The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is exploring the creation of a fund to back seed-stage startups building innovative solutions around India’s biometric ID, Aadhaar, and its related use cases, a senior executive said.
The focus on the fund comes as the apex body plans to encourage technological solutions that can improve the quality, security and trustworthiness of the Aadhaar system, said Neelkanth Mishra, chairperson (part-time), UIDAI.
“Innovation can come from any side. So, if there is an innovative fintech, we would like to partner with them, create a sandbox environment where they can test out their solutions. We are even exploring setting up a fund, so that if there are innovative solutions that are Aadhaar focused, and which can improve its quality, trustworthiness and security, we would like to fund such solutions,” Mishra said.
He was speaking at the Bharat Fintech Forum 2026.
On the sidelines of the event, Mishra added that while the discussion was in its exploratory stage, the idea was to invest in seed scale startups that may not require a large chunk of capital to begin with. The plan, however, is subject to necessary regulatory approvals.
“This is going to be a direct investment fund. It is still in the exploratory stage. We are looking at seed capital investments,” he told Business Standard.
The corpus of the fund and timelines are yet to be finalised.
“We are very cognizant of the fact that we are the largest biometric database in the world. There are solutions that can be built using the database that we have and no one else can replicate. Therefore, that gives a huge opportunity to people, investors and banks to develop solutions,” he said.
UIDAI logs over 90 million authentications each day with the system having clocked more than 130 million authentications.
Mishra added that on peak days, the system records over 15 million face authentications with the number further rising.
“We are building capacity so that we can do 300 million authentications a day. There should not be any server-level problems or bottlenecks. We have revamped the Aadhaar app,” he said.
“We were unhappy with the kind of service coming out of the state government-run Aadhaar Sewa Kendras. So, we have now launched our own Aadhaar Sewa Kendras and those are ramping up and spreading out in every district,” he added.
 "UIDAI plans fund to back tech companies innovating around Aadhaar")
