Z47 Moments

Shashank N.D. dropped out of college to build Practo, back when dropping out just meant you couldn’t get a job. No business family. Both parents in government service. When everyone around him said “do an MBA first, you can always start a company later,” he flipped the logic: you can always get a job later, but right now I have the least baggage I’ll ever have. So he stayed in, bootstrapped Practo...

Ajay grew up in Bangalore chasing free pizza at hackathons, trained as a machine-learning researcher, and never planned to start a company until his brother’s accident and a nightmare healthcare experience in New York pushed him to build Coral Health. In this episode of Unstarted by Z47, Ajay sits down with Anish to break down how Coral is killing traditional RPA (robotic process automation) and c...

Chetan Reddy, founder of Confido, joins the Intelligent Indians podcast to explain how AI is leapfrogging one of the least digitized industries on earth: US healthcare an industry where, as he puts it, the system of record is still sticky notes. Confido builds AI teammates agents with names like Sarah and Ryan  that run the front office of specialty medical practices: answering phones, handling in...

Aniket Shah quit his job with no startup idea, gave himself 18 months, and ended up building Swish one of India’s fastest-growing 10-minute food delivery companies, now serving 1 million lifetime users with 220+ freshly made items. In this episode of Unstarted by Z47, Aniket sits down with Anish to unpack the journey from Ahmedabad to IIT Kharagpur, early stints at Citibank, Jupiter, Pillow Fund (...

Sumit Chhazed has started four companies. The first three didn't work. Solar heating, where he was too young to win government tenders. An edtech platform built with IIT Bombay professors that was years ahead of its market and ended in a modest acquisition. Then a two-wheeler commerce business born out of a second-hand Pulsar that broke down every third day in Bombay. The fourth is OTO Capital, a...

Srikanth Velamakanni built an AI company before most people knew the A in AI. In 2000, long before ChatGPT, he and five co-founders started Fractal Analytics with a simple bet: that math could predict human behaviour and help companies make better decisions. The market wasn't ready. HDFC took 18 months to convince. Citibank made them prove themselves against 100 in-house PhDs. They won on accuracy...

Amit Lakhotia moved from a village in Churu, Rajasthan to Delhi at 10, speaking Marwari and barely any Hindi. Twenty people shared three rooms. His father couldn't afford the school fees, so he made a bet with the principal: if his son didn't come first within a year, throw him out. That year Amit scored 19 out of 20 in Maths and Hindi, and 1 out of 20 in English. His tuition was waived from class...

Nikita Khanna spent fifteen years straightening her hair before she realised the problem wasn't her hair. It was that nobody had built products for it. She was on partner track at McKinsey her only job ever when she started going down YouTube rabbit holes during COVID, trying to find a sustainable way to manage wavy, frizz-prone hair. She found the answers in Brazil: similar hair texture, dozens o...

Aman Goel, founder of Greylabs.ai , joins Avnish on Unstarted for one of the most relatable founder journeys yet — a middle-class kid from Kanpur who was hustling for money from his first year of college and never stopped. Aman is refreshingly honest that his motivation was simply to make money. He earned his first ₹4,000 solving JEE papers, built a content-writing business with his now-wife and c...

Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe, joins Unstarted for a candid conversation on building a company that now serves over 700 million users. From a middle-class naval family to a failed music startup (Mind360), an acquisition by Flipkart, and the founding of PhonePe, Sameer breaks down the thinking behind his "asymmetric bets," why he chose UPI when the entire market was chasing wallets, and...

Saahil Goel, co-founder and CEO of Shiprocket, joins us for a candid deep-dive into how a self-taught coder from Delhi built the logistics and enablement backbone powering a huge chunk of India's direct-to-consumer commerce. Sahil takes us all the way back selling his dot matrix printer on Baazee as a kid, teaching himself HTML by hacking "view source," and building websites for cash in college. A...

Our first-ever episode with co-founders. Karan and Himanshu of WootzWork join Avnish to talk about building a hardware and manufacturing exports company out of India — and why they leaned into a market everyone told them wouldn't work. From an investment banking and Stanford GSB background (Karan) and IIT Kharagpur mechanical engineering (Himanshu), the two met at a previous company where one inte...

