Hyderabad-based technology startup Teknophile, runs by a group of young students has raised $25,000 as an angel funding from a clutch of NRIs.
The tech-led startup, headed by a 17-year-old student Saathwik Yadavalli, has launched an App titled ProblemBolo which aims to bring together all the departments of a city into a unified citizen participatory governance platform.
The brain behind Technophile, Saathwik Yadavalli-a class 12 student, happens to be CEO and Chief Design Officer of the startup. His team includes two other members Akshar Yadavalli, an undergrad in Physics from the University of Texas and Abhiram Gaddam, another undergrad in engineering from Colombia University.
“They liked the idea and asked us to build such platforms for the country’s cities. We are going to make a demo in Colombo later this year,” Saathwik told BusinessLine.
ProblemBolo, which Teknophile calls social empowerment application, will be made available across iOS and Android platforms for free, and will be launched globally for various cities in India, US and Sri Lanka over the next few months. It claims to be scalable to any town or city in the world.
The problemBolo app enables citizens to take a photo of any civic or other problems, and can upload it onto the platform. The citizens need not know the concerned department or officer and the App enables the grievance to reach the right desk, using geo-tagging and geo-fencing technologies to determine the corresponding department.
It acts as a watchdog and creates pressure groups based on similar complaints and generates activity charts to be sent to media outlets, and the users can track the status of their complaints as well.
Commenting on revenue and monetisation, Yadavalli said, “We might look at advertisements and offering technology services such as generating analyses or providing dashboards to those (government agencies) using the platform.”
