The Indian Iris, a policy research and consulting startup that focuses on analysing and simplifying government policies and schemes, raised an angel investment of undisclosed amount from Ahmedabad based Timbru Ventures, a fund that supports aspiring entrepreneurs with promising ideas.
The Indian Iris was founded a year ago with support from Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad. It is founded by the passionate alumni of IIT Roorkee, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIIT Bangalore.
The Indian Iris is the first of its kind platform that provides all policies and schemes of centre and state governments in an easy to understand language. The team at The Indian Iris navigates through complex policy documents and decodes them for easy understanding of citizens.
“We started with the thought that all governments, center or state, formulate some policies and schemes for the welfare of businesses or for their citizens. However, many times the information is not easily available, searchable and easily understood by common citizens, depriving them from availing benefits. There are language barriers too. That’s where, The Indian Iris aspires to play a major role,” says Sahitya, the Co-founder.
The Indian Iris has also developed an android application, ‘Join R’, available on Google Play store for download. The app attempts to leverage the community driven culture in our country. The key aim of the application to deliver information that matters the most to the Indian citizens including the policy and scheme related information. Currently, this beta version of the application maps all 6,50,000 villages of our country and allows user to join his or her village community.
Timbru Venture’s managing director Narayan DhulSingh said that they invested in this startup mainly for the promising team and they are attempting to solve a huge problem which impacts a large majority of our country. “In today’s digital world, information is the new source of power. Many in our country do not get the right information at the right moment. If successfully implemented, it will create a huge impact,” he further added.
“We aim to become the most preferred source of information on policies and schemes by center and state governments in India. We shall cover both welfare and business policies and schemes.” We aim to build a policy and project consulting layer to generate revenues”, says Narayan, another co-founder.
At present, the portal sees over 30,000 unique visitors with 145,000 page views per month. Every day, the portal receives tens of queries from users asking for clarification on polices/schemes, and seeking advice on how to avail benefits. The startup aims to use the funds to scale its operations, hiring more resources for handing user queries, building and marketing the mobile platform, Join R, and enhancing the user interface of The Indian Iris.
