Startup Stream

Every Thursday evening, founders gather for eChai meetup at the GVFL office in Ahmedabad for a simple ritual: real conversations, no filters.

Hosted by eChai Ventures, these weekly meetups are where strategies get shared before they’re polished, and tools get dissected before they trend. This Thursday, the conversation turned to AI in marketing — not the headlines, but the hard questions. What’s actually working inside early-stage teams? What’s just noise? And how do you build a stack that speeds you up without losing your voice?

I had the chance to co-host this session alongside Jhalak Pamnani from Missive Digital, and what made it work wasn’t the format — it was the people. We had Tanmay Shanishchara, who’s spent years running campaigns at MeDigit, Sahil Shah, who’s built audiences and brands through Hungrito and Netsavvies, and Bhavesh Patel, the co-founder of Brands.live, which is quietly powering millions of SMEs with their design tools. Each of them came in not to present slides, but to share what’s working — and what isn’t. It set the tone. No posturing. Just real talk from founders and marketers in the middle of figuring things out, together.

“AI helps us skip the blank page. But the final draft still needs taste.”

Founders across the room weren’t using AI to replace writing. They were using it to start faster. Tools like Jasper, Scalenut, Copy.ai, Peppertype, and Notion AI were common in marketing workflows — but not for publishing final copy. Instead, they help generate rough drafts, outline landing pages, or spark campaign ideas. From there, humans take over.

One marketer summed it up best: “AI gets us to version one faster. But if it sounds like everyone else, it still loses.”
That was the deeper thread — AI saves time, but not taste. And as generative content floods feeds, tone is emerging as a startup’s moat. The sharper your voice, the less replaceable you are.

“We’re not short on content. We’re short on distribution.”

Many teams admitted they’ve never had more content — or felt more invisible. The real bottleneck isn’t creation anymore; it’s reach. Platforms feel unpredictable. Organic engagement is inconsistent. Founders shared frustrations with Instagram and LinkedIn’s ever-shifting algorithms.

So the strategy is changing. Teams are turning toward direct, owned channels: newsletters, WhatsApp campaigns, Telegram groups. Tools like Gupshup are being tested for regional and B2B use cases — especially where trust and timing matter more than scale.

It’s no longer about going viral. It’s about being relevant — at the right moment, to the right person.

“If a tool saves me 10 clicks a day, I’ll keep it. If not, I won’t.”

That single sentence echoed a quiet truth about automation. Startups aren’t cutting headcount. They’re cutting friction.

Across the room, founders described using tools like Make.com, Zapier, Airtable AI, and Bardeen to tie their systems together — automating follow-ups, syncing campaign data to Slack, or organizing leads without writing custom scripts.

The focus wasn’t innovation. It was velocity. When you can move faster without pulling in a dev, you ship more. And every campaign you ship teaches you something. That’s the compounding advantage.

“We give every new tool a weekend. If it fits, it stays.”

One of the sharpest insights came not from a tool recommendation — but a process. Multiple teams shared their approach to experimenting with new AI tools: create a “sprint.” One weekend. A few hours. Clear goal. Document the results. Decide fast.

This prevented stack bloat and tool fatigue. More importantly, it created a learning habit. Instead of reacting to what’s trending, teams ran structured tests in their own context.

No hype. Just: does it help us move faster?

“The problem isn’t the tech. It’s the fit.”

This was the most consistent frustration in the room: tools with great features that still don’t stick. Why? Because they demand too much prompting. Or don’t integrate cleanly. Or break mental flow.

Founders don’t want more content — they want orchestration. The best tools feel invisible. They blend into your existing workflow. They guide you, not slow you down. If your feature needs a training video to explain, you’ve already lost attention.

For AI builders in the room, this was the wake-up call: the battle isn’t for more capability. It’s for better context.

“AI is a workflow upgrade. Not a strategy.”

By the end of the session, there wasn’t a singular aha moment — and that was the point. No playbook is perfect. But the best ones are being rewritten in real-time, in rooms like this.

Founders walked away with sharper instincts:

The story of AI in marketing isn’t about replacing teams. It’s about building systems that help you move with more clarity, speed, and intent.

