Nandan Nilekani-supported Apurva.ai has expanded Apurva LENS, its artificial intelligence-powered knowledge product, into a broader platform intended to help organisations across the development sector share and learn from knowledge beyond their own institutional boundaries.
The September 21 announcement marks a shift for LENS from a tool primarily focused on helping individual organisations work with their own knowledge to a platform built around cross-organisational learning and collaboration.
Apurva.ai said the new model will allow organisations participating in an ecosystem to learn from knowledge that others make available while retaining control over information they want to keep private.
The company describes Apurva.ai as an AI-enabled public-good digital infrastructure working with more than 50 global organisations. It operates as a unit of the C4EC Foundation, which was co-founded by Nilekani Philanthropies.
What Apurva LENS Is Designed to Do
Unlike a general-purpose large language model, Apurva.ai focuses on AI-powered products designed for organisations working on social and development challenges.
LENS is intended to bring together knowledge that can otherwise remain fragmented across research papers, evaluations, programme experience, organisational records and conversations.
A central element of the approach is the inclusion of community voices and lived experiences alongside formal institutional knowledge.
According to Apurva.ai, LENS has already helped surface more than half a million voices and perspectives from across the development ecosystem in the Global South.
The figure is a company-reported measure and should therefore be understood as Apurva.ai's account of the platform's reach rather than an independently audited usage statistic.
Why Apurva.ai Is Turning LENS Into a Platform
The change reflects a broader problem emerging alongside the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence: access to information is becoming easier, but organisations still need ways to determine what information means within a particular social, institutional or geographic context.
For development organisations, relevant knowledge can be distributed across NGOs, governments, researchers, funders, field workers and communities themselves.
Apurva.ai's platform model attempts to connect those different sources without requiring organisations to make all of their information public.
Under the model described by the company, participating organisations retain control over what stays private and what is shared with others.
That distinction could be particularly relevant in development work, where useful institutional knowledge may coexist with information that organisations cannot or do not want to distribute widely.
LENS Is Already Being Tested Across Multiple Regions
The platform approach is not limited to a single geography or development issue.
SELCO Foundation initially used Apurva LENS to combine archival information, everyday conversations and sector-focused material. Teams could then query the accumulated knowledge, identify patterns and synthesise insights.
That work has subsequently expanded through the Platform for Collective Wisdom (PCW), an initiative enabled by Apurva.ai that seeks to connect community voices, practitioner perspectives and institutional knowledge.
In Africa, Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA) has used LENS to organise and analyse community dialogues and research across Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone and South Africa.
The material spans areas including climate resilience, health, livelihoods, food systems, gender, governance and financing.
The project also illustrates a limitation that Apurva.ai and participating organisations themselves acknowledge: AI-based synthesis does not eliminate the need for human interpretation. Local realities, political economy and broader systems dynamics still require contextual judgment.
Brazil Project Tests AI Against 20,000 Life Stories
Another use case comes from Brazil's Museu da Pessoa, which has built an archive containing approximately 20,000 life stories and 11,000 hours of recorded material.
The organisation used Apurva LENS on a subset of the archive to examine experiences related to longevity and identify similarities and differences across individual stories.
The project demonstrates a different potential application for the technology: making very large archives easier to explore without reducing them to isolated documents or keyword searches.
Instead, AI-assisted analysis can potentially help researchers and organisations identify relationships across collections that would be difficult to examine manually at the same scale.
Rare's Fish Forever Is Building a 'Living' Knowledge System
Apurva LENS is also being used by Rare's Fish Forever programme, which works with fishers, governments, local leaders, funders and NGOs across Central and South America, Africa and Asia-Pacific.
As the programme expanded, its institutional knowledge accumulated across reports, presentations, field notes, chats and informal conversations.
LENS is being used to help organise that material and connect existing knowledge with newer information coming from communities and programmes.
The longer-term objective, according to the announcement, is to develop a continuously evolving knowledge ecosystem in which new community insights can feed back into learning across the wider programme.
Nandan Nilekani Sees AI as Infrastructure for Collective Knowledge
Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of Infosys and chairman of the EkStep Foundation, framed the initiative around using AI to make intelligence useful across different social contexts.
“AI’s real opportunity is to make intelligence useful at scale, across varied societal contexts.”
Nilekani also said India's experience with open infrastructure demonstrated how ecosystems can generate impact beyond their original boundaries, describing Apurva.ai's approach as applying similar thinking to knowledge.
The comparison is significant because Apurva.ai positions itself not simply as another standalone AI application but as public-good knowledge infrastructure for organisations dealing with social challenges.
Its official website says the platform is open source and that organisational data remains private unless users choose to share it.
From Organisational Knowledge to Collective Intelligence
Anand Rajan, co-founder and Mission Leader at Apurva.ai, said the development sector's central problem is not necessarily a shortage of knowledge.
Instead, useful information already exists across programmes, organisations, research and communities, but much of it remains dispersed.
“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,” Rajan said.
He also stressed that although AI can help organisations analyse complexity at a scale that previously was difficult, judgment, context and action remain human responsibilities.
What the Shift Could Mean for Development Organisations
The move from an organisation-specific workspace to an ecosystem platform changes the ambition behind LENS.
Instead of merely helping one organisation search or analyse its internal information, the model is designed to make selected knowledge reusable across organisational and geographic boundaries.
For NGOs, foundations, researchers, governments and other development actors, that could reduce duplication where organisations repeatedly investigate similar problems without access to relevant lessons generated elsewhere.
Whether the model achieves that goal at scale will depend on practical factors including participation, the quality and diversity of contributed knowledge, organisations' willingness to share information, governance and the effectiveness of human oversight.
For now, the confirmed development is that Apurva.ai has opened LENS for practitioners and organisations to explore as a broader platform, while its early deployments offer examples of how AI-assisted knowledge systems are being tested in development work.
