apurva-ai-evolves-apurva-lens-from-an-organisational-product-to-a-platform-for-the-development-ecosystem

Rohini and Nandan Nilekani-supported Apurva.ai evolves Apurva LENS from a knowledge workspace into a platform for cross-organisational learning and collaboration
Apurva LENS is open for practitioners and organisations to explore and experience its capabilities firsthand

BENGALURU, India, Sept. 21, 2026 -- Apurva.ai, an AI-enabled public-good digital infrastructure working with over 50 global organisations, today announced a new platform model for Apurva LENS, extending it from a product that helps individual organisations work with their knowledge to a platform that enables knowledge to travel across the wider development ecosystem. Apurva LENS is already being used and tested by organisations addressing complex social challenges across the Global South and beyond.

Apurva.ai is a unit of C4EC Foundation, co-founded by Nilekani Philanthropies to support change leaders working to respond to complex social challenges with speed, at scale, and sustainably.

As social and development challenges grow in scale and complexity, no single organisation has all the knowledge or answers needed to respond effectively. There is a growing need for ways to bring together what different actors and communities know, make sense of it collectively, and respond at scale.

Apurva LENS, part of a suite of AI-enabled products, was designed to help actors across the development ecosystem, including funders, governments, NGOs and change leaders, make sense of knowledge that often remains siloed across research, evaluations, programme experience and conversations. At its core are the voices and lived experiences of communities, so that those closest to a problem can help shape what happens next. Today, Apurva LENS has helped surface more than half a million voices and perspectives from across the development ecosystem in the Global South.

The new platform model transforms Apurva LENS from an organisation-level product into a platform for cross-organisational learning and collaboration. Multiple actors across an ecosystem can now learn from knowledge made available by each other, while retaining control over what they keep private and what they choose to share. This allows learning generated in one part of an ecosystem to become useful elsewhere, without losing its context or ownership.

The shift reflects a larger premise behind Apurva LENS: as AI makes more knowledge available, the challenge is no longer simply accessing information but making sense of it. By bringing together research, evidence, and organisational learning with the voices and lived experiences of communities from the outset, Apurva LENS enables a more bottom-up approach where those closest to a problem help shape how it is understood and how solutions are designed. This approach is already being explored across different development contexts.

SELCO Foundation initially used Apurva LENS to bring together organisational knowledge spanning archival information, everyday conversations and sector-focused assets, enabling teams to query it, surface patterns and synthesise insights. The collaboration has since extended beyond SELCO Foundation through the Platform for Collective Wisdom (PCW), an initiative enabled by Apurva.ai. PCW brings together community voices, practitioner perspectives and institutional knowledge across the development sector, allowing knowledge that would otherwise remain siloed to be connected and built upon across the wider ecosystem.
Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA) used Apurva LENS to organise, analyse and synthesise community dialogues and research across Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone and South Africa, spanning climate resilience, health, livelihoods, food systems, gender, governance and financing. The work helped surface themes across countries while reinforcing an important principle: AI-assisted analysis was most useful when combined with human contextual judgment grounded in local realities, political economy and systems dynamics.
In Brazil, Museu da Pessoa, one of the world's earliest virtual museums, has built an archive of 20,000 life stories and approximately 11,000 hours of recorded material, capturing experiences across generations, regions and communities. Using Apurva LENS, the team prototyped a subset of voices to explore experiences around longevity, surfacing patterns and differences across individual life stories. The work points to a larger opportunity: turning a vast archive into living, accessible knowledge, that enables insights rooted in local experience to travel across languages and geographies and inform understanding far beyond where those stories originated.
Rare's Fish Forever works with fishers, local leaders, governments, funders and NGOs across Central and South America, Africa and Asia-Pacific to restore coastal fisheries and enable communities to manage them sustainably. As the programme expanded, knowledge accumulated across reports, presentations, field notes, chats and informal conversations. Fish Forever brought in Apurva LENS to help organise this collective knowledge, enabling teams to connect what they know with what they are learning and how conditions are changing. Its longer-term ambition is a living knowledge ecosystem where new insights from communities can continually inform learning across the programme.

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 open for practitioners and organisations to explore and experience its capabilities firsthand. The experience brings to life a question at the heart of Apurva.ai's approach: What if communities were not simply the recipients of solutions, but helped shape them from the start?

About Apurva.ai

Apurva.ai is a public-good, sense-making infrastructure for systems change. Through its AI-powered suite of products, it enables change leaders and organisations to unlock the collective wisdom within their networks by connecting community voices and lived experiences with knowledge from across the wider ecosystem. With communities at the centre, Apurva.ai helps surface connections, build shared understanding and enable more contextually relevant action on complex social challenges. Its suite of products supports a continuous cycle of listening, learning and acting, helping ecosystems move from fragmented knowledge towards collective understanding and systemic change. Apurva.ai is a unit of C4EC Foundation.

For more on Apurva.ai visit: https://apurva.ai/about-us/