What happens if you fail with everyone's money? Abhishek Bansal never let himself ask and he thinks that's the only reason Shadowfax exists. He's the first public-company CEO on Unstarted: a middle-class kid from Meerut who quit his job without telling his parents, asked a VC for $5 million with zero orders, and was the only one still standing after the year every competitor died. In this conversa...

Most people assume serious AI silicon can only be built by a giant, in the cloud, burning hundreds of millions of dollars. Ravi Annavajhala did the opposite. Kinara built two AI chips for under $50M, 90% of it out of Hyderabad, and sold to NXP, one of the world's largest semiconductor companies for $307M,  all cash. It's one of the largest deep tech exits India has seen, and one of the least talke...

How much money is enough to make starting up safe? Vivek Sinha thought he knew: ₹50 lakh in the bank. The day he hit it, he quit. Vivek is the founder of Emversity, which trains people for the jobs India actually has in healthcare, hospitality, EPC and manufacturing.  Homeschooled till eight in a Bihar village surrounded by three rivers, he built Buildzar, lost ₹50 lakh, and spent nine years compo...

What do you do when you've built the technology first and the first customer who tries it tells you it's not working at all? Prashant Warrier is the first PhD and the first scientist on Unstarted. A steel-town kid from Bhilai who went from IIT Delhi to a PhD in AI, he came back to India because of a stolen passport — and built Qure.ai , whose AI reads chest X-rays for TB and lung cancer across the...

He built a ₹100 crore brand from scratch in two years. His company rated him 2 on 5. So the question stopped being am I good at this? and became am I even the right kind of person for it? Shashank Mehta is the founder of The Whole Truth, one of the best consumer brands built in India in the last decade. We backed him early, off the strength of a blog whose readers became the company's first custom...

Nirja Bhatt looks intimidating on paper: Columbia, Harvard Business School, strategy consulting. But she calls herself "a duck in water” i.e you never see what’s moving beneath the surface. It took her two years of analysis paralysis, ten abandoned ideas, and learning to normalize embarrassment before she could finally start. Nirja is the founder of Laani, a pre-launch personal care brand for wome...

Chakradhar Gade had the résumé everyone's supposed to want: engineering, CFA, a hedge fund, and felt like he'd lost himself inside it. So he walked away to sell milk. This is the story of how a finance guy who once mapped "the IRR of a cow" learned that the spreadsheet was a lie, lost all his money proving it, and rebuilt Country Delight from first principles, one customer relationship at a time....

Are entrepreneurs born or made? Asish Mohapatra is certain it's the second and he'll tell you plainly he's good at maybe 3 of the 10 things a founder needs. Asish is the co-founder of OfBusiness and Oxyzo, which he built into one of India's largest B2B commerce and lending businesses. But this conversation with Avnish isn't about the scale, it's about the intellectual honesty underneath it. In thi...

Can you be a founder without ever founding anything? Amarjeet Batra has spent 25 years building other people's companies, first Baazee, eBay, OLX, and now Spotify India, and never once thought of himself as an employee. He's what Avnish calls "professionally unstarted": a founder from within. Avnish and Amarjeet get into the questions most operators never say out loud:   1. If you have the skills,...

What does it actually take to build AI for 70 crore users? Vikram sits down with Rahul Chowdhury -  co-founder and CTO of PhonePeto talk about how India's most scaled fintech is approaching AI. Not with hype or a top-down mandate, but with a quiet, deliberate, engineering-first philosophy that started four years ago with a small team focused on making developers happier. Rahul shares the inside st...

Harshil Mathur started Razorpay after quitting the highest-paying job on his campus, a role his whole family had just celebrated, because he walked in on day one and realised he was a guy who wanted to sit and code, not step onto an oil field. Then he spent a decade away from that: walking into bank after bank getting laughed out of the room, surviving the grind no funding can fast-track, and the...

Anjali Sardana grew up in northern Virginia, studied biology at Georgetown, worked at Bain Capital — and then, without telling her parents, flew to India and founded Pronto: a platform building the world's largest labor organization network, starting with home services. In this episode of Unstarted, Anjali breaks down how she picked an operations business over a product business (and why), why she...

India's GPU footprint is on track to grow 40x by 2030, from ~50,000 today to a couple of million.  That number is bigger than any public forecast. Sharad Sanghi has the unusual standing to make it: he built Netmagic into India's most significant datacenter business, and he's now running Neysa, the only neo cloud in India that Semi Analysis has rated, backed by Blackstone. In this episode of Intell...