Identify churn risk and stay close to users at scale
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.
