Podcast · Business

Z47 Moments

Zero to Infinity, by Z47, is a podcast series dedicated to the founders, startups, and all within the ecosystem through candid conversations on what we think it really takes to survive in this wild startup world. In a world where we are endlessly engulfed with information in all its forms and sizes,

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 40 min
Latest: 8 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026 · 39 min

266: 3 failed startups, 1 IIT degree, and a broken Pulsar | OTO Capital | Sumit Chhazed

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 lending infrastructure platform for banks and NBFCs in two-wheeler financing. In 2024, mid-growth and mid-fundraise, the round fell through. He and his co-founders stopped taking a salary for twelve…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E265 · 1 Oct 2026 · 40 min
265: From a Small Town in Assam to India's First AI IPO | Srikanth Velamakanni, Fractal
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, stayed profitable, and 26 years later Fractal became India's first AI company to go public. In this episode of Unstarted, Srikanth sits down with Avnish to talk about the story behind the story.…
E264 · 24 Sep 2026 · 31 min
264: From a village to building a profitable business in 3 months | Amit Lakhotoia | Founder, Park+
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 four through twelve. He went on to NSIT and IIM Ahmedabad, helped scale MakeMyTrip, Paytm and Tokopedia, built a taxi business that was four times Ola's size before shutting it down, and then…
E263 · 17 Sep 2026 · 46 min
263: Building a ₹100 Crore hair care brand in 2 years | Nikita Khanna, Moxie
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 of local brands, none of it available in India. When she asked people in the industry whether it was a business, almost everyone told her the category was too small and too random. Roughly 80% of…
E262 · 10 Sep 2026 · 51 min
262: He Saved ₹50 Lakh in College - Then Sold His Startup at 25 | Aman Goel, Grey Labs AI
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 co-founder Harshita, and had saved close to ₹50 lakh before he even graduated. He went on to build Cogno AI - an AI chatbot and voice company for banks - in 2017, before generative AI existed,…
E261 · 3 Sep 2026 · 47 min
261: Why PhonePe bet on UPI when everyone chose wallets | Sameer Nigam | Unstarted
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 how the Big Billion Day payments collapse revealed the problem he'd spend the next decade solving. He also opens up on his 31-year partnership with co-founder Rahul Chari, why he embraces regulators…
E260 · 20 Aug 2026 · 55 min
260: Shiprocket's Saahil Goel on their IPO, PMF & Building AI for Bharat | Unstarted
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. Along the way he shares the hard-won lessons behind every pivot: why Indian SMEs won't pay upfront, why you should never fall in love with your product, and how obsession with the merchant's problem…
E259 · 13 Aug 2026 · 36 min
259: How two founders sold to a billion-dollar company with no factory | Wootz Work | Unstarted
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 interviewed the other as head of engineering a one-hour conversation that ran three hours. In this episode they unpack how a single insult ("we don't talk to Indian engineers, we work with Germans") lit…
E258 · 6 Aug 2026 · 42 min
258: Started with ₹8 Lakhs and built a Billion Dollar Company | Abhishek Bansal, Shadowfax
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 conversation with Avnish Bajaj, they attempt to answer: 1. Should you have a co-founder and how do you actually pick one? 2. What should founders look for in a VC when there are multiple offers? 3. How do…
E257 · 4 Aug 2026 · 44 min
257: India's biggest deep-tech exit that nobody knew of | Ravi Annavajjhala | Nxp
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 talked about. In this episode, Vikram Vaidyanathan sits down with Ravi to take apart how it actually happened, and what it says about where AI is heading next. You'll hear: 1. Why the disruption playbook…
E256 · 30 Jul 2026 · 39 min
256: How the Ex-Unacademy COO built an edtech solving India's healthcare skills gap | Vivek Sinha
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 compounding skills at Mobikwik, OYO and Unacademy before starting again in a sector everyone had written off. In this episode, Avnish and Vivek take on, 1. Where did you get the confidence to do this? 2.…
E255 · 23 Jul 2026 · 35 min
255: From PhD to 26 FDA Clearances: Building AI in Healthcare | Prashant Warrier
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 world. In this episode, Avnish and Prashant attempt to answer: 1. How do you identify a unique problem is it about passion or market cap? 2. How do you know the technology is actually working? 3.…
