Digital India: iSpirt, Dalberg launch contest to build apps on India Stack

Dalberg Advisors, a social advisory firm and software industry think-tank iSpirt have joined hands to launch a venture pitch competition for early stage startups that will build on India Stack, a set of APIs released by the government, to build India-specific solutions.
 

India Stack uses Aadhaar as a base for verification of an individual and delivers a set of services for identification, banking and managing digital records. It includes UPI for digital payments, e-sign to enable digital signing of documents and DigiLocker which serves as a repository of documents. India Stack was launched to push the government's Digital India initiative.

Bharat innovations, the venture arm of IIM Ahmedabad's Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, Omidyar Network and Unitus Seed Fund will be pitched the shortlisted ideas and guide the participants.

The startups that will qualify will be in teams of minimum two to maximum four members, including the founder. They will also have to be early stage startups that have received only seed or limited angel funding. Further, they need to meet the three point criteria of being tech-enabled, leveraging India Stack platform and serving the "underserved".

"India Stack adoption across all APIs is growing exponentially. Looking forward to see innovative new applications come up," Chief Innovation Officer at Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (IIM-A), Sanjay Jain said in a statement.

The competition is open to business models that can reach previously underserved, new customer segments across diverse sectors such as financial services, education, and healthcare and others. The core focus areas of the competition will also include digital lending and supporting activities, such as alternative credit scoring, health insurance, education loans, skilling and certification, property registration agreements, patient-centric healthcare management, and SaaS platforms "as a service" that support the development of other India Stack based innovations such as Digi-locker or e-sign providers.