Audio
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Prashant Kumar on his plans for planet-friendly operations at scale at Zingbus
In this episode, Prashant Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Zingbus Technology, talks about how his venture is innovating inter-city bus travel, as road infrastructure improves in India, and technology facilitates data-driven dynamic pricing. He also talks about how Zingbus, backed by investors including Y Combinator, Info Edge Ventures and AdvantEdge Founders, is shifting towards a carbon-neutral future, including plans for electric buses, and experimenting with a way for passengers to pay to neutralise the carbon footprint of their trips
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InFocus: Narayan Subramaniam, Niraj Rajmohan and Vishesh Rajaram on building high-quality EVs in India for global markets
In this episode, Niraj Rajmohan and Narayan Subramaniam, cofounders of Ultraviolette Automotive, and Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner at Speciale Invest, talk about the importance of strong local R&D for the long-term growth of the EV sector in India. They also talk about how developing Ultraviolette's first electric motorcycle, called F77, which is soon to hit the market, has helped the company build a connected vehicle platform that can support multiple future products and services
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Neeraj Khandelwal at CoinDCX on the company's new mobile app Okto to boost decentralised finance
In this episode, Neeraj Khandelwal, cofounder and CTO of CoinDCX, one of India's largest crypto exchange providers, speaks with Forbes India during a three-day event organised by the company that ended August 28. Neeraj speaks about a new mobile app released by the company, called Okto, whose name is inspired by the octopus, in an effort to bring web3 and decentralised apps to the masses. Neeraj also talks about how decentralised finance is set to become a 'killer app'
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Simha Sadasiva and Henry Peter on being one step away from unicorn status at Ushur
In this episode, Simha Sadasiva and Henry Peter, co-founders of Ushur, a customer experience automation company in Silicon Valley and Bengaluru, talk about the unmet need for their solutions in the enterprise space — a need that is helping them to become a "hyper-growth" venture that is within striking distance of becoming a unicorn. Simha also talks about Silicon Valley founders' pay-it-forward attitude which is an important ingredient in that ecosystem's success
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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