Pritam and I met at IIT Kharagpur and became close friends long before we became co-founders. What pulled us into building together was a shared frustration: the biggest problems around us weren't hidden — they were so normalized that nobody saw them anymore.

Dining out was the perfect example. Waving down staff to order, waiting for the bill, restaurants running on disconnected tools with zero memory of their customers — everyone had accepted this as just "how restaurants work." We couldn't unsee it. The entire offline dining experience was broken, and because it had always been broken, no one was fixing it.

We decided to become founders because these status-quo problems don't get solved by incumbents — they require someone naive enough to question the default. That conviction became Explorex.

We decided to Apply to YC because we were very much inspired by Airbnb. We applied 4 times total and got rejected 3 times, each of those rejections only kept making us better and helped us understand our business and customers better.

Yes.

We have come a long way, became profitable, seen every phase succeed so far.

~90% of Indian retail happens in person, yet offline venues have no memory of their customers. A restaurant that has served someone fifty times knows less about them than an e-commerce site they visited once. This is the core problem: offline commerce is data-blind.

For restaurants, this means running on disconnected tools — one system for billing, another for reservations, spreadsheets for everything else — with no way to know who their customers are, what they love, or why they stopped coming. For diners, it means friction everywhere: flagging down staff to order, waiting for the bill, and a dining experience that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades.

It's a big problem because of the sheer scale of what's being left on the table. Food services in India is a massive market, and it operates with almost none of the intelligence that transformed online commerce. Delivery platforms captured the ~10% of eating that happens at home; the 90% that happens inside venues remains a black box.

We decided to work on it because the problem was obvious but invisible — it had been the status quo for so long that nobody questioned it. We realized that solving it requires owning both sides: the restaurant's operating system and the consumer's touchpoint. That's hard, which is exactly why it hasn't been done — and why it becomes an irreplicable moat once you do.

Our vision is to build the memory layer for physical commerce — starting with dining.

If we truly succeed, walking into a restaurant will feel like the internet already works: the venue knows you, the experience is personalized, ordering and paying are frictionless, and an AI concierge (Elara) guides you to the best possible experience before you even decide where to go. Discovery, decision, and transaction collapse into one intelligent layer.

For restaurants, success means every independent venue in India operates with the data sophistication of an e-commerce giant — understanding their customers, optimizing their menus, and reaching high-intent diners directly instead of renting them from aggregators at punishing take rates. Think Shopify for restaurants: infrastructure that makes the merchant more powerful, not more dependent.

And dining is just the beachhead. The same problem — physical venues with no memory of their customers — exists across all of offline retail. If we win dining, we become the intelligence layer for offline commerce broadly: the UPI of physical retail operations, a shared infrastructure that makes the real world as smart as the digital one.

The world that results is one where the 90% of commerce that happens in person is no longer invisible — where physical businesses finally compete on equal footing with digital ones.