If you join late for a demo of ProblemBolo, you can easily mistake it for a class project presentation by Saathwik Yadavalli. The 17-year-old teenager talks fluently on the platform — which connects citizens’ civic complaints to government agencies — built by his start-up.

Hyderabad-based Teknophile has already got a commitment from an US-based angel investor, Sri Malladi, and some of his friends.

“We liked the idea. It is scalable to any town or city in the world. We are going to put in $20,000-1,00,000 in the next few months to help them build a robust platform,” Malladi said. The firm, which is yet-to-be registered and has 10 students working for it, has also won Sri Lankan government as its first client.

“They have liked the idea and have asked us to build such platforms for the country’s cities. We are going to make a demo in Colombo later this year,” Saathwik told BusinessLine .

How does it work? A citizen takes a photo of a civic or other problems they face and can upload it onto the platform. Using geo-tagging-like tools, the platform then sends it to the relevant department for action. The citizens can track the status of their complaints.

While Yadavalli, founder and CEO, as well as Chief Design Officer of Teknophile, studies in a local college, his two aides, Abhiram and Akshit, are studying in the US.

Revenue model

The firm, however, is not looking at monetising the platform at the moment. “We might look at advertisements and offering technology services such as generating analyses or providing dashboards to those (government agencies) using the platform,” Yadavalli said.

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