And those systems aren’t being built in trend decks.

They’re being built, one Thursday at a time — in rooms like this.

While top LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity came up frequently as go-to general AI assistants, much of the meetup focused on more specific, workflow-driven tools. These were the AI products founders are actually integrating into their day-to-day — from content ops and customer engagement to video creation and backend automation.

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If conversations like these interest you, you’ll find many more through eChai. We host meetups, demo days, founder gatherings, and community-led events across cities — all focused on helping founders connect, share, and grow together. Whether you’re building your first startup or scaling your fifth, you’ll find peers to learn from and stories to relate to. Explore what’s happening next at eChai.Ventures.

From a small town in Gujarat to  to the forefront of Silicon Valley’s AI revolution, Nirman Dave’s journey reads like a blueprint for the kind of ambition that defies borders, playbooks, and probability. Long before AI was a boardroom buzzword, Nirman was a teenager teaching himself to code by watching YouTube videos on a borrowed laptop. He didn’t stop at learning. By the time he was 17, he had built over 200 apps—used by more than a million people worldwide—and even launched CircuiTricks, a business that turned his passion for electronics into a profitable startup.

“I was always fascinated by the idea that code could do something real in the world—solve a problem, help someone, grow personally & professionally,” he once shared. “I didn’t know what a startup was, I just knew I wanted to build.”

That spirit carried him to the U.S., where he studied Computer Science and Behavioral Economics at Hampshire College. There, he didn’t just attend classes—he built movements. HampHack, the first interdisciplinary hackathon in the country, was his brainchild, created in partnership with Google and Viacom. For Nirman, every project was a playground for systems thinking and user empathy.

In 2020, he co-founded Obviously AI, a bold response to a question many were too afraid to ask: What if anyone could build a machine learning model—without writing a single line of code? The platform went on to power 82,000+ prediction models, saving companies over 12.8 million hours of data science work. More than 3,000 businesses used it to make everyday decisions smarter—from churn prediction to lead scoring.

“We didn’t want to just democratize AI—we wanted to make it feel like magic,” Nirman said in an interview with MJF. “You upload a spreadsheet, and 30 seconds later, you get a prediction. That’s the kind of simplicity that changes behavior.”

Obviously AI earned Nirman a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30, and drew investment from some of the world’s sharpest funds—Sequoia Scouts, Facebook’s startup fund, B Capital, and TMV among them. But even as the no-code AI category boomed, Nirman’s mind was already racing toward the next frontier.

That next leap became Zams, his current company, and an emerging powerhouse in enterprise automation. If Obviously AI was about giving startups superpowers, Zams is about giving scale to the Fortune 500—without the drag of manual work. The name Zams is short for Zero Age Main Sequence, a term in astrophysics that marks the moment a star starts to shine.

“Zams is that ignition point,” Nirman explains. “Where AI stops being a pet project and starts being infrastructure.”

Today, Zams agents automate complex back-office tasks for some of the world’s largest companies—from RFQ parsing to quote generation—freeing up teams to focus on high-value work. One client added $10M in new revenue without hiring a single new person. The platform’s goal? To make deploying an enterprise AI agent feel as intuitive as building a website on Webflow.

And it’s working.

Behind the scenes, Zams is powering the kind of automation that makes operations not just efficient, but intelligent. And Nirman’s approach is refreshingly pragmatic. He doesn’t promise a utopian AI future—he ships real tools, solves real problems, and listens obsessively to the pain points of his customers.

“AI doesn’t need more theory,” he says. “It needs better design. And a hell of a lot more empathy.”

What sets Nirman apart isn’t just the scale of his ambition—it’s the clarity of his conviction. He’s a founder who’s equally at home in product reviews, investor pitches, and late-night build sessions with his team. He speaks often about the invisible work of company-building, the tension between vision and iteration, and the underestimated power of persistence.

As a fellow at INK and the Rajeev Circle, and a familiar face on AI panels and community events in SF, he continues to share that conviction freely. And yet, he stays grounded—always in builder mode, always two steps ahead.

For Nirman Dave, AI is not just a technology. It’s a tool of leverage. A creative force. A democratizer of opportunity. And most of all, it’s a blank canvas for the next generation of builders.

