Do you have your Meet the Drapers appearance transcript?

Rabi Gupta:    Hey, I'm Rabi, co-founder of Eva Bot. We moved to Silicon Valley like a year ago from India, and we wanted to build these new relationships. We started Eva so that it can help us build those relationships. When we started Eva, we were personally delivering, hand delivering all the gifts. The aha moment was when we saw the reaction on the faces of people who were receiving the gift, they were surprised and delighted. That's when it clicked to us that this, we are on to something big.

    I think that we're at an important technology junction here. On one hand, technology can actually bring over machines and then humans are out of jobs and stuff like that. On the other hand, we can actually use technology to bring humans closer so that they work in a better way or in a better environment. We believe in the latter.

Monique:    Up next, we've got Unima.

Speaker 22:    Hi.

Monique:    Tell me a little bit about what your company does.

Speaker 22:    We are working with fast technical diagnostic technology for diseases. It's a device made on paper that was developed to be used in the developing world. This was developed to be used by people with no technical training, where the doctor could just take a blood sample from a fingerprint, put it in the device, wait 10 minutes, take a picture with an app in a smart phone, and it gives you the results in just five seconds.

Rabi Gupta:    Hey, Rabi from Eva Bot.AI. Eva Bot is a customer delight automation platform. What it is does, it basically helps you send highly personalized gifts and merchandise to your customer landscape. You can also collect important data like feedback, customer testimonials. Like their birthdays, addresses, like virtual, virtual chat box. How it works is really simple. I mean, you just seize the email at Eva Bot.AI in an email, and mention the intent of sending a gift or a merchandise, right?

    Then Eva chats with the recipient to figure out what they like, where they live, the delivery lives, all the things. Then they send out a gift or a merchandise, which matches their taste, on behalf of the company. In 10 months, more than 90 companies have sent out more than 3,000 gifts worth $80,000 to our platform.

Tim Draper:    All right. Pull up a chair and we'll talk. I've looked at this before.

Rabi Gupta:    Yeah.

Tim Draper:    I was very interested in how your progress has come. Thank you for the cup of coffee you sent me through Eva.

Rabi Gupta:    Yeah, yeah. That's how we started, right.

Tim Draper:    That's a wonderful thing.

Rabi Gupta:    Personally delivering the gifts.

Tim Draper:    Yeah. My biggest question is how many people have done it once, and then done it again and again and again and again? Do you have any that are just totally hooked up?

Rabi Gupta:    When we started, it was more like anyone can come in and start sending gifts. When you send out a gift to someone, they also like it and they want to use it, so that's how we initially grew. Then when we started going to these guys and started sending gift packs, which is like companies can now buy gift credits up to $10,000 upfront to start, to use our services. There are 10 companies paying us more than $5,000 in credits, basically to use our services.

Bill Draper:    Can't they do this by themselves without you?

Rabi Gupta:    Let's look at the process. Like in a typical company, if you have, say a thousand clients, how do you send them gifts? You don't know what they like, right? You don't know where they live. What typically, people use today is your office assistant will chat with each one of them to figure out, "Hey, I want to send you something. Can you share with me your address? What do you like, by the way?" All those awkward questions, right? The other problem is the logistics. You need to find out the gift, you need to send it out, and then you need to track it, right?

    Then, if you want to do it in your own company branded boxes, then you need to figure out another vendor, like, "Who will do my gift boxes?" Right? We actually automate all of this. We basically take care of end-to-end things. It's not just about chatting with your customer, it's also about logistics. We manage everything, and then you are able to track where's the gift right now? Is it delivered or not? Whether the product was right or not, all those feedback things, everything is in-built.

Tim Draper:    Now, when I went through the process, I noticed I had to send multiple texts to finally get to where they knew what I wanted.

Rabi Gupta:    Yeah.

Tim Draper:    It was a little frustrating, but I guess maybe it's because I don't text that much. I'm not as used to doing it.

Rabi Gupta:    Now we actually have beta AI conversation engine, which is able to look at your requirements. For a specific company, say they want to do a survey while taking the gift, and everything is automated. You just say that, "These are my requirements," and then Eva creates a conversation, which is less than 45 seconds.

Jesse Draper:    There's literally a thousand of these companies. I mean, there's three in YC every single time they have a pitch day, so I'm wondering, what is your competitive advantage?

Rabi Gupta:    The data says that when people use Eva to send out gifts, 93 percent of gifts get accepted. Without using our service, the conversion rate is 15 percent at max, but using our service, it's around 80 percent. Any gifting company, especially corporate gifting, what they do is, their proposition to you is, "We will make some cool products and put your logo on top of it," right? That is most of the companies, that's what they're doing. Then at max, they will say, "Here, send this link to your recipient, and they can come and choose from a catalog of a thousand gifts," right?

