India DeepTech

Transcript

[music] [music] Yeah. So, I'd love to chat anyway like uh >> Yeah, we're waiting for you. >> Oh, yeah. Okay. >> Yeah. How how's it been so far? >> It's been great. >> I don't think uh >> very good. And thank you and congrats to everyone who's here for the best talk of DevCon 2026 Mumbai. So I appreciate you all being here. >> Yeah. Like um like did you folks attend any other talks uh at DevCon? Was did you just come in for this >> so far?

>> Just for this but this is my third DevCon. >> Is your third Devcon? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Really? Uh which ones did you go to? >> Shanghai and London. Oh, that's Wait, what years were that? >> 15, 16. >> Crazy. Okay. I had no idea that you had a veteran here. Um, no. Great to great to have you back. I think uh yeah, then were you just like, okay, only if it's in Mumbai, then I'm going to go. I'm not going to like I just got lucky that it's in Mumbai this year. And I think it's a good thing. You guys have been doing great work with ETH India to really put India on the map for Ethereum and crypto globally. So welld deserved I would say >> and uh yeah do you plan to come uh tomorrow for session? We finally got the

the person you were looking forward to meeting. Uh so we have a special session tomorrow at uh 400 p.m. Uh do come for that. Uh we have Mr. Bitu joining us. U for it. Uh I don't know if you heard of Bitu Davai. So it's a small promo. Uh I'm just going to promo the next session. So yeah, just just come for our next session tomorrow uh at 4 pm on the India stage. We're going to have a bunch of folks um including I'm not sure if you you'll be able to make it but then there's um there there's Arnav who for sure is going to who's promised me he's going to

make it to the panel tomorrow. Um and um and a couple of other folks who really care about you know building um building in like um building tech sol that can help you know like make India beautiful again right that's that's the that's the sort of uh thing that we're going for um so I have an interesting set of folks it's going to be more like a discussion not so much of a panel um and then yeah I think I finally have someone uh more qualified than me to take up this panel. Uh and he's finally made it uh and yeah should be here uh is here soon. So just while

he gets on stage just so you know who he's talking about there's this guy called Betu Tabahi who's from West Bengal I think >> who is a teenager who just decided to clean up the really dirty rivers and lakes that we have in India by himself >> and he would just go and clean up eventually volunteers joined him and he's done a lot for sort of ocean and river cleanup so he's speaking tomorrow at 4 p.m. >> speaking tomorrow at 4 p.m. Amazing. >> Yeah. Right. Cool. We have one of Yeah. Thanks. >> All right. Thanks, Denver. Hey. Hey, everyone.

>> So, I always have this like spiel about how India will have the biggest cities of the future. Our urbanization problem is in some ways unparalleled. Right. Sure. In some ways, one thinks of the the equivalently sized country that is our neighbor that is China. But in some ways, China has tools to combat this problem that we don't. The the fact that in in China the government can create new cities by government fiat or restrict migration into their their existing cities. But we don't have any such tool in India, Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore will continue to grow. in some ways Bangalore

that has more than doubled in the last two decades uh mean that the the scale at which our civic and urban problems uh continue to rise and compound will will continue to uh be the case in the in the time to time to come. So I would like to direct my first question to to you Angad. How did you get into working at Prawn? What is the what is like the the bottom line ambition? Where are where are things headed? Um yeah I think uh I grew up with asthma in India and while I could move to a country with a cleaner environment couldn't expect friends and family to do the same and today 99% of the human population breathes unhealthy air and um

when you're 19 or 20 uh and you try something risky and it doesn't work out you don't lose anything. So the idea was is it feasible to build a Tesla for air and we started with very utopian ambitious idea that we want to rebuild Earth's atmosphere and [snorts] to do that you want to solve air pollution and remove greenhouse gases at planetary scale um to and then so of we built those things and eventually realized the first milestone should be indoor spaces where we spend 90% of our time and HWAC by itself itself is over a century old.

So is there a way that rooms can optimize themselves for human physiology? So every space you spend time in helps you uh sleep better, recover faster, have better cognition and performance. Uh and living indoors should give you the same experience as living outdoors. >> I remember I came across Brown when I was I had this phase where I was obsessed about indoor CO2 levels. as one of the u I feel the the great efforts at combating the quality of air indoors.

