Those are the main categories I have.
The company you worked for before, did the investors make money?
That question early on, I was like, 'Oh God'...
This is Las Vegas, baby! HumanX is putting on an enormous conference.
I built up this crazy drive like hockey, and that drive doesn't go away.
Scientific research can turn out really well or really bad, and you have very little control over that.
We're going to do something we've never done.
I set a high bar for myself.
You need to bring this to the market. You need to solve this.
I'm Tim Draper. I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. Thousands apply, but only top entrepreneurs have made the cut for a chance to win an investment of one million U.S. dollars! It's a journey packed with unforgettable moments.
If we had a million dollars, this would really expand the number of categories that we'd be able to work with. We'd be able to hire out parts of the team to be able to focus on certain verticals.
Money is available in Silicon Valley. For me, it's more about all the relationships and the opportunities that it would bring.
Constrained with the number of features, we can deliver to some of our largest customers, get a few more engineers in to deliver on some of these problems.
We can grow much faster. Collecting the data into building the models is not super cheap. We can go to the next steps.
Welcome to Meet the Drapers! All right! We have four great entrepreneurs here. We're at the HumanX conference. It's all about AI. It's going to be fantastic. And the A's are moving to Las Vegas! Tell us a little bit about the A's.
Well, you know, the A's are a 124-year-old franchise that actually started in Philadelphia. Leaving Oakland was a very difficult decision. We will move into a new stadium on Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Boulevard.
We're hoping there are four really good entrepreneurs that have come from here.
I'm going to be looking for somebody that thinks long-term. Most businesses tend to think very short-term. But if you can have somebody that's looking at the long-term, you can have a very successful business.
And on my right, we have Shalini Pai, who is the VP of television at Google. Really extraordinary job. Welcome to the family.
It's so good to have you here. What are you looking for and what do different lengths of show make a difference to you?
Really, it is up to the person who's watching it, what they actually want to watch. Whether it's a two-minute clip, whether it's a five-hour show. And really, the job of a platform is to ensure that we can actually recommend the content. You know, just being able to experience, for example, your home videos in amazing 3D experiences, that's what a lot of these solutions are going to enable us to do.
Yeah, that's something we're working on.
Okay, what are we going to see here? What are you looking for?
I think what I'm looking for is what is the moat that helps one company succeed over another.
All right. Let's get this show on the road, shall we? Let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
My name's Amrita Bhasin. My company's called Sotira, and we are Workflow and Compliance Automation, powered by AI. Growing up, I was a very entrepreneurial person. I mean, like the typical American suburban person. I had a lemonade stand as a kid. I spent a lot of time doing side hustles in school. I got in trouble with the teacher multiple times because they said that the rates at which I was selling were not fair. And I was like, well, if people are willing to pay something, then you're creating a market out of something. So I've always been having my own businesses, whether it was e-com, or whether it was like selling physical items. Growing up as a kid, it's always been a passion of mine. I see a lot of these big companies. I want to build something big like that. I didn't have to leave or go anywhere super far away to be able to do that. The place that I grew up in, the people I was around, I feel like I got a bit of a jump start on learning about technology and learning about the industry. Early on, I reneged on an offer at a well-known FANG company that I will not name because I got in a lot of trouble for reneging. My university actually contacted me. They blocked me from the graduation portal until I called the recruiter to apologize. Now, a lot of people understand. They see the passion. They see what we've built. We now have numbers behind what we've built. The impact of the number of customers, how much money we've saved, the environmental impact, the partnerships we have with environmental organizations. So I think now people are more supportive, but early on, you have to make those decisions even if people aren't supportive. The other version of me would definitely think that this is inevitable and would probably be impressed by what I've done to this point. Right now, where I'm currently at, I'm like, there's so much more to do. I set a high bar for myself.