Jesse Draper:    Right.

Rabi Gupta:    We say that, "You don't need to do all of this. They just chat for 45 seconds and we see what's their prize, gift that they like." No one is doing that.

Tim Draper:    How do you make money? Is it a per gift thing, so you get a dollar per gift or something?

Rabi Gupta:    Yeah, so for one gift we are actually making 25 percent back today. Then on top of it, what we have started doing is a lot of services, so if you want to add your own box, like own branded box, then we'll charge you $3 extra per gift.

Naveen Jain:    Is it an app or it's just in free text messaging?

Rabi Gupta:    Just CC Eva in an email. After that, the link which the recipient gets is of that link, so it works everywhere, on mobile or desktop.

Bill Draper:    When you gather information that you're gathering, do you have a plan to use that in any other way later on?

Rabi Gupta:    What happens is, when you receive a gift from say a vendor, we ask you for the product feedback. If you say that, "I like the product," then we also ask you, "Hey, would you like to be contacted by this vendor for the product?" You can say yes. Most of the guys say yes, "We like the product." Then, it basically becomes a marketing opportunity for us also, to connect the vendor to a customer.

Naveen Jain:    I'm still, sorry, I'm ... Why can't I just have a gift of five things, just like you do on a website and say, "Pick the one you want"? There's no gift catalog, there's no price.

Rabi Gupta:    It's easy to say, but it's very hard when you don't know what the recipient likes.

Naveen Jain:    He's going to select which one he wants out of the five.

Rabi Gupta:    Then, out of five, what if I don't like anything? How are you going to decide what five? Based on what?

Naveen Jain:    Sure, a group of people, they'll say, "There is sweet stuff, there's salty stuff, there's electronic, non-electronic."

Rabi Gupta:    See, today we are moving towards personalization, right? Everyone wants their own stuff. When you are doing customer gifting, right, it's not just about the gift, right? It's also about the gesture and what you want. Say incentivization and non-cash incentives is a huge industry.

    This incentivization is automatic. When you use Eva, you are sending out a gift, but then you are able to collect a lot of information so you can give the subtle hint of, "Hey, here's a gift for you, would you like to give me a testimonial? Can I have your birthday or can I have your address?"

Bill Draper:    Can you talk about your own management? Have you ever had a leadership role?

Rabi Gupta:    Yeah, so before this I actually built and sold a company in India.

Tim Draper:    Then, did the investors make money?

Rabi Gupta:    The investors, they got their money back.

Tim Draper:    I get the long-term vision, and how you'll be able to spread, and you'll be a big logistics company and all that, but I feel like it's going to be a long time before you get there, and you're going to need a lot of money. Convince me that you're not going to need a lot of money to grow this.

Bill Draper:    How much money-

Tim Draper:    How much are you raising?

Bill Draper:    Yeah.

Tim Draper:    How much are you giving away for it?

Rabi Gupta:    We are looking to raise another $1 million. We have raised around $450,000.

Tim Draper:    What valuation?

Rabi Gupta:    At four million cap.

Bill Draper:    As a conservative estimate, how big do you think this will be in five or ten years?

Rabi Gupta:    In five years, we'll definitely gross $300 million in revenues. Because if a small company like Roomi is willing to say, come at $50,000 a year on our platform, then bigger companies, you can look at a good size of say, half a million dollars or a million dollars per company.

Tim Draper:    Well terrific, well thank you so much for coming in.

Bill Draper:    Yeah.

Tim Draper:    We'll see how the audience feels.

Rabi Gupta:    Sure.

Tim Draper:    They can vote up, they can vote down or they can invest.

Rabi Gupta:    Cool.

Tim Draper:    Eva may have some investment, who knows?

Bill Draper:    Good luck to you.

Rabi Gupta:    Yeah, it went pretty well. The judges are really nice, so I didn't feel like there was stress or anything. It went really smoothly. To be honest, I don't think any question really surprised me, but yeah, I mean one question about competitive advantage or like what other competitions you have, that was one by Jesse. Otherwise, it was all good.

Jesse Draper:    What did you guys think?

Tim Draper:    I'm not sure it works. If he can ingratiate himself into all these corporates, and every time they have a problem with customer service the customer gets a cup of coffee or something, then he's really on to something.

Jesse Draper:    Yeah. I mean, there's a million of these. For years, there have been a million of these, so I feel like if you're doing gifting, you really have to be doing something incredibly unique, and I didn't feel that. He's saying the personalization, but I think he's fantastic. It's a boost company, and I love boost. I think it's the best accelerator on the planet. I think he will lead a great company, whatever comes.