Avni in 2025

December 22, 2025 by Avni Team

A review of Avni in 2025

The end of a year is a time for us to pause, reflect on our work and its impact, and prepare ourselves for what comes next.

2025 has been a year of constant experimentation and learning. The Avni platform has grown stable and powerful. We experimented with new approaches to improve reach and adoption.

We also spent time visiting many NGOs during this time; spending more face time, and understanding on-the-ground challenges. During the year, we also mentored a few NGOs and students on data and technology.

Taking stock, Avni is now used in 2 new domains, and the number of non-profits adopting Avni has seen strong growth. At the same time, we continued to deepen our work in domains where Avni has been used for several years, strengthening both the platform and our partnerships.

We hope that we can translate all the work and learnings into activities and technology tools that can serve the sector better in the future. To all the NGOs that have been with us, providing guidance on how we can create value together - a big thank you from all of us. We cannot exist without you.

Highlights of the year

It was a proud moment in January when the Avni Gramin project of ATE Chandra Foundation was recognised as a “community-led, technology-enabled model for rejuvenating water bodies to enhance rural water security” in the National Economic Survey 2025-26. ATE Chandra Foundation has been using Avni to drive the programme since 2020.

Screenshot from National Economic Survey 2025-26

We hosted a 2-day Avni Conference 3.0 this year in January in Mahabalipuram. The conference was attended by 18 NGOs, some technical partners and ecosystem players. These two days provided a great opportunity to build camaraderie, knowledge-sharing sessions and brainstorm ideas on how Avni can sustainably and meaningfully contribute to the sector. We also conducted capacity-building sessions for our NGO partners at the workshop.

Platform Growth

The platform keeps growing every year to become more stable and capable.

One objective this year was to make the application easier to configure. Some new features to enable this include

An AI Assistant - that helps users understand Avni and build applications using natural language. Currently available in beta, it can answer questions about the platform and create forms and some rules, with capabilities being expanded iteratively
Application Templates - that address the starting point of development. Templates are production-ready starter applications that can be applied to an Avni account and then customised before going live. The platform now supports publishing, browsing, and applying templates
Out-of-the-box analytics - to provide basic visualisations, prebuilt to ensure basic metrics to monitor the program are available right away

Other notable features that support end users include the ability to associate images with questions and answers, and richer documentation through videos embedded in forms.

The overall system is stable and faster with a 4X improvement in overall response times through better infrastructure, and a 50% reduction in support requests.

Increased Reach and Impact

While 26 partners continued their journey with us and one stepped away, new collaborations helped expand Avni’s ecosystem into a vibrant community of 40 NGO partners. In this year, we significantly increased our focus on outreach and simplifying our onboarding processes towards maximising the impact. We onboarded 13 new accounts this year, better than any past year in Avni’s history of 9 years.

Apart from the regular domains like health, education, water and social security, agriculture, sports and legal aid are the new domains where Avni got used in this year. Every new domain and use case enriches our knowledge and the underlying platform. While expanding into new domains, a significant part of our work this year was also about going deeper in existing ones.

We continued improving Avni for village-level health workers, focusing on usability in low-connectivity settings and simpler workflows.
We worked with NGOs taking health programs to new geographies, adapting implementations to local contexts and capacities.
Our work in social security deepened further, emerging as a recurring theme with multiple projects approaching us in this domain.
We also saw multiple new projects around non-communicable diseases (NCDs), building on earlier health-related work and long-term data collection needs. This combination of depth and breadth has helped Avni mature as a platform that supports both long-running programs and newer use cases.

Towards a Sustainable Model

Sustainability for us is measured by the share of our expenses funded through revenues from NGO partners, rather than grants—an important indicator of reduced dependency on external funding. In 2025, this figure improved significantly from 36% in 2024 to 47%, reflecting a stronger, more resilient operating model.

Alongside this, we intensified our fundraising efforts, engaging in many more conversations and applications than in previous years, and successfully secured grants from two new funding partners. We look forward to building meaningful, long-term partnerships with all of you as we grow this revenue-led model.

Avni Launchpad

We started Avni Launchpad, a cohort-based mentoring program. The program is designed to ease the decision making for NGOs wanting to adopt Avni. In a span of two months, with free mentoring and cloud credits, participating NGOs build their own pilot apps and experience Avni’s value firsthand. For the first cohort we received an excellent response with 49 applications. We onboarded 13 organisations. They will be testing their pilot until Jan 30th and then choose to move towards a full and paid rollout.

In a 2-day workshop held in Bangalore it was heartening to see how :

Diverse use cases were being digitised using Avni under the same roof
Focus and motivation of NGOs wanting to learn Avni and build their apps
Team members step up from their roles of building software to listening to problem statements and mentor NGOs.

Glimpses of 2-day workshop in Bangalore | Avni Launchpad Cohort-1

Ecosystem strengthening

With almost a decade long experience, we felt the time was right in stepping up our role towards sharing our learnings with the sector. We conducted Field data collection workshops across different cities and networks with our partners. As part of the workshop we got an opportunity to listen to challenges that NGOs are currently facing and share our learnings from digitising 60+ projects with diverse needs.

This year we joined as mentors on

C4GT - a program to encourage ongoing contributions and strengthen collaboration between DPG/DPI builders, adopters, and contributors (students or working professionals)
Data Catalyst Program - an initiative, for non-profits or social impact organizations, designed to build capacity for using data effectively to drive strategy, improve operations, and achieve greater outcomes, by fostering a data culture, improving skills, and implementing practical data solutions for real-world challenges

💡We conducted a masterclass at the India CSR Summit organised by CSRBox and participated in various panel discussions, sharing our learnings.

✍️We wrote an article for IDR Hindi on the : https://hindi.idronline.org/article/choti-sanstha-ke-liye-saral-digital-tool-ka-mahatva/

Team Capacity Building

This year was characterised by more team members taking customer-facing responsibilities, whether it was part of delivering projects or taking up roles of mentors through different initiatives. We took up more field visits giving us a chance to learn more about ground realities, gathering feedback from the ground.

Voices Shaping Avni

The stories below come from people using Avni in their everyday work. Their experiences reflect what worked, what changed, and what made a real difference on the ground.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our ecosystem partners and supporters, Project Tech4Dev, Azim Premji Foundation, ATE Chandra Foundation and Thoughtworks, for their continued support over the past year. Their trust and encouragement have enabled us to experiment, learn, and strengthen Avni as a platform for the social sector.

In addition to all our existing partners, we are also grateful to the new organisations that chose to work with us this year and placed their trust in Avni: Action Northeast (ANT), Atul Foundation, Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Ekam foundation, Farmers for Forests, Gram Seva Trust, Maitrayana, MLD Trust, Khel Mel, Peepul, Public Health Research Institute of India, Purna Clinic, Saaras Impact Foundation, and Srijan.

As we enter the new year, we are clear about what we want to build and how we want to show up for the sector. The learnings from 2025 give us a strong base to move faster, scale what has worked, and be more deliberate about where we invest our time and energy. In 2026, our focus will be on deepening impact, expanding Avni’s use across organisations and domains, and translating our experience into tools and practices that genuinely help NGOs do their work better. Wish us luck, and wish you a very happy 2026. See you on the other side.