I've been attending three conferences in three days, which is crazy. This conference specifically, I think you really have to be prepared, which means you have to be ready to be walking a lot during the day. Some of the badges, like for HumanX, are super cool. You tap the badges together. You automatically share information. Last time I was here, I saw a bunch of shows. Cirque du Soleil was great. There's a couple other shows that they do in the hotels. So I think there's a lot to do, even if you don't drink or even if you don't party a lot. Food here is amazing. I had really good Thai food yesterday. I think that was some of the best red curry I've ever had before. You have all diversity of cuisines out here. It's kind of like New York in that sense, especially if you're willing to drive a little bit off the strip and go to the hole-in-the-wall restaurants. There's really good food. This pitch was different than the other pitches I've done for more logistics technical audiences.
All right. Amrita, give us your pitch.
My name's Amrita Bhasin. I'm a co-founder and CEO of Sotira. We're Workflow and Compliance Automation Software for the $800 billion overstock and surplus industry. My co-founder Gary and I built liquidation businesses in the food and beverage and health, wellness and beauty space. And we realized that this is a huge industry where people are essentially procuring overstocks. We've built together a platform. So the compliance part of it is when you are figuring out how to offload and monetize your overstock, there is state compliance in terms of how you handle that. So you can no longer dump or waste overstocks. And then there's a lot of compliance in the corporate sphere around like expiration dates of the items. There is $800 billion worth of overstock just in the U.S. And we see that the vast majority of that ends up in landfills. Retailers, corporations, businesses, delivery companies, distributors, manufacturers, we work with all those kinds of customers. They don't have a solution for how they get rid of their overstock. And now they're getting fined by state governments. They're getting fined by national governments. Many of these companies are B-corp companies. They're trying to achieve status. There's a couple of categories that we work with specifically. We work with food and beverage. That's a big category for us. We work with HBA, which is health, wellness and beauty aids. Those industries have huge overstock problems. We also do apparel, and then we do furniture and home goods. Those are the main categories--
The company you worked for before, what happened to it? Did the investors make money?
That question early on, I was like, oh, God, I was like, I had an order and now this has tripped up the order. So that was a business that we were running where we were doing liquidation. We made a lot of money just brokering transactions. But the thing about brokering is that you don't have software to automate it. So we built a platform that now automates that. Again, this is fully end to end. So the companies that we work with, they sync their WMS systems, WMS systems or warehouse management systems. We get access to their inventory data directly within our platform. We're able to share it and then we're able to figure out what is the best solution for that inventory--
Why did you start this business?
Because I was very fascinated by the liquidation space. Again, there's so much money flowing through this. You can make a lot of money just brokering. So technology and industry like reverse logistics is super valuable. Right now, it takes you three weeks on average to get something liquidated. On our platform, it's happening within the week.
Do you guys have this problem?
Yeah. You know, actually with, with Tim also involved in a equestrian boot company, do you require that that there be government regulation to make this happen?
We don't. The government regulation is a big selling point. The state of California has given us grant funding in addition to the VC that we've raised from venture capitalists. We know which companies are being fined for unsustainable inventory practices. And so we're able to go out and market to them. But a lot of our customers that we work with have not been fined yet. So like Gap is a good example, right? Maybe it doesn't make sense to hold those items till next winter. Maybe it makes sense to liquidate it, right? You're able to unlock cash, invest into your business.
But the margins end up being so small. It's easier for them just to give it to a liquidator and say, 'You solve the problem', because there's not enough money to be made by going after that part of the business.
For a lot of customers we work with, they're getting back 50 to 75 percent cost, which is huge. We know what your overstock data is. We've created the best solution to get it to a buyer in the overstock space.
What is going to keep you in the business if you have competition?
We started building this with the private buyers that we'd already done business with, right? We didn't need to vet them as much because we'd literally done business with them. We'd been in their warehouses. We met these people in person, right? We do have competition. I mean, this is a huge industry. Every like few months there's a company popping up that's trying to like innovate the way that discounting is working. There's a ton of companies in the return space. Our unique value proposition is the fact that we're focused on items that have expiration dates.
