. We are probably the largest open finance ecosystem in the world today that exists. And the kind of progress that we make is seen by everybody around the world. So I was in Cape Town last week, and more people are looking at the data from India and trying to figure out how they can actually make it work in their own countries. So in terms of where we are as an open finance ecosystem in India, I think we are massive in terms of usage. So will we cross the total number of users that UPI has at some point? That will have to wait and see over the next few years. Obviously, we started much after UPI. So we'll see how it goes from here.

Dhruv Sharma: And I believe even in terms of fulfilled consent, and if I'm not mistaken, I think Samathi literally means consent, already crossed the threshold of about 400 million, I think.

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: Yeah. So I think accumulatively, we've already crossed that. We're talking about 25 million a month at this point, every month. So you already crossed close to about 300 million when they were outside. So that's the kind of scale that our account aggregator already has. And it is growing really fast. So the adoption has been great for us. It took off from about 2023. We started seeing the rocket ship, you know, just taking off. And it's been a hopeful growth from there on.

Utsav Somani: And I remember meeting Mr. Mahesh in your office in 2023 as well, when I think he was trying to do partnerships with VC firms and angel investors in the country. I remember very fondly when he mentioned that I think personal loans will be one of the first verticals that he goes after via the AA framework. But you're also focusing on insurance and wealth. Those categories will come in as well. And this framework of consent-based data sharing, I think, can be extended to health and many other things. Is that something that you're working on actively right now? Or is finance the only focus?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: No. So lending personal loans was, like Mahesh mentioned then, has been literally the one that has helped the account aggregator see great usage. But having said that, our next use cases have been personal finance management, followed by insurance, which is now starting to take off, and wealth management as well. So these are the four use cases, sort of many use cases, that we think over the next few years you'll start seeing immense growth. So I think a few weeks back we had LIC join the ecosystem as well, which brings in insurance as the largest insurance player in India on the ecosystem. So you will start seeing insurance being one of the largest use cases there.

Utsav Somani: To Dhruv's point, UPI has a lot of these private players, like I mean, say PhonePe and PayTM, which have done incentive-based growth. I think that has been a key proponent to, I think, faster adoption for that consumer-facing product as well. Do you think, is there an element of, with the new capital raise and infusion by our partners as well from the ecosystem, is there something along those lines? That you will think about?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: So when you think about incentives, you mean incentives for the ecosystem?

Utsav Somani: Yeah, incentives for usage, growth.

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: So the usage is growing primarily because the ecosystem is seeing huge benefits from it. So one of the studies showed that some of the players were spending about 400 rupees to process a loan application. And when they started using account aggregates, it dropped to 100 rupees. So the processing time dropped from days to under a day and an hour now. So especially when it comes to parcel loans, everything is digital. So that's the benefit that the consumers are getting. And that's the benefit that the ecosystem is getting. So you're getting a lot of push from many of the ecosystem players themselves to start adopting this and start to push this ecosystem. So the incentive is built inherently already in the system.

Dhruv Sharma: And Kiran, as we think about expanding outwards, and you were talking about like cross-border interoperability, help us understand what happens behind the scenes. Is it so that data regulators from multiple jurisdictions come together and agree to certain data sharing frameworks? Because all of them are very protective of their respective sovereign data and PII.

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: Yeah, I think that's going to be the most important thing that could happen in the world if all the banks agree to a certain protocol and to come together. So there is an institution called the Bank of International Settlements, BIS. So they just ran a project called Project Apartha, where we were participants as well, so was RBI, where we were testing out a cross-border sandbox to see how data could be shared across. And BIS is essentially a body which is comprised of central banks around the globe. So we had certain central banks who are participating in it very actively. And there is some interest from participants there. But having said that, we are also excluding bilaterals along certain corridors. So for example, India-US corridor, India-UA corridor, India-UK corridor. So and then that makes it a little more easier because we then have to talk to our central bank and then convince the central bank on the other side to see how it would benefit both countries from this data sharing. So while we are looking at connecting NRIs back home, the question is, can their businesses benefit by data that's coming from India, for example? So I think that's where there'll have to be some kind of a play around for both sides. And that's what we're working on.