E254 · 16 Jul 2026 · 52 min
254: Secrets of building The Whole Truth | Shashank Mehta, Founder and CEO | Unstarted
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 customers. In this conversation: 1. What do you do when you build something from zero and still get rated below the person who grew an existing brand by 5%? 2. How do you tell the difference between being…
E253 · 9 Jul 2026 · 33 min
253: The Harvard Grad who quit her job to build a deodorant for women | CEO, Laani | Unstarted
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 women, built around the categories nobody talks about. In this episode, she and Avnish go back to the very beginning. They get into: 1. How do you start when you have ideas but no capital? 2. Why…
E252 · 2 Jul 2026 · 35 min
252: How Country Delight grew its revenue to ₹200 Cr a month | Chakradhar Gade | Unstarted
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. Avnish Bajaj and Chakradhar get into the questions most founders sit with alone: 1. What do you do when a successful career leaves you with "a huge loss of identity"? 2. Should you bootstrap and…
E251 · 25 Jun 2026 · 39 min
251: Running two profitable unicorns in India | Asish Mohapatra, OfBusiness | Unstarted
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 this episode, they get into: 1. How did you get comfortable in your own skin? Was there a trigger? 2. Are entrepreneurs born or made, and how do you decide which skills to build vs. buy? 3. How do you…
E250 · 18 Jun 2026 · 44 min
250: What sports taught the Head of Spotify India about building a business | Unstarted
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, the confidence, and the network, but not the one big idea, what do you actually do with that? 2. Is raising a fund a solution, or a responsibility you take on before you've found the problem? 3. Why…
E249 · 16 Jun 2026 · 49 min
249: PhonePe CTO on how they are using AI at scale | Rahul Chari | Intelligent Indians
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 story of PhonePe's AI journey from building their own LLM gateway and Agent Hub, to launching AI search with Microsoft, to betting on on-device models for privacy and cost. And it ends with the biggest…
E248 · 11 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
248: Got Rejected from 100 banks and then built a $7.5 Billion company | Razorpay Story | Harshil Mathur
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 night Yes Bank froze with customer money stuck inside it. This is the founder story, lived experience as an edge, why the rejections compounded in his favour, why the grind always comes, and the…
E247 · 4 Jun 2026 · 36 min
247: 23 years old and raised $45M in series B to build Pronto | Anjali Sardana | Unstarted
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 sees India's informal labor market as a trillion-dollar opportunity, and the founder mindset that got her through the messy, chaotic, sleep-deprived early days. She also gets brutally honest about…
E246 · 2 Jun 2026 · 37 min
246: He built India's #1 Data Centre and is now building its AI backbone | Sharad Sanghi, CEO - Neysa
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 Intelligent Indians, Rajinder Balaraman and Sharad cover: 1. Why neo clouds exist as a category, and what hyperscalers structurally can't do for one market 2. The ITQ case study: how to define ROI before…
E245 · 28 May 2026 · 35 min
245: Building a brand that is used by 20% of India's D2C Market | Chirag Taneja, CEO - GoKwik | Unstarted
Chirag Taneja built GoKwik into 1 in 5 D2C checkouts in India. But the path there was a series of bets that didn't work, jobs that didn't last, and one moment in 2020 where the suitcases for Canada were packed and waiting in his living room. In Episode 12 of Unstarted, Chirag sits down with Avnish Bajaj to talk about what it actually means to keep tinkering, and when tinkering becomes the thing that holds you back. They get into: 1. What's really important to start a business: idea, capital, or knowledge? 2. Why choosing the right problem matters more than solving any problem 3. The Canada…
E244 · 21 May 2026 · 40 min
244: Built a ₹1000 Cr brand with ₹5 lakh | The Souled Store Story | Unstarted
Most founders can't tell you the moment they decided to build. Vedang Patel can. He was 23, a finance analyst with IIM seats in hand, and he looked at the MBA-holder sitting next to him in office and asked himself one question: "Is that what I want to do?" The resounding no from every section of his brain, and the ₹5.25 lakh he and his co-founders had between them is what became The Souled Store. ₹1000 crore in revenue, ₹150–200 crore in profit, an NSE bell on the way. In this episode, Avnish and Vedang sit with three questions sent in by aspiring founders: 1. How do you actually validate an…
E243 · 19 May 2026 · 50 min