Well, Amrita, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers.
I think the pitch went well. The questions in the middle were great because I was able to like really dig deep and do a deep dive.
She identified it's a big problem. I thought the question about what is the moat points out the real issue that everybody's going to go into this space. They're going to drive down the cost. A lot of times people are sending their merchandise overseas.
It was interesting, John, that you faced the same problems at Gap. Food angle is so humanitarian as well, especially given all the tariffs that are coming our way. I think this is a phenomenal space to be investing in. I think to your point, the differentiator was not really clear to me.
All right, let's move on to our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
My name is Alex Hult. I'm the co-founder, CEO of AIO. The world's first all-in-one AI platform for restaurants. So I followed first my dad. He was a hockey player. Followed his footsteps and then changed gear into my mom's footsteps, who have been working in restaurants all her life. So I grew up in Sweden, was ranked number two in the country, drafted by the Sharks, played for the Swedish national team, and then it hurt my knee and kind of had to pivot and changed from what I thought was going to be my career playing hockey to actually restaurants. I think I was always an entrepreneur first, not a restaurateur. Opened 10 locations within 10 years. I knew I wanted to do something big, and I think I found that. The fact that it ended up being in restaurants and AI, probably very surprised. But I think I always knew I was going to do something big in life. I built up this crazy drive as a young boy, you know, wanted to be the best in the world playing hockey. And that drive doesn't go away, so I knew something was big is going to happen, just not what. My wife was thinking it can't get worse because I was never home. I was always working. And the bad thing about restaurants is that you're working when everyone else is off, on the holidays and the special occasions. Those are your biggest nights. And that's when you want to spend time with family. So I think she was excited to be together more on the holidays. But yeah, she's getting used to it, I think. The only reason why we have built this all in one system that we have is because I was not technical enough to know how hard it was. If I would have known how hard it was and how much time it would have taken and all the problems that we faced, probably would not have done it. I would have just like focused on one thing. That was the advice we got from all the VCs in the beginning, just focus on one thing and do it really well. And I was like, well, our name of the company is AIO, all in one. Can't just do one thing. We need to solve this problem. My co-founder is crazy enough to believe in this vision and push through. And it's been hard. We've been working around the clock for two years.
It's a wonderful experience. There's always people coming to Vegas having a good time. And we try to provide just that. We call it the triple the fun Vegas experience because of everything being served in flights of three. I think Vegas is a really cool city. A lot of people obviously come here to have a good time. There's great conferences. It's very easy to get to, get around. Formula One is here now. Raiders have a team here. A lot of sports events are coming to town, which is really cool for the area. There's so many good restaurants. The best restaurants in the world is right here on the strip in Las Vegas. Vegas is a very business-friendly city. So more and more companies are coming here. The housing is still reasonably priced. So there's a lot of opportunities in Las Vegas. I'm pretty used to TV. I was a pro hockey player for many years. I did a lot of interviews.
Let me tell you, restaurants are not easy. You work all the time. The costs have gone crazy, super expensive. So many problems you're facing. You need literally ten systems to run a restaurant. One for POS, one for payroll, one for accounting, and so on. I set out on this journey to solve this problem. And I got really lucky and met my co-founder, Zia, who is head of product at NVIDIA. He built iconic product for Motorola. What we set out to do is building AIO, all-in-one system for restaurants. So imagine everything you need to run one restaurant, payroll, accounting, marketing, website builder, everything in one system. And on top of that, we have 33 AI agents automating all these redundant tasks, saving restaurants so much time and money. You give your managers of the restaurant one system to log into. In that system, they can do literally everything from hiring, paying the employee, doing the marketing campaigns, watching the report, improving the product, everything you need one-stop shop. And then those agents are automating all those workflows like laying a schedule, paying the bills, doing the books, running the report, sending you the analytics on how to improve the business and whatnot, P&L.
How's your business going so far?