“The real win,” he says, “is when someone without a tech background builds an agent that changes how their company works. That’s when I know we’re doing our job.”

India’s quick-commerce revolution has transformed how people order groceries, cabs, and snacks — but urgent medicine delivery has lagged behind. Kaushal Shah, founder of pharmacy tech platform eVitalRx, saw an opportunity hiding in plain sight. In early 2025, he launched PillO — a platform promising 60-minute delivery of critical medicines, wherever you are — at home, at a railway station, even stuck in traffic.

Shah isn’t new to this world. Before PillO, he spent years inside India’s fragmented pharmacy ecosystem, helping digitize over 7,000 retail pharmacies through eVitalRx. That inside view — not just of tech, but how medicines physically move across Indian cities and small towns — gave him an unfair advantage when it came time to reimagine healthcare delivery for the on-demand era.

Unlike traditional e-pharmacies that rely on slow-moving warehouses, PillO taps into a dense hyperlocal network. The model feels refreshingly simple: partner with neighborhood pharmacies, build real-time logistics tech, and get life-saving medicines to consumers before a minor issue becomes a major emergency. Early adopters are noticing — like Haris, who shared on social media how PillO delivered urgent meds straight to his train coach at Bengaluru Railway Station within 36 minutes. Or Santosh, who managed to get critical medicines delivered mid-transit. These aren’t PR stunts — they’re genuine signals of unmet demand.

The timing couldn't be sharper. India’s ₹4 lakh crore pharmacy market is formalizing fast, while post-COVID behavior has shifted permanently. Blinkit and Zepto have trained Indian users to expect groceries in 10 minutes. Healthcare — especially urgent medicines — is the next logical leap. PillO’s bet is that "meds in minutes" will become a non-negotiable layer in how we live, move, and manage health.

But this isn’t just another fast-delivery story. Kaushal Shah’s advantage is upstream: the tech stack. For five years, his team built eVitalRx — a full-stack ERP used by pharmacists for 8–10 hours a day. It tracks real-time inventory, enables compliance workflows, and powers AI-based QA systems. Without this infrastructure, he believes no “partner pharmacy” model can scale with reliability. “Others built apps. We built plumbing,” he says.

As PillO scales to 15 cities over the next 18 months, the roadmap is expanding. From adding lab tests and partnering with insurance firms to enable cashless OPD experiences, the company is building toward a future where healthcare is as accessible — and reliable — as ordering a pizza.

I caught up with Kaushal Shah over breakfast at an eChai Social in Ahmedabad to learn what PillO is building. I asked a few questions. He answered them all, openly.

Medicines aren't pizzas. How do you balance the urgency of 60-minute delivery with the critical need for medical safety and regulatory compliance? Where is the real operational bottleneck today?

That is precisely the point. We almost never encounter a real scenario in life where we must have medicines in less than 15 minutes but at the same time we also don’t want to suffer long without it (in case of acute issues) or miss a dose (in case of chronic medicines). So we decided to pick a sweet spot of 60 minutes, where we also are not rushing our delivery partners that can jeopardize their lives. Also it gives enough time for pharmacists to run checks and balances on their end, to understand and verify prescriptions, cross-question patients if needed and make sure they are dispensing the right medicines. We deliver 90% of orders in 45 minutes anyways.

In terms of operational bottleneck, it's hiring and building our own delivery fleet in different cities of India. Other than that, we can scale quickly by adding a new city to our offering every month, which is faster than even the Q-Commerce giants.

Today, early users are sharing amazing stories. As you scale across cities and handle thousands of orders daily, how will you maintain the same quality and reliability of experience? What could break?

I think the answer is similar to the previous question: it's the delivery fleet that we need to keep building and keep delivering the best experience in the space where almost all of us have had horrible experience (at buying medicines when we need them) in the most important aspect of our lives: our health.

To answer how do we maintain the quality and reliability of experience from the pharmacy and dispensing side, we are adding new checks and balances every few weeks. I will share a couple of examples:

We have seen other startups attempt faster pharmacy deliveries before. Some succeeded briefly, many struggled. When you look at those previous attempts, what are your biggest takeaways or lessons?

