Summary
Typing this report from San Francisco as the year is winding down and the team is resting and getting ready for 2026, which is starting with a bang at Neembaadi Learning Centre in Ahmedabad. A broken clavicle (from a bicycle accident) gave me time to step back and reflect on the 7 years of evolution and growth in Tech4Dev as we look back on 2025 and ahead to where we are going.
As we mature as an organisation and have strong leaders for all our verticals, an annual blog on their highs and lows has become part of our process. I’ll summarise the key trends we are seeing across our initiatives in this report. For those of you interested in the details, please read the annual reports from Glific, Dalgo, Fractional CxO, Avni, Cohorts + Partnerships, Communications, and an overall recap.
The past seven years have been a great ride, but in 2025, we hit our stride, and it has been a journey of growth and learning. We grew from 35 to 50 people and added two new platforms: Sashakt, a large-scale assessment platform and Kaapi, our AI integration platform. The Fractional CxO initiative evolved into a CxO and fractional tech team initiative, adding the Grassroots Initiative as one of its programs.
Using a quote from Ashana’s blog post: “When we connect, collaborate, and stay curious, impact doesn’t just add up; it compounds.”
Highlights
- Our vision has always been to enable and strengthen the ecosystem, and in 2025, we hosted 16 events and engaged with 300 NGOs. Collaborating with partners like Dasra and The Agency Fund made these efforts more impactful, reinforcing our shared purpose and collective progress.
- We doubled down on our AI initiatives, growing the team to 8 people. We released the first version of Kaapi, featuring integrations with Glific & Dalgo. We concluded AI Cohort v1.0 with 7 NGOs and launched AI Cohort v2.0. A focus of this cohort was expanding NGOs’ AI capacity through both funding and resources.
- We have made a small breakthrough on the “how to get more NGOs onto our platforms” sales issue. Our platforms have experimented with the Launchpad concept, which onboarded any NGO to the platform in 2 days through an intensive workshop with extensive hands-on support.
- Our products grew at a reasonable pace, though we are likely to miss our goals by a small percentage. From a sustainability perspective, we are trending in the right direction, with revenue growth slightly outpacing expense growth.
- Our fundraising continues to grow, with a very high funder retention rate and a strong inflow of new funders. Our funders have been attending sprints to see our work in action and interact with our partner NGOs. This year, we connected some of our NGO partners with new funders through our cohort programs. This quarter, we received a generous grant from Jack Dorsey’s #StartSmall Initiative to develop Kaapi, our AI Platform, and to support the AI Cohort Program.
- Finally, I’m proud of our willingness to experiment, learn from our mistakes, and iterate towards more effective solutions. Examples include our improved hiring and onboarding processes and new initiatives such as a fellowship program.
Misses
- In our 4th year, staff attrition, especially in engineering, has been a challenge due to salary constraints. Recognising this, we are committed to being more innovative and creative in retaining our team members moving forward.
- As each of our initiatives operates as an independent unit, we need to place them on the grant proposal track and secure funding independently of the parent organisation. We started the process this year with minimal traction, and it was not a priority for the group. We need to step up our game here.
- This year will be critical for both Dalgo and Avni regarding the products’ and the model’s viability. We strongly believe in the products, but we need to ensure the market is responsive and willing to pay for them. We should make the hard decisions as soon as we have sufficient data and confidence in our judgment.
- As we grow as an organisation, we need to keep the team motivated and driven, move faster and execute better, and deliver high-quality products and services.
What’s Next
In April 2026, we will begin implementing our Tech4Dev 3.0 roadmap. It focuses on scaling and developing new platforms, deploying fractional tech and product teams, supporting grassroots NGOs, and strengthening the ecosystem. Through Tech4Dev Global, we plan to expand our mission beyond the Global Majority by engaging skilled professionals worldwide who are eager to contribute to social impact. We’ll expand our work on AI via Kaapi, Cohorts and partnerships with model companies.
Glific Chatbot: 3-Year Impact Summary
Over the last three years, Glific’s portfolio has scaled sharply in both usage and outcomes, progressing from standalone chatbots to data‑integrated and increasingly AI‑enabled assistants. Platform usage has grown YoY, with ~190M messages exchanged across 200+ NGOs since 2022, with education programs driving 80% of traffic. In the same period, NGOs reached 3.3M beneficiaries and engaged 700k+ at annual peaks; education organisations (60% of the portfolio) account for 80% of beneficiaries and 85% of engagement. Under Cisco grant support, 120+ education NGOs exchanged 150M messages and reached nearly 2M beneficiaries.
In 2025 alone, education NGOs used Glific to reach 672,178 learners, with 619,568 of them interacting through LLM-enabled chatbots, reflecting the rapid adoption of AI-assisted program delivery. A small set of high-scale education programs: twelve exemplar NGOs, accounted for 95% of all active learners on the platform this year. Programs such as Udhyam (370K+ learners), TAP (141K), Samagra Shikshana/Alokit (29K teachers), Milaan (25K adolescents), and Rocket Learning (8K AWWs supporting ~150K children) illustrate the breadth of impact and the diversity of use cases.
Independent evaluations from partners strengthen evidence of effectiveness—showing improvements in foundational numeracy (Ganitha Ganaka), cognitive and socio-emotional skills (KEF), early childhood learning (Rocket Learning), and student engagement and agency (TAP). These results indicate that chatbot-enabled interventions, supported by Glific’s data and AI capabilities, drive measurable shifts in learning and behaviour.
