Forbes India - The Startup Fridays Podcast

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Dec 2024

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About the show

The Startup Fridays Podcast is a weekly podcast series where Forbes India's Technology Editor Harichandan Arakali brings you conversations with startup entrepreneurs who are finding opportunities in solving problems in multiple areas. From agriculture and satellite imagery to digital finance and cryptocurrencies, venture capital investors, and more, meet the change agents on this podcast, out every Friday

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December 13, 20241 hr 12 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep12: Vishal Gupta’s optimism for unicorns turning wealth creators for India

In this episode, Vishal Gupta, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, talks about his career as a VC investor in India, and gives us an overview of the opportunities he sees on the basis of what Bessemer calls roadmaps that the firm develops for various sectors. In this conversation, recorded on November 26, Gupta also talks about how, from among today’s privately valued unicorns and those that have recently gone public, will arise the next generation of blue-chip companies and large-scale wealth creators in the country.

November 29, 202453 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep11: Zepic’s founders on their approach to marketing automation

In this episode, Naveen Venkat and Sreelesh Pillai talk about starting another company whose name starts with the letter z. Jokes apart, Venkat, a repeat software entrepreneur, and Pillai, a seasoned marketer, talk about why they think their new startup, Zepic, has something refreshing to offer enterprise customers in the crowded world of marketing automation. In this conversation, which was recorded on November 8, the two also talk about how India’s software products ecosystem is changing.

October 25, 20241 hr 3 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep10: Ideaspring’s partners on backing the next-gen deep techs in India

In this episode, Naganand Doraswamy and Suryaprakash Konanuru, co-founders Ideaspring Capital, talk about their enthusiasm for India’s early-stage deep tech startups. The two talk about how, while these startups are part of a nascent ecosystem, they are developing products that are sometimes coming to the fore for the first time anywhere. Doraswamy, who’s more involved with the commercial aspects and Konanuru, a full-time CTO and products mentor for the VC firm’s portfolio of startups are in the very early stage of raising their third fund.

August 16, 202449 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep9: Clairco and Sensiable join forces on decarbonizing buildings

In this episode, the founders of Clairco and Sensiable, talk about their vision as one company, as their energy management tech and solutions complement each other – offering customers like Brigade Group a fuller suite of products and services. Aayush Jha, Udayan Banerjee, Ashish Singh and Akshay Davasam, talk about how they can help customers monitor one laptop on one desk or an entire multistorey building. Backed by investors including Anicut Capital, the entrepreneurs are about to announce a new round of investment as well.

August 2, 20241 hr 2 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep8: Parithi Govindaraju on Okulo’s long-endurance drones for India

In this episode, Parithi Govindaraju, founder and CEO of Okulo Aerospace, gives us a quick update on the solar-electric hybrid long-endurance drones he and his team are developing, for what he describes as “persistent monitoring”. In this conversation, Parithi talks about the importance of such long-endurance UAVs for protecting India’s strategic assets – both civilian and military. He also touches upon his experience so far, in building a deep-tech company out of India.

July 12, 20241 hr 18 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep7: Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora’s experiment with tech and radical transparency

In this episode, Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora, founders of Plum Benefits Insurance Brokers, talk about how they are using tech to reimagine employee health benefits and insurance. In this conversation, Abhishek and Saurabh, who started Plum five years ago, also talk about how the journey so far has been one of discovering “a culture of radical transparency” with all stakeholders, which they say is an an important factor in their success.

June 28, 202452 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep6: AI for India – Jan Ki Baat, Sthaan and other use cases from People+ai

This episode is the second part of a conversation with Tanuj Bhojwani, head of People+ai, a non-profit effort that's working to find population-scale applications of artificial intelligence that are relevant to large problems in India. In this conversation, Tanuj about how both the development and applications of AI in India will be different from what we see happening in the rich countries. People+ai is funded by Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Infosys and former chairman of UIDAI, through his EkStep Foundation.

June 10, 202439 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep5: AI for India – how people+ai was born

In this episode, Tanuj Bhojwani, head of people+ai, a non-profit effort that’s working to find population-scale applications of artificial intelligence that are relevant to large problems in India, does a quick recounting of how the initiative was seeded. In this conversation, which I hope will be the first of many on AI for India, Bhojwani also gives us a quick overview of the four main objectives at people+ai, funded by Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Infosys and former chairman of UIDAI, via his EkStep Foundation.

April 5, 202444 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep4: Axio's founders unpack lessons from BNPL success

In this episode, Sashank Rishyasringa, and Gaurav Hinduja, co-founders of Axio, a buy-now-pay-later specialist in Bengaluru, talk about how, while a strong regulatory environment is critical in fintech, it can also become an enabler of innovation. Lower cost of money for “new entrants and challengers” with innovative financial products can benefit millions of consumers, which in turn can help India’s economic growth, they say.

February 16, 202456 min

Startup Fridays S5 Ep3: Ashok Jhunjhunwala on why India must say ‘yes we can’ to deep tech

In this episode, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, institute professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and president of IITM Research Park, Incubation Cell and RTBI, talks about why the next big push is needed now for India to become a nation of deep tech products over the next decade. He also asks that administrators and bureaucrats change their control mindset to allow our scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to fail without fear so that they can eventually succeed in building this ecosystem for India.