Danosh, you're working on one of the most essential building blocks of our of our future to come. How do we manufacture things in the first place? Now, what is the what is the intention and what is the logic at XLogic? >> Yeah. Um [clears throat] the reason see I've always been into robotics since I as a kid but when I was 18 or 19 I was reading KL Marx right and then he talks about this utopia where um I mean basically like all of manufacturing is solved and then everyone you know lives a peaceful and harmonious life and so on. I mean in a way it's it's really a good uh thing right but uh why hasn't it been solved?

Was it because maybe KL Marx was uh you know way ahead of his time and there was not enough tech to solve uh you know his vision right so in a way I would I mean uh inspired by that uh I kind of wanted to solve that side of the world like where you have manufacturing abundance and that enables a lot of things downstream and you know people live a happy life forever. So, you know, that's what uh you know, inspired me to start this company.

>> Love that. Uh favorite uh like founder motivation from from Karl Marx. >> Yeah. Capitalist >> Arman, in the years I've known you, you have uh you have discovered and supported so many of India's youngest builders. Do you think something has changed in the recent years? >> Yeah, definitely. I think um we've probably had decades of compounding that are now beginning to really you know I have this theory which is that there was a report recently I don't know if you guys read it it said that India has lifted some 426 million people out of extreme poverty in the last two or three decades. So if you go back to 2009 some

36 30% of the population lived in extreme poverty. Today that figure is depending on who you ask between 0 to 5%. Whatever the reality is, lots of people now, although they aren't rich by any means, they're not struggling for basic survival. I think that's one reason that gives people the flexibility and freedom to dream of doing really ambitious things rather than just trying to make ends meet. Secondly, we have a lot of infrastructure which been which has been built out which supports founders, capital infrastructure, bank accounts, investor capital availability, all that kind of stuff. And the third thing is that limiting beliefs are beginning to like melt away. This company Pixel recently was in the news.

It was being criticized and stuff. But that's one example of a company which I think just inspires people. You know, I think everyone here is probably inspired by SpaceX and Elon Musk. But closer to home, Pixel has shown many young Indian builders that if two college kids can build a space tech company which puts satellites in space, why can't somebody else do it? So, I think that's what's really changed is this belief. It's that and the fact that all these stories become like national news so so much faster than they used to. It's uh uh and someone growing up now has in some ways access to both this and just the the you know the the global maxima and all the uh stories of great

accomplishment from all over the world and just makes all of this feel so much more feasible compared to let's say our parents' generation. So yeah, before this we were also just catching up and we were talking about what our different like side projects and other ideas are and D you and I were just talking about uh about ideas in in food quality. >> Yeah. So like you know continuing my uh you know >> hallmarks.

>> No of course. Yeah. So the reason uh you know it motivated me. So I think there should be like two kinds of uh abundance. One kind of supporting each other that makes people truly not care about money in the future. So one is food right which is at the core of everything and manufacturing that enables everything else and in some sort of course like uh food abundance too. So yeah, I mean like one of something that I really want to work on once like you know Xlogic is kind of at a certain stage is that like how can we build like you know cityscale robots to solve for food abundance. The food in India is very uh toxic. It's very uh

non-nutritious like your average meal in India is not nutritious enough. So how can you solve nutritious meal for a scale of you know at for people at the scale of India. So maybe you just build city scale robots that can do farming autonomously, do logistics autonomously and uh you know deliver cook autonomously and and deliver to you know hands of customers at maybe like 50 rupees a meal. You know that's what uh you know is something that's very interested and I'm I'm very interested and want to solve maybe uh soon.

I've always found that when you ask like the the the best people you know about what else is on their minds, you always get very interesting answers. You know, I uh and to your point about food quality, I was just thinking about how and it's like a recurring thing for us at at Lranch Point is just the how some problems are just so like well fitted to being solved in India. Like sure RO and UV were not invented in India but there's a way in which water purifiers as a as a product category scaled in India like they did nowhere else right I was visiting one of our uh friends houses in SF and his uh I realized his

water purifier cost like $800 whereas in India one can get one of these for a tenth the cost if not cheaper or more accessible via like a subscription model or something like that and so um angut I'm wondering how how do you see people uh adopting air purifiers? You know, obviously in in Delhi that that that moment feels like it is already passed, but what does that look like for the the rest of India? Um and especially the parts that have air quality just as bad if not worse.