Utsav Somani: And I think no interview these days is complete without asking the AI question. You have IKEA, which you've, I think, recently launched. It's something to do with AI and the AI ecosystem. And then you have a Google partnership also. Can you share a little bit more about these two things?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: So IKEA is essentially our fraud management platform. So the first fraud that we've been working on is a loan fraud, where we are looking at detecting loan frauds in real time. So if there is somebody stacking up loans, you will know instantly whether this person has been stacking up loans for 20, 30, 40 lenders. And then the lender can make a decision whether to give a loan or not. And that's where we are looking at layering AI on top to help with predictions and to make decisions to help the ecosystem understand whether this is a risky choice or not.

Utsav Somani: And the Google Cloud partnership?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: So the Google Cloud partnership has been essentially to build many of these platforms. So for example, we use confidential computing in these platforms so that we don't see any data, neither does Google see any data or any of the other participants. So for example, in the loan fraud detection, the lender says a number, a mobile number of users that they want to check for fraud. That is not seen by us and that is not seen by anybody else in the system. So we use Google infrastructure for that.

Dhruv Sharma: Well, I don't know if it's account aggregators mandate as such, but we'd love to get your thoughts on just general design principles when one is thinking of a high scale or a population scale product that will ultimately go into the hands of vulnerable, you might say even digitally inexperienced users. How do you design it in such a way that not only is it helpful for them, but it also never takes undue advantage of them or doesn't exploit any vulnerabilities?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: No, I think that's a great question, right? So I think that's the question that we keep working on all the time. So for the first part, we're working to see how we can get more MSMEs to start using this platform and to get included into the formal financial system, right? We see the gap is massive at this point. So how do you get them to start using it? That's the first part. The second part is we actually built a conversational AI tool and we took it to to certain areas in Bombay and Pune to see how we could get underserved folks to try and listen to what account aggregator would do to them conversationally and see if that resonates with those folks. So for us, we think that while everything is in English or in Indian languages, many people might prefer using a conversational format. And the other thing that we're looking at is what we call assisted journeys, where there are certain agents who could help these folks with understanding how account aggregator works and assist them with whatever services they need. So there are a number of these programs that we're working on that will actually go down to the other market segments, the underserved part of the society.

Utsav Somani: As a closing note for our listeners here, many of them are potential founders. So what can they build as our economy is increasingly becoming financialized? What can they build on top of the account aggregator framework to drive more adoption, more excitement around this ecosystem?

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: I think there's a ton of things that they can do. So I think when it comes to wealth management, when it comes to cross-border use cases, when it comes to lending itself, when it comes to using AI to make things better, faster, safer, I think there's a ton of work to do. So what we do is at Lab, we work with startups and we help them with building the platforms that we're talking about. And we would invite more startups to come and join hands with us. And to see each of these programs, we actually work with the startups themselves and see how we can promote these startups going forward with not just the solutions, not just the platform itself, but also about getting them potential access to the ecosystem.

Utsav Somani: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on our show today and sharing your journey with us, Kiran. Thank you.

Kiran Gopinath - Founder & Head, Sahamati Labs: Thank you for having me.

Utsav Somani: Thank you. All right, Dhruv, do you want to talk about the weekend that we just had in Darjeeling with one of the guests who's come on the show, Alt Carbon?

Dhruv Sharma: I definitely want to talk about the weekend, but I'm going to start by asking you what was the big highlight for you. But before you say anything, I want to tell our listeners that I had no idea what's actually a hidden talent, which is we had a cricket match while we were there and he's saying he hadn't played in 10 years. But if our team got anywhere, it was because he was our all-rounder.

