 Everyone's different here at the Canopy Workspace, different organisations, projects and specialisms. But here inside the Entopia building, there's also a common goal that brings us together. There's a collective desire to accelerate change, and sustainability is at the heart of it. The Canopy is all about collaboration, a community, sharing and learning from each other's experiences. And this is Canopy Connect, a podcast where you can get to know your fellow members at the Canopy. This time on the podcast. Hi, my name is Drishti Kholichin. I'm the founder and CEO of Textbot AI. So, let's connect. Textbot AI is a SaaS platform that helps companies and businesses implement diversity, equity and inclusion strategies using data. So, we help them collect data around their workforce, value chain workers and even board members. We perform analysis on the data and we help them with multiple reporting requirements that's impacting them mostly due to ESG and the UN Sustainability Development Goals. Prior to Textbot AI, I used to work in investment banks. So, I've been on trading floors for almost a decade. And you can imagine how male dominated the place was. So, for me, I perceive this as a problem to be fixed. I wanted to create more representation and inclusion in imbalanced workforces. It feels like I'm making an impact, like I'm not being a bystander and watching unfairness and being okay with it. So, it's just taking a stand to fix it in my own way, in my own capacity. That's how I feel. I feel liberated from being actually from a victim position to being someone who's fixing it. So, Textbot AI helps companies identify gaps in their workforces, value chain workers and board representation. So, those gaps would be mostly around composition, like gender composition or a racial ethnicity composition, even more extending to social economic background composition. So, we provide that form of intelligence throughout various seniority levels in the company, and we are able to quantify a lot of qualitative aspects in the workforce. So, one would be inclusion and engagement. It's really hard to measure those traits, but still we're able to kind of produce a metric out of it that helps them in also meeting their reporting requirements arising from ESG or impact metrics. So, that kind of completes the whole story while also giving the company a chance to fix what's wrong in their own organization. At the moment, my day is filled with activities such as talking to my customers, gathering more information around their needs, looking at the regulations and ensuring that our metrics are actually aligned with them. A large part of it goes into our fundraising efforts, trying to reach out to angel investors, VCs, getting conversations, and also that would entail looking at my team as well, developing more features on our product, testing them out. That's pretty much it. The textbook AI has been going on for two and a half years now, so pretty early stage, but in that period we've been able to show material change in the venture capital space. We've been able to help venture capital firms measure how much funding is going to underrepresented founders, to measure inclusion within their portfolios, and even put certain strategies and continuously measure that. So, that is a big improvement in that industry in itself, where we see only 2% of funding is going towards female founders, and there's potential for a lot more improvement on the EDI or diversity, equity and inclusion side of things. We are raising 750K as our pre-seed round. We would like to fill this with investors that can help us open doors to more customers and also partners such as ESG scoring agencies or reporting platforms where we can embed our metrics and help our customers deliver more value. We are also looking for potential customers that would be interested in improving diversity, equity and inclusion in their own organizations using data. We can embed our solutions in any systems as of now, so we would be very keen to try this with other partners. Success for us comes in two different strands. So, the first one is really about performance. We're looking to hit that one million annual recurring revenue, and on the other side it's really about how much social impact we are making. So, we want to see how businesses are improving diversity, equity and inclusion in their organizations using our product. We want to see how many more minority groups are being hired or feeling more included. So, things like that we keep measuring using our own analytics to help us meet our social impact targets. It's been two months since we've been working with Cy in this program. We found it very interesting because we're able to kind of align on sustainability goals. It's very important and it's also very relieving to see that organizations like BSI are taking the social sustainability part of ESG quite seriously. We feel very validated and valid in this whole exercise. We're able to work together with them, which is another great thing. BSI members, they talk to us all the time and we're able to have really fruitful discussions, and that brings us closer to putting together solutions that can help the wider economy and make bigger impact. So, this is the most enjoyable part of it, and also the fact that being in the canopy itself, it's living and breathing sustainability every day, so it just sets the mood right. We are very open to collaboration. We would like to talk to more businesses similar to BSI or even different. We think that there's a lot of fragmentation in the industry right now with respect to ESG or social sustainability. We're more than ready to show learnings, and even from a technical perspective, our application has its API infrastructure. We can embed platforms. We can do so many things together, so completely open to that. So, if you'd like to know more about Textbird AI, just head to our website, www.textbird.ai. And also connect with me on LinkedIn. We are going to be in the Entopia building every second week of every month. So, feel free to reach out to me and just schedule some time to have coffee. Thanks for checking out this episode of Canopy Connect. Log in to your Office R&D profile to connect with your canopy neighbours. Just head to the members page and find them. This is a canopy podcast made by New Allotment. The canopy is part of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Thank you for listening.