>> I think you largely think about breathing when you can't breathe, right? So the urgency to act on air comes against some calamity or or personal uh challenge. So the I think adoption has grown crazy crazy year on year. I think about 40 to 50% growth every year this season in domestic air purifier sales. Um but I think the path to solving it at scale in a country like India is from an infrastructure perspective not isolatedly from consumer electronics. Um, I very candidly say we sell machines to the rich and ultra rich

because if you're trying to uh build unique functionality, better experiences for people, the cost of the hardware, software, everything is much higher and as a result you sort of start with a notchstar product and then you scale manufacturing to bring it to more people like this year itself I think hive is 30% more affordable Um we have seen faster decision making. There's lesser conversations on discounts which is um great but how do you get it to 10 million devices in India is a little bit unlikely. So the only path is to interface with HWAC and make it experiential and aspirational

and health focused. And what's the story for adoption at seat at factories and and in manufacturing? >> Um I I think it's fortunately unfortunately signaling today. Uh it is cheaper to get away with the penalty than to say spend $20 million with us to fix it for a factory. Um and so until that urgency is in place, it's unlikely to scale at a venture pace outcome. Um that's why we focused on indoor spaces where we can meaningfully have an impact on individuals and factories which are highly sensitive. So whether it's

defense, robotics, drones where the dust in the air, the moisture in the air has an impact on the equipment itself becomes a very fast decision. to the point of what technologies can and can't be like supported by venture I don't do you see that changing in India do you do you see people like uh building things that may not have the cleanest like pathway to being supported by by capital uh as it is >> sorry what's the question are people building things that are not >> as in like do you like how do people I guess I I guess for for any any good

founder with the fiduciary duty who is just focused on you know what the market supports but is also then looking at problems here at home and realizing that hey maybe the maybe the capital conditions aren't the best to do this sort of work but they still want to do it like what do you think the answers are like is it something like hey you know this like you know like hold on the the help is coming or what is the what is someone let's say like like Anga when you were you know back in Georgia and you were like you know working on what would become PR and you were thinking about um questions around around funding like h how does that environment come to be

>> so I think one thing that's very positive for people in India who are trying to build things that are maybe like breakthrough long horizon futuristic ideas is that the world is pretty flat. There's a lot of capital out there in the world and it's easier than ever to access capital from the US, from Europe, from different parts of the world. And even within India, there's more people now willing to kind of take risk. There are certain kinds of investors who are well suited to certain kinds of businesses. Some of them get very excited about super long horizon breakthrough things. Uh others are pure kind of like thesis investors who want to invest in the next hot thing. Some are founder investors who just look at what the founder does. Um, sometimes

it's hard to find the right investor for a company. Um, just because there's so many different investors out there and so many companies, it becomes like a matching problem. But I think that the I think we're definitely going in the right direction in terms of both founder quality and availability of risk capital. I guess what are some very unconventional ways where you have found people or just corners of the the country let's say >> um I think one of the most powerful channels has been media so um we have a newsletter called Tiger Feathers and we write essays so sometimes people come up

to us and just recognize us and those have been some of the most you know important relationships we've had is through YouTube channel content we've put out or uh essays we've put out. Um the rest is just being very curious, you know, just trying to talk to as many people as possible, including high school students, because there's no reason why they can't do amazing stuff. I'm sure all of us know some really smart high schoolers or have seen founders who've built things from school. you think as some of the standard ways in which people have uh or or rather the one of the things that high schools at least when I was in high

school were uh looking at one of the ways to prove yourself used to be that hey I can go you know build a fantastic piece of software you know reach reach a lot of people on the internet get distribution that way you know pro prove that I have that capacity to build things. And now in this world as that's become like way more um where software itself has become way more commodified like what is the what are signals that and this is kind of a question for everyone like what are what are the hallmarks of a good builder these days?