243: Why Indian AI founders are not building in India | The Reality of Indian AI
India's AI moment is louder than its rank. 100M+ ChatGPT users. #2 globally in usage. Still 76th in the world on per capita penetration. So what's actually happening on the ground? In this episode of Z47 Moments, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Ashwin Raguraman (Head of AI, walk through The India AI Edge: a three-month primary research effort by Z47, OpenAI, and Zinnov. The report draws on first-party ChatGPT data from OpenAI and interviews with 100+ CXOs across India's largest enterprises, traditional businesses, and emerging companies. They unpack: Why India's AI map looks nothing like its tech…
E242 · 14 May 2026 · 54 min
242: Building India's most viral sneaker brand | Utkarsh Gupta | Unstarted
What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet? Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it. By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud: Was the MBA real, or was I…
E241 · 7 May 2026 · 39 min
241: How 3 IIT engineers built one of India's biggest beauty brands | Manish Taneja | Unstarted
Do you need an original idea to start a company? Do you need to be a consumer of your category? Do you need the "right" co-founders? Manish Taneja was none of those things. He grew up in Faridabad a self-described "frog of his own well." He went to IIT and "felt very small." He became a banker, then an investor, then started a beauty company with two other male engineers, with no female co-founder, and no personal stake in the category. He still built Purplle into one of India's largest beauty platforms. In this episode of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj and Manish sit down to work through the…
E240 · 30 Apr 2026 · 45 min
240: The man who sold his company to Jio for Rs. 700 Cr | Aakrit Vaish | Unstarted
What do you do with the regret of being right too early? Aakrit Vaish started Haptik in 2013: an AI chatbot company nine years before ChatGPT. By 2016 he knew the market wasn't ready. He kept going anyway. In 2019 he sold to Reliance Jio. In November 2022, he watched the world finally catch up to the thesis he'd carried for a decade and for a few weeks, sat with the sentence: "This should have been me." Today he's co-founder of Activate, an AI-native VC firm running with two partners, one employee and seven agents, and an advisor on the India AI Mission. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj sits…
E239 · 23 Apr 2026 · 43 min
239: How Rebel Foods Built the World's First Cloud Kitchen Empire | Jaydeep Barman | Unstarted
What happens when you spend 13 years building something, and for most of those years, the people around you think it's not going to work out? Jaydeep Barman left a gilded career at McKinsey's London office to bet on a single roll shop in Pune. What followed was a decade-plus journey through India's costliest real estate market, the invention of an entirely new category (cloud kitchens — before anyone called it that), and the slow, painful work of staying in the game while companies that started years after him became unicorns overnight. In this conversation, Avnish and Jaydeep wrestle with:…
E238 · 20 Apr 2026 · 38 min
238: Raised $12.5M to eliminate US healthcare's biggest problem | Coral AI
What does it take to fix the most broken system in America — from the outside? Ajay and Aniket, co-founders of Coral AI, had zero healthcare experience when they started. What they had was a burning problem, a one-way plane ticket to the US, and a relentless drive to understand healthcare from the ground up — visiting 17 cities in 30 days, becoming interns, and reading thousands of faxes doctors still send in 2026. In this episode of Zee47 Moments, Ashwin and Vikram sit down with the founders to unpack how Coral is using AI to eliminate the administrative chaos of patient referrals — cutting…
E237 · 16 Apr 2026 · 37 min
237: Built a $70M company because he wasn't invited to birthday parties
Sanket Shah started thinking about business at 17. His first idea was putting ads on Mumbai's auto-rickshaws. The government said no. He went to Mantralaya three times, met the Chief Minister, got sent to the transport commissioner, and received government letters at home for four years. He got 4 rickshaws approved. Twenty-something years later, he's the founder of Invideo — a video creation platform operating at serious scale, with under 100 people. And right now, he's stopped looking at his revenue numbers entirely. He has two people running the existing business. He is fully allocated to…

About Z47 Moments

Z47 Moments is a English business podcast from Z47. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Z47
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 40 min
Latest episode: 8 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1445390745

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