Utsav Somani: Not at all, not at all. But let me recap what the weekend was. So basically, I think we went to Darjeeling or a town nearby called Siripuri, where we based 20 founders there. And I think the idea was to spend two days with this company called Alt Carbon. You should check them out. Awesome design company doing real serious stuff in climate tech. They've delivered the first enhanced rock weathering mechanisms, carbon credits extracted from that mechanism. And they've got clients like Mitsubishi, Stripe, Google. And I mean, it's just insane what they've done. And they have these two major projects, which I'll let Dhruv tell you more about. But I think the itinerary was fairly exciting. We visited the climate labs. We visited the fields. Then we had some really good musical evening with them and their parents as well. And then next day was all about sports. And then we spent a very awesome evening. I think that was pretty much, I think, the biggest highlight for me, where we did moonlight tea plucking with the locals there, with the tribes living there. And I think it was just fascinating to experience all of that on almost a full moon night, I think. So that truly was the highlight, which Sparsh and Shrey, the founders, their mom, left the evening for us. And I think that was just truly magical for me.

Dhruv Sharma: That was so special. You know, the one thing I realized, Utsav, is that you cannot understand the carbon market from a distance. You can't understand it from environmental blogs, maybe not even our TON show probably didn't do enough justice to it, right? It took us to go there on site and see for ourselves with our own eyes what was going on. You know, they have this technique called enhanced rock weathering. You need to literally, you know, enter a paddy field, stand next to a pile of basalt and see how it's sprinkled and then actually even have rainfall all over it, which happened while we were there, and bring back samples with you to the lab and then see how those samples are tested to see how the, you know, how science and paper becomes a fact on the ground. And, yeah, I think all carbon.

Utsav Somani: That was the Darjeeling revival project. What's the other one?

Dhruv Sharma: The other one is, are we talking about the Bengal Renaissance project? Yes, that's the other one.

Utsav Somani: Biochar plant.

Dhruv Sharma: Sorry?

Utsav Somani: The biochar plant.

Dhruv Sharma: The biochar plant. Yes, the biochar plant. Yes. And, you know, so we entered a warehouse. There was this newly commissioned plant, which right now has a, it's actually even operating subcapacity, but it can literally take biomass and turn it into something that's useful, which we call biochar. But, you know, the coolest thing was against the backdrop of all of that, they spoke about the work that they do. And all I'll say is that it was almost like a, it was like one of those SpaceX kind of, you know, presentations and just very fun to watch. Then, of course, the next day we went to the T-estate and this one was on the slopes, saw maybe the prettiest sunset, at least I've seen in a while, and then came back to the moon night parking.

Utsav Somani: I mean, we're talking about AI all day and productivity, all of that. And like, then that's that end of the spectrum where you're so far away from like this hustle and bustle of the city and the tools and stuff. And you're actually doing stuff on ground. And I think that's when you realize that all of that stuff will have to be done so that we can use our AI tools and talk about saving the world. But those guys are actually saving the world and the planet. So I think it's pretty cool and kudos to them. We've hosted the creative design director on the show as well, Amrita. She runs this magazine called All2Mag where they're trying to bring art and science together. And I think that's a beautiful way of storytelling. And I think it's a lesson for all deep tech founders. And I wish we can have them back on the show again to talk more about narrative building for industries which are typically boring. But just I think if delivered right, I think they can get a lot more people excited about their mission. And I think maybe attract even more talent to their spaces as well, along with capital. Talking about deep tech, let's quickly recap what's happening in the world. I mean, space tech is hot. Pixel is partnering with Sarvam to bring Sorbonne AI to the orbit. So India's first orbital data center satellite. I think that's pretty exciting. Skyroot Aerospace is on the cusp of launching India's first privately built orbital rocket, Vikram-1, within a few weeks, actually. And space tech startup Galaxy Eye is, I think I got the name right, successfully launched its first Earth observation satellite mission, Drishti, aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9, which is when?

Dhruv Sharma: It's an optical satellite, two in one. We spoke with the founder of Pearsight, who's building a SAR satellite. This one is a two in one. But yeah, I'm in space in India.

Utsav Somani: It's an OptoSAR, right? If I'm reading it correctly. Yes, that's what I said, two in one. Yeah, pretty exciting. And other transactional data, I think UpGrad is acquiring an academy. The number is finally out, 2055 crores is what the transaction is closing it at. All equity deal with 900 crores in bank for an academy. So yeah, consolidation in their tech space. Wishing all the teams a very best ahead. That's it from our side, I think, Dhruv. That is it for today. All right, everyone. See you on Wednesday. Bye-bye.