We plan to bring eChai across 100 cities in India. It starts with eChai Startup Demo Day on 26 September, all in person. 13 cities confirmed, 644 founders registered. Any city that reaches 20 interested founders is on too. See your city

Founder Notes

More Founder Notes

  • Jatin Chaudhary Jatin Chaudhary eChai Ventures 4h

    Khadim Batti, co-founder and CEO of Whatfix, died on 1 September.

    He started Whatfix in 2014 with Vara Kumar Namburu and built it out of Bengaluru into a global enterprise software company. He was one of the most respected founders in Indian SaaS, and one of the most helpful. He made time for other founders, and was candid about how Whatfix had actually been built, including the years when it did not work.

  • Curated from X →

    Mitesh Khapra is an associate professor in the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras, and he heads AI4Bharat, the lab there that builds open-source language AI for Indian languages: the datasets, the models and the applications. Bodhan AI is the IIT Madras Bodhan AI Foundation, the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence for Education that the Ministry of Education established at IIT Madras, with a national mandate to build responsible, scalable and India-first AI for education. Indic-Speak is the two of them working together.

    Mitesh Khapra Mitesh Khapra 11h

    Transcribe. Translate. Recognise. And now — Synthesise.

    Introducing Indic-Speak: 4B params, 23 languages, one model. Built by @Bodhan_AI and @ai4bharat

    There's a bit in this video where two speakers, Parth and Dhara, have a podcast style conversation about "Attention Is All You Need" in Hindi — generated in a single pass, no stitching two voices together after the fact. Doesn't sound like TTS (worth checking out in the video).

    Also handles code-mixed speech naturally, gets PAN/Aadhaar/currency right, and reads a full Tamil audiobook chapter without losing the thread.

    Live on 05.09.2026 on @Bodhan_AI

  • Curated from X →

    PJ Celis founded Judge.me, the reviews app on a lot of Shopify stores, where the plan is either free or $15 a month. The second product is priced differently: email is metered at 15 cents per 1,000 sent once you pass the free 15,000 a month, so this bill moves with the sending. The comparison a store will make is Klaviyo, which prices on how many contacts you hold rather than on what you send. Under the post a merchant paying about $2,300 a month for 750,000 emails a week asks whether he can move, and PJ puts 3 million emails a month at $450. The app has been listed since 14 July, he says it is still early, and a Klaviyo import is on the way. Plenty of the B2C founders here sell on Shopify with Judge.me already installed.

    PJ Celis PJ Celis 13h

    After 12 years of being focused on just reviews, we're adding a second product: @judgeme Email.

    Priced super low: 0-15 USD / month for features, 15K emails per month for free, then 15 cents per 1000 emails.

    That's 10x cheaper than the competition. Even compared to Shopify's own Email app, we're 85% cheaper.

    The product is in early stages, but we're adding features constantly. The price will never go up as we add value, as we optimize for market share, not profit.

    After you install the app, you'll be able to request a call with our team to go over your email marketing needs and your setup.

    Very excited to have this app live, and if you're a Shopify merchant, hope to see you soon!

    apps.shopify.com Judge.me Email - Email marketing done well: email campaigns, popups, automation | Shopify App Store

Every note →

eChai Partner Brands The partnership →