Khosla Labs & Unitus Seed Fund to incubate and back up to six Aadhaar-based startups

Bangalore-based startup incubator Khosla Labs has partnered with seed-stage impact investor Unitus Seed Fund to incubate and fund four-six startups working on the Unique Identification Authority of India (Aadhaar) project.

The incubator will conduct tutorials on building Aadhaar verification apps for Android. Additionally, it will provide developers with requisite biometric devices & software development kits (SDKs) to build Android and Windows desktop apps, besides Aadhaar gateway SDKs and shared-internet connectivity.

Incorporated in 2012, Khosla Labs was setup by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, along with Srikanth Nadhamuni to focus on solving large scale with technology. Nadhamuni is the brain behind the technology at UIDAI to get a better idea of how the Aadhar project which has opened up immense opportunities for technology startups in the country.

Aadhaar system was deliberately built as an identity platform as opposed to an end user application, so that government departments and private companies/startups could build their own apps leveraging the platform.

Khosla Labs had earlier incubated a mobile payments solution firm, called Novopay Solutions, which offers Android-based mobile payment solutions to Kirana stores and uses Aadhaar-based biometric scanners to allow consumers conduct banking transactions, money transfer and mobile payments among others.

Last year, Unitus Seed Fund had secured over $8 million in investment commitment from multiple investors including Vinod Khosla, who is also the founder of Khosla Ventures and Khosla Impact.