Apurva.ai Expands Apurva LENS into Development Ecosystem Platform

Bengaluru, September 21, 2026: Apurva.ai, an AI-enabled public-good digital infrastructure working with more than 50 global organisations, has expanded Apurva LENS from an organisation-level knowledge workspace into a platform designed to support cross-organisational learning and collaboration across the development ecosystem.

Apurva.ai is a unit of C4EC Foundation, co-founded by Nilekani Philanthropies to support change leaders working on complex social challenges. Apurva LENS is designed for funders, governments, NGOs and other development-sector organisations to bring together research, evaluations, programme experience and community voices that may otherwise remain siloed.

According to Apurva.ai, Apurva LENS has so far helped surface more than half a million voices and perspectives from across the development ecosystem in the Global South.

Under the new platform model, organisations can learn from knowledge shared by other actors while retaining control over information they choose to keep private or share. The platform is intended to allow learning generated in one part of an ecosystem to be used elsewhere while retaining its context and ownership.

The approach is being explored through collaborations with organisations including SELCO Foundation, Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA), Museu da Pessoa and Rare's Fish Forever.

SELCO Foundation initially used Apurva LENS to bring together archival information, everyday conversations and sector-focused assets. This work has since expanded through the Platform for Collective Wisdom (PCW), which connects community voices, practitioner perspectives and institutional knowledge.

RANA used the platform to organise and analyse community dialogues and research across Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone and South Africa, covering areas including climate resilience, health, livelihoods, food systems, gender, governance and financing.

Aggrey Aluso, Executive Director, Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA), said, “Working across countries, communities and interconnected development challenges, we see firsthand how knowledge can remain fragmented across programmes, partners and contexts. Our work with Apurva LENS has shown the value of bringing community voices together with research and systems knowledge to see connections that would otherwise be difficult to surface. The opportunity of a platform approach is to take this further, enabling learning to travel across actors and ecosystems while retaining the local context that gives it meaning. AI can help make those connections, but human judgment remains essential to understanding and acting on them.”

Dr. Harish Hande, CEO, SELCO Foundation, said, “Some of the most valuable learning comes from communities and practitioners solving real problems every day, yet those experiences rarely travel far enough. When they can be connected across organisations and geographies, we can build on what has already been learned rather than repeatedly starting from scratch. Our work with Apurva.ai is about creating that possibility at scale, while ensuring that community knowledge and lived experience remain at the heart of how solutions are shaped.”

Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder and Chairman, Infosys and Chairman of EkStep Foundation, said, “AI’s real opportunity is to make intelligence useful at scale, across varied societal contexts. India has shown how open infrastructure can enable ecosystems whose impact can extend far beyond its borders. Apurva.ai is bringing that thinking to knowledge - connecting research, organisational learning and community experience so that insights can travel across organisations and geographies. I hope more organisations will join us to explore what we can build together.”

Anand Rajan, Co-Founder and Mission Leader, Apurva.ai, said, “The development sector does not lack knowledge. It already exists across organisations, research, programmes and, importantly, within communities themselves. The challenge is turning all of this into understanding that people can act on. With Apurva LENS becoming a platform, we are moving from helping individual organisations make their knowledge work for them to asking what becomes possible when that knowledge can travel across an ecosystem. AI can help us make sense of this complexity at a scale that was not possible before. But judgment, context and action remain fundamentally human.”

Apurva LENS is now open for practitioners and organisations to explore its capabilities.