Teknophile gets $25,000 angel funding

HYDERABAD: Teknophile, a technology startup promoted by a team of young students that developed an App to provide interface between people and civic authorities for resolving public grievances, has raised $25,000 of angel funding from a group of NRIs.

The App, titled ProblemBolo, will be launched globally for various cities in India, US and Sri Lanka over the next few months, said Saathwik Yadavalli, a class XII student, who is heading the team.

The App, which Teknophile calls social empowerment application, will be made available on iOS and Android platforms for free.

Other members of the team include Akshar Yadavalli, an undergrad in Physics from the University of Texas and Abhiram Gaddam, another undergrad in engineering from Colombia University.

Addressing media on Friday, the Teknophile executives claimed that ProblemBolo is the first mobile App for citizens that works for a city and brings together all the departments of a city into a unified citizen participatory governance platform. The citizens need not know the concerned department or officer and the App enables the grievance to reach the right desk, using image processing and geofencing technologies to determine the corresponding department.

Apart from helping users track status of complaints till they were resolved, the App also acts as a watchdog and creates pressure groups based on similar complaints and generates activity charts to be sent to media outlets, they said.