>> Sorry what's the hallmark of >> like what are the hallmarks of a good builder? a builder. >> Let's ask the good builders, you know. [laughter] >> Yeah. I mean, it'll be wrong of me to talk about myself. >> Well, actually, maybe the way to answer it is like if you wanted to find someone out in the wild to hire, what would be something that would just be like, hey, this is the person I want. >> I think few things that uh I look for in people uh who I'm hiring. Uh right. So we hire builders and usually it's one really good sign is that they worked on a lot of side projects um that they don't have to work on. For

example, maybe if their course work doesn't have to need them to build an app or something, but they still ended up you know deploying an app like making some money. I think uh that's an intent which is a very good sign. So just build a lot of projects. Yeah, I'll just add very curious and high agency. You know, I think it of course it's very impressive if somebody builds like an amazing robot or like a laser or something like that, but even if somebody isn't technical, the abil the range of things they can accomplish now has increased so much. Maybe many of you guys saw an X, there was like a designer who made a video which got like some 5 or 10 million views. This girl

made a video to get herself hired. you know anybody can I mean okay it's a very accomplished piece of film but you can make anything now using AI agents so having that agency to go and actually build stuff is important >> I I think I look for urgency uh highest like why do you do what you do and if you really put to the test would you continue to uh do better um and I think like they correctly identified um you know ownership outside the call of duty.

>> Uh and so does the outcome matter or does the activity matter? Cuz I think in within next 24 months, I don't think technology is going to be a moat. Uh only distribution and brand recall may be a moat cuz anyone can build anything. Um in fact, so many times uh we've been able to push out parts in four five hours which would otherwise take a few days for an engineer to CAD from scratch. and uh manufacture. So I think hiring to as your first few engineers, yeah, absolutely. Agency and urgency, hiring for scale, then that's largely tied to been there, done that. Um so

you're not spending the time to relearn the the basics. >> In some ways, like there's still that value in experience, but you you want this ownership. You want this this agency. Dash in some ways you're building a very powerful primitive. I feel like not enough has been talked about that. >> Yeah. >> So what we are building is wayos of factories right so there are different types of factories let's say yellow cab equivalent and Ubers of the you know factories where they aggregate a bunch of uh yellow cabs and there's whimos right. So we build wayos of

factories. What does it mean? So we build an entire factory that acts like a robot which takes a piece of raw material in this in in our case it's a piece of sheet metal or a tube metal and then we use a bunch of robots within our own factory that works really autonomously uh you know that's guided by software you know all the processes are planned by software and then it executes it autonomously to make an end product right so so that's what we Um so right now it's very um it's a very humanized process and uh due

to that like there's a lot of uh quality issues and uh you know it's just there's like a lot of uh problems with you know high quality output which we hope to solve with uh you know factories because like a lot of people don't want to work in factories anymore. These are works like welding and things like that. So the way I'm looking at the world, uh, it's going to be like highly automated factories like ours deployed in different parts of the world that'll be able to take a part made by a human or an or an AI agent from, you know, designed to production autonomously and send the part out, right? That's what we're building. to your point about like it being hard to hire people to work in the factories. This is a a a complaint that I've heard a lot from uh many many

like factory owners that hey we're just having the worst time hiring. They're not able their own children are interested in any career but what they have been they've been doing with their lives and so it's like >> yeah how and in some ways it's like an urbanization problem like why are why are the places where the factories are not nice places to live right >> yeah I mean like even the salaries of welders are way too high cuz no one wants to do the job anymore welders we used to hire used to cost 80,000 rupees a month uh TCS uh you they used to pay 25,000 rupees. No offense but uh like you know these guys get paid really a lot because there's a demand for good welders. So so yeah and it's true that I mean why would you want to work in a

polluted environment? I can't you know work in uh a factory for more than 5 minutes. It's very polluting right so you got to have like really good robots doing these works in my opinion and that's what we're building. I do want to ask like one final question which is in some ways going out to this every every person who aspires to you know like work on any of the hard problems that are headed our way and question open to everyone here on the panel but what what is the uh given the the state of the world we're looking at like what what is the what is the call to action what what would you ask people to be I think whatever you do, just do

something that's authentic to you that you care about. Don't do something because you think it's what you should be doing, what like somebody else wants you to do. Just do something that that calls to you inside cuz that's when you'll do your best work. And we need people to do their best work to really expand what we produce as a species, >> right? It's like less pattern matching, more just authenticity, more yourself. [snorts] >> I don't have Yeah, I think >> [music]