Corporate biggies to back non-profit startups for alleviation of poverty

BENGALURU: A Bengaluru-based non-profit that is backed by several industry bigwigs and bodies including Nandan Nilekani and Tata Trusts is launching what is perhaps the first ever incubator to support non-profit ventures working towards pulling people out of poverty.

The Nudge Foundation, as it is called, will offer Rs 10 lakh seed-grant to each selected startup along with an intensive six-month incubation. There will be about 10 non-profits in each batch, so the goal is to incubate 100 nonprofits in areas like education, healthcare, agriculture, and employability in the next five years.

Applications have just been opened up for the first batch. Screening will be complete by the end of August, and the incubation programme, called NCore, is expected to start in the first week of September.

The Nudge Foundation is also funded by Maruti, Cisco, Mphasis, Godrej, Target, Wells Fargo and Social Venture Partners, among others.For the incubator, financial support is coming from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Dr Reddy's Foundation, McKinsey & Co director Ramesh Mangaleswaran, and a number of others.

The foundation's founder Atul Satija, who was a top executive at InMobi and who worked at Google and Adobe prior to starting this poverty alleviation non-profit, said that at the end of six months, the ventures would be showcased to the world and would be supported for fund-raising pitches. "And if the foundation thinks it can add further value to some of them, it will take a board seat in them, and support them for up to an additional two years," he said.

Each startup will be assigned to a partner. Partners include Sanjay Purohit, former Infosys consulting board chairman, Maneesh Dhir, former MD of Apple India, K R Lakshminarayan, chief endowment officer of Azim Premji Foundation, and Ujwal Thakar, former CEO of Pratham and GiveIndia.

They will be assisted by a newly formed Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) council of some nine members, including Aloka Majumdar, head CSR, HSBC India, Anil Kumar, exec trustee & CEO, Axis Bank Foundation, Anurag Pratap, CSR leader, Capgemini, Biren Bhuta, chief CSR, Tata Steel, Jitendra Kalra, COO, Reliance Foundation, and Meenu Bhambhani, headCSR, Mphasis.

The objective is to build high-impact and scalable non-profit ventures that look at poverty alleviation through lenses different from traditional ones.