Unfortunately, most of those startups think (and still do) that “partnering” with local pharmacies will work without putting in any work. What most of them do is make a low-touch app, onboard local pharmacies and start sharing the orders. There are three problems:

The app they need to make to engage with pharmacists has to be a deeper engagement with much broader information. That app is an ERP/Billing software that pharmacy uses for 8–10 hours a day and also has real-time stock information as well as billing mechanism for each of billing, accounting of those orders and payment reconciliation.

No other startup has invested their time and efforts to build this. This is what eVitalRx did for the last 4 years and it is due to this product and network, PillO is easier to build and is more likely to succeed than anything else out there.

Unless someone is willing to build this kind of software and better than eVitalRx for years, this is unlikely to work out.

The other option, which has become now the “conventional” option is to: “we will just open dark stores like Blinkit.” Well to them, I have one question only: “Then how will you beat Blinkit or Apollo for that matter?” I think it's a ridiculous and absurd approach — and if it was that easy, Blinkit and Zepto would be doing pharma Q-Commerce for the last 2 years now. But they haven’t!

There is a lot of quick-commerce buzz lately. Why do you believe PillO is not just another fast-delivery story? Why you and why now?

Agreed — and that’s why discussions like this are important to differentiate the nuances. PillO has been in the making for the last 5 years essentially. We launched PillO 3 months ago but foundations are being built for the last 5 years, before pretty much any of us knew the term “Quick Commerce”. Don’t believe me? Come to my house in Ahmedabad and right outside you will see a poster of eVital from 5 years ago promising the same thing that PillO does now.

Only thing we were missing is the very ERP system we have now. Meaning, we were just as naive as other medicine delivery apps are naive now.

Why me? Anyone can do this, they just have to commit to build the best ERP, POS and CRM software the pharma space has ever seen in India along with a centralized and standardized product catalogue — which one very senior manager from Udaan called “insanity.” Other than that, my experience of visiting, selling and talking to 1000+ pharmacists in India helps a lot.

Why now? I think one thing that has changed about consumers in India after Q-Commerce arrival is that people have started paying for convenience and we hope that if people are paying delivery convenience for pizza, they might do the same about their health. Also, I think small business owners — i.e., pharmacists and pharmacy owners — have also accepted the shifting business nature and have welcomed technology and collaboration.

What is the way forward for PillO? Beyond 60-minute deliveries, what is the bigger roadmap you are building toward?

First, we will be scaling to the top 15 cities of India in the next 18 months. Beyond that, we are also adding lab tests through our partnerships with other players and also collaborating with insurance providers to provide a cashless experience to patients for their OPD claims etc.

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Several other players have recently entered the quick-delivery medicine space. PhonePe’s Pincode has started piloting 10-minute medicine deliveries in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Pune by working with local pharmacies. Zepto has launched Zepto Pharmacy as a pilot across parts of Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. Flipkart is reportedly preparing to expand its ‘Minutes’ service to include medicines, also through local partnerships. These moves signal growing interest in adding healthcare products to the quick commerce mix.

The real test for PillO won’t be 60-minute deliveries — it’ll be scaling trust across cities, partners, and patients. If it works, Kaushal Shah’s legacy may not just be another healthtech play, but the foundation of India's true health-on-demand infrastructure. And this time, the infrastructure might arrive faster than the medicine.

In the fast-moving world of tech, few have traversed the founder-to-VC arc with as much depth, grace, and impact as Mala Ramakrishnan.

She’s not just funding innovation — she’s lived it, coded it, scaled it, and sold it. And today, she’s using that hard-earned wisdom to back the next wave of AI-first startups through Progressive Ventures, the seed-stage firm she founded with a simple thesis: “Back builders. Believe early.”

“I’ve sat on every side of the table — founder, operator, investor. I know what it’s like to pitch with hope and lead with grit,” Mala shares. “That perspective keeps me grounded in what really matters — clarity of vision, obsession with the problem, and founders who are all-in.”

