One97 Mobility fund has invested in Bangalore based mobile app developer Dexetra Software Solutions Pvt Ltd. the company behind Iris and the Friday-app

The funds will be used for scaling the team size and up-scaling the technology. Dexetra was founded by Narayan Babu. It develops apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry phones. It has developed several apps including TryCube2, SecureKeys, AibiNox and Friday. Friday already has over a million users.

For over a year, Dexetra team has been building Iris a highly personalized and intelligent answering engine for mobiles. You can talk to Iris on your phone just like you talk to someone who knows a lot about you and your world. Based on your mobile usage behaviour and various bots on web, Iris uses its proprietary context building and semantic maps technology to provide answers to users’ question. Iris for Android, has around a million downloads within a month of launch and have answered 10′s millions of user queries.

In a post on the One97 Blog by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of One97, he states that “Narayan and his team put their Artificial Intelligence skills to create this personal search engine for your world. And then one day Siri (on iPhone 4S)happened. The Dexetra team had done AI, done web bot and now challenged them to launch their own version for Android just in 8 hours. They created it overnight, calling by reverse spelling of Siri i.e. Iris.Since then things have not been the same. With nearly a million downloads and 10s of millions of queries iris crates first global product out from Bangalore. Our investment made months before is announced today and is a great reinforcement of opportunity to create world-class offerings out of India.”

One97 Mobility Fund is a $100Mn fund backed by SAIF Partners. The fund invests in early stage mobile companies. In July, it invested $820,000 in Singapore-based mobile gaming company, TheMobileGamer. 

Before that, it invested in Singapore-based LeapSky Wireless, which has developed 'JumpSurf'.

Indian mobile app developers are attracting a lot of investor interest in the recent past. Recently, Onward Mobility Solution Private Limited has raised Rs.18 Cr series a funding from IndoUS Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures.