Explorex

Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

The founders, Pritam and his co-founder, met at IIT Kharagpur and were friends before starting the company. They focused on the offline dining experience, citing issues such as flagging down staff to order, waiting for the bill, and restaurants using disconnected tools with no record of their customers.

How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?

The founders applied to YC four times, being rejected three times before their current application.

What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?

The company states it has reached profitability.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

The founders note that around 90% of Indian retail occurs in person, yet offline venues retain no data on their customers, leaving restaurants running on disconnected billing, reservation, and spreadsheet tools with no customer insight. They aim to address this by owning both the restaurant's operating system and the consumer touchpoint, targeting the roughly 90% of eating that happens inside venues rather than through delivery.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

The founders aim to build a data or memory layer for physical commerce, starting with dining, where venues recognize customers, ordering and payment are frictionless, and an AI concierge named Elara guides diners. They plan to give independent restaurants e-commerce-level data capabilities and a direct channel to diners, then expand from dining into offline retail more broadly.