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Before stepping into the world of venture capital, Mala was a three-time founder with successful exits — proof that she doesn’t just analyze product-market fit from a distance; she’s fought for it in the trenches. Her resume includes leadership roles at WhatsApp (Meta), Cloudera, and Automation Anywhere, where she built and scaled enterprise platforms in machine learning and privacy.

At WhatsApp, she led Consumer Privacy. At Cloudera, she launched AI and ML platforms. At every stop, she paired technical depth with product instinct — and the rare ability to translate between engineers and execs.

“The hardest problems in tech aren’t technical — they’re human,” she says. “Alignment, storytelling, trust — those are the real levers.”

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Through Founders Creative, the nonprofit she co-founded and now presides over, Mala supports over 10,000 underrepresented technologists — a testament to her belief that innovation must reflect the diversity of the world it hopes to serve.

“The talent is there. The ideas are strong. What’s often missing is access,” she says. “We’re changing that — by building community, not just capital.”

Her work sits at the intersection of deep tech, inclusive access, and raw conviction. It’s no surprise that founders describe her as “the VC who gets it.”

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“She’s the kind of VC who doesn’t just ask the hard questions — she helps you answer them,” says one founder she backed pre-seed.

Another simply calls her, “the rare investor who’s walked the walk.”

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In a startup world often filled with polished decks and performative pitches, Mala stands out as someone who cuts through the noise. She doesn’t buy into hype. She listens for substance. And she shows up with the kind of clarity that only comes from having been in the arena herself.

“You can’t fake founder energy. I back people who can’t not build.”

Whether she’s writing the first check or mentoring a founder on the brink of burnout, Mala brings the same principles to the table: honesty, empathy, and an unapologetic bias toward execution.

And for those lucky enough to share a room with her, one thing is certain — you’ll leave with more than advice. You’ll leave with perspective.
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If you want to go deeper into Mala’s journey — from Stanford to scaling deep tech, from building enterprise products to backing the next wave of B2B AI startups — her recent conversation on the Verso Talk with Aytakin podcast is a must-watch. It’s a candid, thoughtful look at how she blends technical depth with founder empathy, and what drives her to back bold ideas early.

https://youtu.be/i1lD1qZVZbo?si=cTjnYkXhUmmJmkUc

On May 28th, I’ll be hosting Mala in San Jose at an eChai gathering we’re calling The AI Gold Rush: Behind The Bets. She’ll be joining us for a candid fireside chat, sharing what she’s seeing in early-stage B2B AI — the patterns, the GTM shifts, the blind spots most founders miss, and what real traction looks like in 2025. If you're building in AI, product, or anything that requires belief before proof, this is the kind of room where clarity lands and conversations linger.

Because some VC conversations don’t jsut belong in boardrooms.

They belong in rooms like this — where the stories are real, the rooms are warm, and belief doesn’t need a filter.

I recently rewatched the AlphaGo documentary, and even though it originally came out in 2016, it feels more relevant than ever in 2025.

At its core, AlphaGo is the story of how DeepMind’s AI took on the complex and ancient game of Go—and beat one of the world’s best players, Lee Sedol. But it's more than just a documentary about a machine winning a game. It’s a powerful exploration of human creativity, intuition, and what happens when we meet a new kind of intelligence.

One of the moments that gave me chills was when AlphaGo made a move that shocked even the experts—a move that no human would’ve ever played, yet it turned out to be brilliant. That moment felt like a turning point, not just in the game, but in the way we see AI: not just as a tool, but as something that can innovate in its own right.

What really hit me, though, was watching this now—nine years after AlphaGo’s big moment. In 2025, AI is everywhere. We now use it in our daily lives without even realizing it: from content creation and medicine to personal assistants and scientific research. Watching AlphaGo today feels like looking back at the first step of a long, fast-moving journey. It was a glimpse of the future—one that has now arrived.

But despite all the advancements, what makes this documentary so special is how human it is. You feel the pressure Lee Sedol is under. You see the awe in the eyes of developers watching their creation do the unexpected. You experience the quiet philosophical shift as people start to ask: What now?

If you’ve never seen AlphaGo, I highly recommend it—not just for the tech, but for the reflection it invites. And if you have seen it, watch it again. In light of everything AI has become since then, it hits differently.