Audio
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From a Hong Kong casino to Shell, Boeing, and Ikea, Saravana Kumar dreams of Coimbatore's first SaaS unicorn
In this episode, Saravana Kumar, founder and CEO of Kovai.co, talks about how he bootstrapped his company from one customer — a casino in Hong Kong — to thousands, including Shell, Boeing and Ikea, in a niche software area, growing to a $10 million ARR SaaS venture out of London and Coimbatore. Saravana — who went from a distance-learning MCA degree to a successful software entrepreneur — now wants to triple revenue by 2024 and then create the first SaaS unicorn from his home district in south India
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Kamalika Bhattacharya at QuoDeck on mobile gamified learning as an enterprise SaaS opportunity
In this episode, Kamalika Bhattacharya, cofounder and CEO of QuoDeck Technologies, talks about how she and her husband and co-founder Arijit Lahiri turned their passion for gaming into a business. She also talks about the pivot from award-winning board games for consumers to a SaaS platform for gamified mobile-based learning that has drawn some of the world's and India's biggest brands as customers—from Unilever to Flipkart
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Mayank Tiwari on ambition to make ReshaMandi the one home for natural fibre products anywhere
In this episode, Mayank Tiwari, co-founder and CEO of ReshaMandi, a natural fibres venture in Bengaluru, talks about how the company is seeing strong growth, having found its product-market fit, over the last 12 months. He also talks about the ambition to make the company the first destination for any natural fibre product in India and abroad, with complete traceability built on top of a strong digital tech backbone
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Shubham Vishvakarma on his 'Indian method' of metal extraction for EV battery cells and beyond
In this episode, Shubham Vishvakarma, founder and head of process engineering at Metastable Materials, talks about how he turned his research into a commercial venture to extract valuable metals that could go into India's electric vehicle battery cells and other applications. Shubham also talks about the R&D centre the company has opened in Bengaluru, and the longer-term plan to go beyond just closing the EV battery and cell life-cycle loop
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Anirudh Gupta and Siddhanth Jayaram on their vision for a one-click climate action revolution
In this episode, Anirudh Gupta and Siddhanth Jayaram, co-founders of Climes, talk about how they wanted to find a way to get people to take climate action, literally with the click of a button. Backed by investors including Sequoia and Kalaari, Anirudh and Siddhanth are integrating their tech with a growing list of brands to show consumers the carbon footprint of their purchases, and also give them a click-of-a-button option to neutralise it
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Story of post-independence India through the lens of Wagh Bakri and Rasesh Desai
Rasesh Desai, Managing Director of Wagh Tea Group, is the same age as independent India. Born in 1947, the third-generation entrepreneur has built Wagh Bakri into India's third largest packaged tea brand. Rajiv Singh takes us behind the scenes of how this cover story came to be and how the brand story played out with the chronicle of independent India
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InFocus: Vivek Goyal at Playshifu and Jatin Desai at Inflexor deep dive into the opportunities in AR and XR
In this episode, Vivek Goyal, co-founder and CEO of Playshifu, one of India's best-known AR startups, and Jatin Desai, a founding partner at Inflexor Ventures, a sector-agnostic deep tech VC firm, talk about the world of augmented reality and extended reality. They discuss the current state of affairs, what might drive the industry onto its next phase of growth, including hardware breakthroughs, and where the opportunities might lie from the perspective of AR startups and investors in India
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Ankita Thakur on her fascination with data leading to a successful entrepreneurial journey at GeoIQ
In this episode, Ankita Thakur, co-founder and chief data officer at GeoIQ, talks about how her fascination with data brought out the idea that became her first successful startup. She also explains the connection between the availability of rich location data and real-world business outcomes for customers—made easy through APIs that GeoIQ offers, with all the heavy lifting happening in the backend. So much so that the profitable company is expecting to grow revenues 4X in the coming quarters
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Umakant Soni at ARTPARK on AI innovation and the dream of a trillion-dollar tech company from India
In this episode, Umakant Soni, co-founder and CEO of ARTPARK (AI and Robotics Technology Park) in Bengaluru, talks about supporting AI-led innovations with the hope that they will make a billion lives better and perhaps yield a trillion-dollar tech company from India. He also looks back at his entrepreneurial journey, and how the Indian startup ecosystem is changing, with a bit more depth today than when he started one of India's first chatbot startups
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Nitesh Nandy, co-founder and CTO, on why email still rocks, and plans ahead at Hiver
In this episode, Nitesh Nandy, co-founder and CTO at Hiver, talks about the long haul that he and his IIT Kharagpur senior Niraj Ranjan, embarked upon, and the multiple pivots they made, and the email-centric customer support product they've built for small and medium-sized businesses. With a recent $22 million series B funding, Nandy also talks about plans ahead at Hiver, which he expects will double its revenue this year
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Dhruva Goyal, co-founder and CEO of BugBase, on life as an ethical hacker and entrepreneur
In this episode, Dhruva Goyal, co-founder and CEO of BugBase, talks about how he and his schoolmate Kathan Desai went from tackling hackathons to dropping out of engineering college to set up their ethical hackers' marketplace. He also talks about bug bounties as a career choice and plans at their Bengaluru startup that has already won the second round of funding, after finding early backing from 100X VC