Lucky that I wasn't first, because they would have thrown me off a lot more if I wasn't prepared for it. We launched six weeks ago on January 29th, was our pre-launch. We hit a million dollar in annual revenue in 12 days. We are on track to hit $2 million now, and we're aiming to hit $10 million by the end of this year.
So who are the big customers?
We're focusing on the independent restaurants first, because it's a faster sales cycle.
So you got to sell each one individually?
They actually come to us quite a lot, to be honest. This is a huge need in the space, and restaurant owners are really struggling with all of the products that they're using today. And we drive their costs literally down by 75%. On top of that, we make the business more efficient, we drive them more traffic.
There are lots of workflow vendors, including Salesforce, for example. Why wouldn't they get into this space and compete with you? We've also briefly touched on driving more traffic in this day and world. That's the biggest thing. So we'd love to understand a little bit more on that.
I think it's a very specific niche market. There's a million restaurants in the U.S. 60% of them are small business owners. In Toast, they only have 15% of the market. And the challenge for toast is that they have purchased all these different companies. So it's really hard to build AI on top of all these segmented databases. So if we dig into the product here, Table Site Assistant, so you can order with voice right at the table. AI marketing with a couple of clicks can generate an entire marketing campaign for the restaurant owner, which typically you need a full salaried position to do, responding to reviews. A lot of restaurants don't have time to sit and respond to all these reviews. Now it can be done completely automated. And then the biggest piece is IO intelligence. You can literally query your own database, and chat GPT style, spits out the answer. So that's super powerful. So no more running reports, no more trying to figure out where you're at. You can actually have AI suggest what to fix and what to improve in your business.
What's going to differentiate you? Why are you going to be awesome?
One of the best things we did right away, we brought in advisors, 15 restaurant owners, managers, chefs, that every Wednesday morning for two hours, we sit and go through the products before we even write one line of code. So by the time the product comes out, it's like this is what we want. And that's what we're seeing, why there's such a pull to buy it, because we're solving so many problems in one product.
Very impressive. Raising $7 million, the group you put together, when you're making your pitch, or they're coming to you and saying, 'Help us with all this,' what are you charging them and what are they saving as a result of it?
The only real use case we have is my own restaurant here in Vegas. We went from having five salary positions down to two. We have increased our sales by 30 percent, and that's just one restaurant.
You want to run some restaurants in a stadium?
Let's just make a deal today. Yeah.
All right, Alex, thanks so much for being on Meet the Drapers.
Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Thank you. It was still great. It was super fun. Tim interrupts perfectly, so you just have to kind of be on your toes.
What did each of you think?
I like the fact that he's going after a niche. You know, he talked about his moat being the fact that he understands restaurants from end to end. I think how much money he can make from it is the question. I do personally think cost savings is great, but if you can increase the sales, I think that's a larger place to play.
John, what do you think? You raise Toast. You have Open Table, but they've got 180 people, programmers mostly, raise $7 million. And if you're trying to solve these problems quickly, there might be a significant first mover advantage. And there are a lot of mom and pop restaurants out there that operate very inefficiently. I think it's pretty interesting.
You almost made a deal right there.
Oh, yeah. Well, there might be other people in my organization.
Okay, so let's bring on our next entrepreneur here in Las Vegas. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
I'm Max Jakobs, CEO and co-founder of Deepmirror. We help chemists get drug molecules from an idea into patients much, much faster than ever before. The academics, like they often work mainly for themselves, for their own prestige. So it's actually quite isolating and quite lonely. So you don't actually work often as a team. The last one is the professor, the first one who's did all the work. Everyone in between doesn't really get much of the recognition. So teamwork is actively discouraged in a way. Whereas now in a company, it feels like everybody has a specific responsibility and works as a team. It feels like you have some sort of perpetual mobility that kind of moves by itself. And everybody does their stuff for the greater good, which is very different to academia. I mean, I'm still a scientist by heart, even though I left academia. Initially you think, oh, you just do it for the chemist, but then as soon as you feel it touching other people and see what it will mean in the grand scheme of things, then you know actually the really addictive thing is the patient impact. Not so much the steps in between, but you have to kind of do it the whole way. Being on that track, you don't feel like you're absolutely in control of your own life most of the time. Because in the end, scientific research can turn out really well or really bad, and you have very little control over that. That's why I actually kind of shifted as well. So it was a bit of a gradual thing, but it came from the idea initially that it was all about trying to translate technology into something that people actually use every day in their work, and not something that they don't really understand how to use, so it's too complex to use.