The platform itself has evolved materially during this period. NGOs have shifted from using WhatsApp chatbots solely for communication to leveraging Glific for data integration, analytics, and now AI-driven personalisation. The newest wave in AI-enabled Chatbots has seen NGOs pilot LLM-powered assistants to enable personalisation and reduce staff workload—helpdesks and tailored guidance (Udhyam), AI summaries for mentorship (Avanti), rubric-based AI evaluation at scale (Inqui-lab), and always-on teacher and learner companions like SEF’s Teacher Buddy and Quest’s AskAbhi—pointing toward scalable, personalised support built directly into WhatsApp workflows.
Looking ahead, Glific + Kaapi (AI Platform) will deepen this trajectory by making it easier for NGOs to build and deploy chatbots using LLM prompts, extract insights by “chatting with their data,” and integrate lightweight assessment tools. Our vision is to offer NGOs an accessible, end-to-end platform that supports communication, personalisation, analytics, and scale—helping organisations reach more learners, learn faster, and improve outcomes sustainably.
Total Glific Messages & Beneficiaries over the last 3 years
Full Report: Glific 3-Year Impact Report – Cisco Grant.pdf
Financials
If you would like to see our complete financials, email us at info@projecttech4dev.org
| Tech4Dev 2.0 – Summary of the Inflow & Outflow | |||||
| (USD’000) | |||||
| RECEIPTS | “Actual(YTD)” | Q1 Act.Jun 25 | Q2 ActSep 25 | Q3 Act.Dec 25 | Q4 Act.March 26 |
| B/f Donor bal | $5,961 | $5,961 | $5,939 | $6,088 | |
| Grant | $2,325 | $348 | $516 | $1,462 | |
| Earned Revenue | $515 | $160 | $185 | $170 | |
| Total | $8,802 | $6,469 | $6,639 | $7,720 | $0 |
| EXPENDITURE | “Actual(YTD)” | Q1 Act.Jun 25 | Q2 ActSep 25 | Q3 Act.Dec 25 | Q4 Act.March 26 |
| Program Salaries | $1,247 | $426 | $405 | $415 | |
| Program Cost | $445 | $105 | $146 | $194 | |
| Total | $1,691 | $531 | $552 | $609 | $0 |
| C/f Donor bal | $7,110 | $5,939 | $6,088 | $7,110 | $0 |
| Note: Expenses are on actual till Nov and accrued for Dec. Revenue and Expenses calculated on an actual basis | |||||
| (in INR Crore) | |||||
| RECEIPTS | “Actual(YTD)” | Q1 Act.Jun 25 | Q2 ActSep 25 | Q3 Act.Dec 25 | Q4 Act.March 26 |
| B/f Donor bal | 50.07 | 50.07 | 49.88 | 51.14 | 0.00 |
| Grant | 19.53 | 2.92 | 4.33 | 12.28 | 0.00 |
| Earned Revenue | 4.33 | 1.34 | 1.55 | 1.43 | 0.00 |
| Total | 73.93 | 54.34 | 55.77 | 64.85 | 0.00 |
| EXPENDITURE | “Actual(YTD)” | Q1 Act.Jun 25 | Q2 ActSep 25 | Q3 Act.Dec 25 | Q4 Act.March 26 |
| Program Salaries | 10.47 | 3.58 | 3.40 | 3.49 | 0.00 |
| Program Cost | 3.74 | 0.88 | 1.23 | 1.63 | 0.00 |
| Total | 14.21 | 4.46 | 4.63 | 5.12 | 0.00 |
| C/f Donor bal | 59.72 | 49.88 | 51.14 | 59.73 | 0.00 |
Key Metrics Across Initiatives
Introducing a new section that we will expand on in future reports. Let us know the type of information and/or visuals you would like us to report on.
| Platform/fCxO | Total accounts | Active accounts | Accounts onboarded in Q3 | Q Revenue$(000)s | Q Expenses$(000)s | YTD Revenue $(000)s | YTD Expenses$(000)s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glific | 219 | 138 | 16 | 52 | 74 | 139 | 237 |
| Dalgo | 25 | 23 | 3 | 23 | 86 | 75 | 240 |
| Avni | 73 | 41 | 2 | 40 | 73 | 152 | 330 |
| fCxO | 34 | 15 | 2 | 64 | 102 | 181 | 236 |
*Revenue and expenses added for the quarter are on an accrued basis
At a Glance: Platform Metrics
More Details
Highlighting some of the blog posts written by team members from last quarter:
- AI Evaluation: From ‘Seems Good’ to ‘Scores Good’
- AI Cohort v1.0 – Reflections and Comments
- Evaluating student innovation at scale – Building a Multi-LLM assessment pipeline
- Sashakt: A Deep Dive into the Open-Source Assessment Platform
- URJA Trust’s Journey with the Data Catalyst Program
- Towards Dalgo 2.0 – Building for Impact
- How Key Education Foundation Boosted Early Learning with WhatsApp
- Glific Launchpad Mumbai: Two Days of Learning, Building, and Collective Energy
- AI in Action: Wrapping Up Our Journey in the AI Cohort
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