The Digital Extension of Yourself
Hi everyone,
We’re Samika & Siddhant - cousins and co-founders of Iris. Our aim is to create a true digital extension of your mind that can take off 20-30% of your daily workload.
❌ The Problem:
The problem isn’t a lack of tools - it’s that they all expect you to think like them. Between five calendars, three inboxes, and constant context switching, simple things like moving a meeting or replying to an email still take minutes of mental load. Apps like Motion or Reclaim help you plan, but they don’t understand you. They still need perfect inputs, perfect routines, perfect focus.
We didn’t need another productivity system to maintain - we needed something that worked with how we already do things.
✅ The Solution
Iris is a digital extension of yourself that learns how you work. She observes how you reply, decide, and prioritize - the small behavioral patterns that make up your day - and uses them to prepare the next set of actions automatically. The core insight is simple: if you model real behavior, you can replicate judgment. With personal agents and a knowledge graph, Iris reduces the mental load of constant context switching by pre-filling the actions you would take, the way you would take them. You simply swipe to hand it off to your proxy.
We started with email and calendars. In four weeks, over 1,200 people have downloaded Iris, 168 use it daily, and they’ve taken more than 36,000 actions - growing 48% week over week. This is the first real step toward a future where everyone has a personal digital extension running their day with near-perfect accuracy.
The Team
We’re cousins who’ve been building together since we were kids.
Samika previously worked on adaptive AI systems at CMU for a year, and studied how humans build trust in AI.
Siddhant has been coding since he was 11, he built and launched 12 consumer apps with 2500+ active users. He studied Computer Science from UCSD.
Earlier in the batch, we met Adam Cheyer (founder of Siri), who became a mentor and advisor. That conversation reshaped how we think about assistants - not as UX problems, but as deep engineering problems.
Our Ask
If you find yourself juggling multiple calendars and inboxes every day, try Iris!
Let Iris handle the busywork so you can focus on what actually matters.
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?)
We’re cousins who’ve been building things together since we were kids. Samika had already founded a company before Iris building scalable enterprise agents. Siddhant has been coding since he was 11 years old and loves building complex systems in the form of consumer applications (12 apps in production, 2500+ active users)
Iris started as something we built for ourselves. We were constantly overwhelmed by scattered calendars, inboxes, and tasks and every “assistant” tool felt either too rigid or too dumb. So we decided to build one that actually understood us, combining the reliability of deterministic systems with the intuition of LLMs.
What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?
We started Iris as a side project to fix our own scheduling chaos with a good user experience. The first prototype synced our calendars and emails, and within hours it was already making our days smoother. That’s when we realized how big this could be.
A major inflection point was meeting Adam Cheyer, the founder of Siri. His advice reframed how we thought about the problem - it wasn’t just a UX challenge, it was an engineering problem. We then brought on one of Siri’s founding engineers as a technical advisor, which shaped our architecture around deterministic logic combined with adaptive LLM reasoning.
That shift (from “AI wrapper” to hybrid intelligent system) became the foundation of Iris.
What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
The core problem is cognitive overload because people are drowning in context switching between calendars, emails, and apps just to stay organized. Productivity tools today still expect you to manage them. They don’t understand how you work and make you configure rules and routines that fall apart when real life changes.
We felt that pain deeply ourselves. Both of us are neurodivergent so motivation wasn’t the issue, context was. We didn’t need another to-do list but we needed something that understood our rhythm and made intelligent decisions for us.
Iris exists to eliminate that friction. It learns how you work, automates the repetitive decisions, and keeps you focused on what actually matters. This problem is universal, everyone struggles to stay on top of their time. Solving it unlocks human attention at scale.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
In the future, everyone will have their own Iris: an assistant that actually knows them - how they work, who they meet, where they go and helps them stay a step ahead. When two people both use Iris, their assistants can coordinate directly, handle logistics, and clear out the noise before it reaches them.
At scale, this becomes the foundation for how individuals and teams organize time - from one person’s calendar to entire companies. Iris is how people will work when AI truly understands context.