Viewers: usually I'm pretty easy to reach. I mean, there are only 300 million of you. I'm making it a lot easier for you to contact me. I have downloaded my brain into this 24-7. Enjoy it. It's great. It's a new feature of Meet the Drapers and Draper TV. I think you're going to have some fun.
We're on the strip in Las Vegas. Everything that Europe often is not: big, flashy, exciting. Great. The strip is definitely great, but also yesterday we had a networking reception where they took us on a racetrack down south in Las Vegas to drive Supercars, which was also cool. Normally we go more to chemistry-focused conferences, so it was quite an exciting
I really enjoyed that. I love the States. I actually almost grew up in the States because my dad almost took a job in Boulder. Sometimes I wonder how it would have been if I wouldn't have grown up in Germany, but here. It's a really exciting place. Normally when we pitch, it's like on phone calls with potential customers, and then it very much becomes more like a demo. So yeah, nervous until the lead up, but as soon as you're on stage, I think things start flowing.
Hi, everyone. I'm Max Jacobs, CEO, co-founder at Deepmirror. Each and every one of us here in this room will have 20,000 ways in which you can catch cancer that all need to be treated by different treatments. However, over the last century, humanity has only approved around 1,000 drug molecules for treatment, and we need to do much more. It takes a really long time to translate drugs from the lab into the clinic, an average of around four years or so. We at Deep Mirror bring that down to six months with our interactive co-ideation platform, which essentially is a tool that helps chemists and researchers in general to collaborate with AI and their colleagues to design safe and effective drugs faster by helping them suggest the next best molecule to make.
I guess you need the human there too.
How does the AI know if something is safe?
You can always solve for one thing, such as kills bugs really effectively. But while you're doing that, you might lose out on other things, and it doesn't treat anything. You also need to make sure it doesn't hit any other targets. It might kill cancer, but it also might lead to drugs starting to interact with each other. There's all kinds of effects that might happen. And that was also where the kind of the idea for the whole company came from, which was all about making technology accessible to people that actually make the decisions in the lab. So we are putting a lot of effort into the design of the interface to make sure that technical chemists, non-technical chemists alike can use the interface.
Is the big breakthrough here that you're using a neural network?
So the way the product works is chemists come with a few drug molecules that they have tested for different assays in the lab. They upload these to the app. We have pre-trained a lot of chemical data, which includes data that only we have access to for our customers who sometimes give us access to their data. So it's a bit of a data moat angle there. And then these models are on the fly, fine-tuned on the uploaded user data. And then they become really good scoring functions, which can evaluate new designs. And that's where the second part comes in. It's about generating molecules that may be interesting to chemists. Which is actually quite difficult. They're quite opinionated when it comes to what designs they like and to which ones they don't. Because many of these people have 30 years experience in the industry, and I've seen all kinds of different things.
Curious how you compare it with Alpha Fold. A lot of the research that has gone in through DeepMinds and Isomorphic Labs.
So we're mainly a subscription service that we just sell directly to the biopharma companies. And we tend to aggregate algorithms that we know work well. We keep also doing our own research on top. But first we test.
John, do you have questions for him?
Is the FDA fully on board, or does it not even touch them? Because you're all kind of pre-FDA work?
I don't think we have any regulatory issues. Because in the end, for FDA approval, you will still need to do all the relevant rat, mouse, and other animal experiments. So that's, of course, super important.
