Policy Research Startup The Indian Iris Raises Funding

The Indian Iris, a policy research and consulting startup has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Ahmedabad-based Timbru Ventures.

The Indian Iris was founded a year ago by IIT Roorkee and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus Narayan Singh Rao and IIIT Bangalore alumnus Sahitya Sindhu. It was founded with support from Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad. It focusses on the ongoing initiatives, policies and schemes of the Government of India and the State Governments.

The Indian Iris is a platform that provides all policies and schemes of centre and state governments in an easy language. The team navigates through complex policy documents and decodes them for easy understanding of citizens.

Talking about the startup, co-founder Sahitya said, “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.”

The startup has also developed an android application, ‘Join R’ available on Google Play store. Currently, the beta version of the application maps all 6,50,000 villages of the country and allows user to join their village community.

The startup will use the newly raised funds to scale its operations. Moreover the funds will be used to hire more resources for handling user queries. Also for building and marketing the mobile platform, Join R, and enhancing the user interface.

The Indian Iris aims to become the most preferred source of information on policies and schemes by centre and state governments. It hopes to cover both welfare and business policies and schemes.

At present, the portal sees over 30,000 unique visitors with 145,000 page views per month. Every day, the portal receives multiple queries from users asking for clarification on policies/schemes, and seeking advice on how to avail benefits.

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