Why we are setting up a non-profit

Imagine a lender, a hospital chain and a tax office. Each of them has been told the same thing: before you act on a request from an AI agent, look the agent up in a register. They all agree it's a sensible idea.

Then they find out who runs the register. It's a company. It also sells agents.

The lender's biggest rival is one of that company's customers. The hospital chain wonders what happens to its lookups if the company is sold. The tax office asks, quietly, whether a government department can really depend on a private firm's database for something this basic. Nobody says no. Nobody signs up either.

That little scene is most of why we chose the form we did.

What a Section 8 company is

India's Companies Act, 2013 has a provision for companies that exist for a purpose beyond making money for their owners. Section 8 lets the Central Government license such a company. Reading India Code's copy of the Act (read 12 October 2026), the conditions are that the company's objects include things like commerce, art, science, education, research, social welfare or charity, that it intends to apply any profits or other income to those objects, and that it intends to prohibit paying a dividend to its members. A company licensed this way can be registered without "Limited" in its name.

A law firm's explainer (S.S. Rana & Co., read 12 October 2026) puts the effect plainly: no distribution of profits or dividends among members, and everything earned goes to the company's objective.

Two more things in the Act matter to us. A Section 8 company can't change its memorandum or articles without the Central Government's prior approval. And if one is wound up, what's left after its debts are paid goes to another Section 8 company with similar objects, subject to conditions the Tribunal may set, or is sold with the proceeds going to a government insolvency fund. Either way, the Act doesn't send it to the members.

The Ministry of Corporate Affairs is the department that administers the Companies Act, 2013, as Wikipedia's entry on the ministry describes it (read 12 October 2026). The ministry's own site wouldn't open for us, so we haven't read it there. The Act also lets the Central Government cancel a licence if the company breaks the rules, which is the oversight we'd want a shared register to have.

The argument

It's short. A register works only if the people who have to depend on it are willing to. Rival companies will hesitate to depend on a register one of them owns. A government office will hesitate too, for different reasons. A non-profit that its members run, under rules written in the open, gives them less to worry about.

We can show the shape of this with something people already know, and we want to be careful here, because it's an analogy and nothing more. UPI payments move between apps and banks that compete with each other. The Reserve Bank of India's National Strategy for Financial Inclusion 2019-2024 (read 12 October 2026) describes NPCI, which operates UPI among other retail payment products, as a Section (8) company promoted by a group of public, private and foreign banks. Our reading is that this is part of why competing banks could sit around the same rules. We haven't asked anyone involved, and we're independent of NPCI. We're borrowing an argument, not a name.

The diagram shows the shape we're planning: a foundation, members, working groups and board seats. Every box in it is a plan.

What it costs

A non-profit is slower. A company with an investor can hire fast and decide on a Monday. A foundation that wants a board of government, industry and academic seats, and working groups that write the standard together, will take longer to decide anything. We chose that on purpose, and it will frustrate us.

It also depends on money that someone else decides to give. At first we expect to run on grants and donations. Grants arrive on the funder's calendar and come with the funder's questions. A company with a product to sell can at least set its own pace.

And a company that can't pay dividends can't raise money by selling a share in its future profits. If we need to grow quickly, there is no investor round to lean on.

There's a quieter cost too. A non-profit has to keep earning the trust that its form only promises. The Act can stop dividends. It can't make a board wise.

How it's paid for

At first, the foundation runs on grants and donations. Fees, if any, are decided with the founding group once the foundation exists, and nothing is due from anyone before then. The governance page says the same, and we'll keep the two in step.

What we don't know

We don't know whether Section 8 is the right form. We think it's the usual Indian one for this job. If something else turns out to be better, we'll say so here.

We don't know how long licensing takes, or whether the government will ask for changes to our objects. We haven't applied.

We don't know whether grants alone will cover a register that needs to stay up and be trusted. Plenty of non-profits struggle with this, and we'd rather hear from the ones that have been through it than assume we'll be the exception.

And we don't know whether offices will see a non-profit as neutral just because its form says so. The analogy to UPI is ours, it's a reasoned guess, and it may not hold in a market this different.