Darshya is being built to give every devotee — in India and across the world — an honest, traceable bridge to the temples, priests, and traditions they grew up with. No screenshots. No middlemen. No broken promises about whether a puja actually happened.
Why Darshya
We started Darshya in January 2026 because we had both watched our parents pay strangers on WhatsApp for pujas they could never independently verify. A booking confirmation. A receipt. Sometimes a single still photo. Often nothing.
The Indian devotional internet had grown comfortable selling faith without proof — and a generation of NRIs were paying premium prices into that gap, hoping it had been done right.
We thought we could do better. Make video proof the floor, not the upsell. Pay the priest first. Document the NRI premium instead of hiding it. Show every devotee the same thing we would want our own parents to see.
“The simplest test of a devotional product is whether you would feel comfortable booking it for your own grandmother. Everything we build has to pass that test.”
The team
Co-founder · Product & AI · Bengaluru
AI product leader. Six years shipping for the diaspora.
Senior AI Product Manager at Bounteous. Spent the last several years putting AI products in front of real customers — and decided to turn that craft toward something his own family could feel.
Co-founder · Engineering · Hyderabad
Builds systems that can be trusted at 3 am.
Software engineer at Amazon, working on high-scale, low-latency platforms. Believes a booking that says "completed" but cannot be replayed on video is a lie — and the system should make lying impossible, not just unlikely.
What we won't compromise on
A booking cannot be moved to video-uploaded or delivered without a proof link attached by the assigned pandit — the server refuses the transition. If proof is still missing after the window in our Refund Policy and the booking is still waiting on its assigned pandit, an automatic sweep cancels it into a refund review queue. A booking a pandit has already advanced is outside that sweep, and we handle those on request — which is why the Refund Policy asks you to write in rather than wait.
Pandit payouts are calculated transparently — price minus a fair platform commission. We do not hold money to optimise our float.
A devotee in San Jose is charged the same rupee amount for the same puja as a devotee in Varanasi — there is no diaspora multiplier on a booking. If a diaspora tier ever returns it will be quoted by the server before you pay, not implied by a page.
Sankalp, gotra, nakshatra — first-class concepts in the booking flow. A devotee in San Jose books the same way as one in Varanasi.
The journey
Scroll through where Darshya has been, where it is shipping now, and where we are taking it.
We had both watched our parents pay strangers for prayers they could never verify. A receipt. Sometimes a single photo. Often nothing. We thought a software company built by people who actually ship for a living could do better. The first commit went in that month.
We sat with temple administrators and priests across India. By the end of the month the first temples were listed, every priest was verified by name and photograph, and the very first video-proof puja went out to a devotee in Toronto. The live count is in the strip above — it is read from our catalogue, not typed into this page.
Live darshan from real temples. A free AI Pandit for Gita questions. Astrologers and wellness teachers you could actually book. Char Dham and the twelve Jyotirlingas as guided yatras. The super-app stopped being a deck and started being a place people came back to.
Every donation is routed to the gaushala it was given to, and an itemised receipt is downloadable on the spot. We do not claim a tax outcome for you here: whether a donation is deductible depends on the donee's own 80G registration, which is between you, the gaushala and your assessor. We also ripped out every placeholder number from our admin dashboards — what you see is what is actually happening, today.
Devotee, priest, store owner, astrologer, wellness teacher, gaushala manager, temple administrator, admin — every person who keeps a corner of the seva running now has their own clean, native experience on iOS and Android. This is what we are putting in production this month.
Coordinated last-rites support at city level for families who cannot fly back in time. A clean way to order puja samagri, idols, and books and have them at your door. And gentle daily-habit subscriptions for the devotees who want one small thing every morning.
A thousand temples streaming live. A pandit who can answer in any of the twelve major Indian languages. Astrology and wellness powered by humans first, AI second. And — quietly — becoming the most-trusted devotional brand on the internet.
The roadmap is not a wishlist. Every shipped item is in production today at darshya.online.
Founder, temple admin, priest, devotee, or just curious. There are two real humans on the other side and we would rather hear from you directly than scale through a script.
Mon – Sat, 9 AM – 7 PM IST · we typically reply within 24 hours