New Delhi: ACT, which was founded last year by various founders, leaders and VCs from India’s startup ecosystem, on Thursday said it plans to raise a Rs 500 crore philanthropic fund over the next two years to back solutions addressing societal problems at scale across education, healthcare, environment and women’s participation in the workforce.
ACT (Action COVID -19 Team) was launched in March last year with a Rs 100 crore grant with a vision to support innovators working on solutions to control COVID-19 pandemic.
With this approach and the collective support of the startup community, ACT in phase one was able to fund 54 startups and over 100 projects, impacting 49 million lives across 27 states, ACT said in a statement.
Leveraging startup India’s power of collaboration, bias for action, and entrepreneurial energy, ACT in 2021 will continue to be a movement for social change,” it added.
In phase two, the Rs 500 crore-fund will be deployed across four key areas – education, healthcare, environment and women’s participation in the workforce, it said.
“ACT was born out of a Saturday afternoon call in March 2020 where a bunch of us from the startup ecosystem got together to discuss how we could leverage the resources we have to help the country minimise the impact of COVID-19. Everything happened very quickly after that – from raising Rs 100 crore to identifying startups to giving out grants,” Prashanth Prakash, Founding Partner of Accel and Investment Committee Member at ACT, said.
It made a difference to people’s lives across the country and it taught the team that ACT can become a truly powerful instrument of driving social change, he added.
“We are now making this bigger, expanding the scope beyond healthcare with the aim to empower everyone who wants to make a difference – be it through time, talent or resources,” he said.
