Time For Teenpreneurs ?
From Zepto to Delv.AI and Induced.ai it looks like college is passe. Read on to learn more.
Kids are in a hurry to grow up these days. Gone are the days when you had to finish college and then decide on an internship after which you would think of a job. And not to mention gain real experience with a real job before thinking of striking out on your own.
Thanks to Silicon Valley which made dropping out of college to build something like a business, fashionable, now kids don’t even want to finish school. How about Pranjali Awasthi, owner of Delv.AI an AI startup that has just raised $400K, already has ten employees, and is rearing to grow.
By the way, Delv.AI's core focus is using AI to enhance data extraction processes and reduce data isolation. Pranjali is only 16. Read her story here.
Hire AI workers: Apply for the Waitlist
In Jun 2023, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, at a conference in New Delhi, said in response to a question that India should not even attempt to create a Chat GPT equivalent as the infrastructure for such work is not here, and if it tried it would fail. Unsurprisingly it kicked up a storm with senior business leaders wanting to ‘accept the challenge’. Sam later tweeted that his comments were taken out of context and he meant something else.
Last week, on Oct 5, Sam did not hesitate to lead a seed funding round together with Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia) of $2.3 million into Induced.ai
Induced.AI is run by teenagers Ayush Pathak and Aryan Sharma.
Ayush was the founding engineer of the Web3 development platform Thirdweb while Sharma was the founding engineer at Layer3, a Web3 user acquisition and retention solution provider.
Induced.ai provides AI workers to automate your browser tasks. Induced agents run 24x7 in the cloud to complete manual tasks on a browser with human-like reasoning capabilities. In a chat window you can ask the AI to complete pending tasks, then add a new one as if you are in conversation and make changes.
Describe your workflow and tasks
Authentical and provide access
Activate workflow
Receive notifications and data output
You can now launch an array of AI workers on demand working on multiple browsers all at once, and watch them in action live.
Anti-bot detection, authentication, reasoning, and popular work suite applications come pre-integrated.
Receivables tracking on QuickBook, candidate screening, automated onboarding, scraping web for content, Creating Jira Tickets, QA and testing, shortlisting resumes, and auto Email writing are standard features. Enterprise custom features will be available.
A marquee investor team is already backing Induced. AI: Sam, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Balaji Srinivasan, OnDeck, peak XV partners, SignalFire, and some others.
By the way, Induced.ai is hiring Data Scientists and senior Engineers - Chromium, Frontend, and LLM. Apply here.
Enter Zepto!
Zepto is your next-door hyper-local quick commerce app that delivers 90% of your everyday needs in 10 minutes. The company was started by Stanford school dropouts Aadit and Kaivalya, who felt there was an opportunity to create a business by stocking fruits, vegetables, milk, groceries, and health and hygiene products for a typical Indian household and ensuring delivery within 10 minutes.
Mumbai-headquartered Zepto is now operational in 10 major cities in India, has a 1000-person team, raised a Series E round of $200 mil capital, and is valued at $1.4 billion.
The company was founded in 2021 by two 19-year-olds who were classmates at Stanford and decided to move all in when they hit upon the idea.
A massively supportive ecosystem of startup entrepreneurs, incubators, accelerators, angels, professors, parents, friends and family, investors, and business leaders are in plenty now to support a risk taker. And the question is - why wait to graduate? If you are striking out on your own anyway?
Can’t challenge that truly!
Generative AI and What India Is Up To:
A multi-year multi-billion dollar investment by Microsoft into OpenAI not only spruced up the generative AI space but unleashed the reality of an entirely new sector for the planet.
In the wild world of tech, you would be wrong to think there are no intruders -as Google recently found out. An old foe can stay below the radar for two decades and shake you up with a strategic weapon when they are ready.
Quick Check on India
I looked for any noticeable Indian presence in the generative AI space. Some observations are captured below.
From some of the preliminary research, I did in this space the stack layers are already well formed and have raised fair amounts of funds in the last 3-4 years. Per some estimates, there are over 1200 companies working in this emerging space with over $8-10 billion in funding already been raised. Sources used in this research are mentioned below. For the full piece, go here.
Dear Reader: This newsletter is chronicling India’s AI march as it unravels a $7T economy. Watch it happen as I take you down the path of this wonderful journey. Along the path, I will paint the opportunities, the gaps, and the methods to unravel new and unaddressed markets. For your weekly fix, subscribe to this newsletter.
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