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Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

The founders are cousins who have built projects together since childhood. Samika previously founded an enterprise agents company, and Siddhant has coded since age 11 and has shipped 12 apps with over 2,500 active users. They built the product, Iris, initially for themselves to manage scattered calendars, inboxes, and tasks, aiming to combine deterministic systems with LLMs.

What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?

Iris began as a side project to address the founders' own scheduling problems; the first prototype synced their calendars and emails. A key turning point was meeting Adam Cheyer, founder of Siri, whose input reframed the work as an engineering problem, after which they brought on a founding Siri engineer as a technical advisor. This led them to design the system around deterministic logic combined with adaptive LLM reasoning.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

The founders are addressing cognitive overload caused by constant context switching between calendars, emails, and apps, noting that existing productivity tools require manual configuration that breaks down when circumstances change. Both founders are neurodivergent and experienced this problem directly. Iris is meant to learn how a user works and automate repetitive decisions.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

The founders envision each person having a personal assistant, Iris, that understands their work patterns, contacts, and habits, and that can coordinate directly with other users' assistants to handle logistics. They see it scaling from individual calendars to organizing time across entire companies.