Action Covid-19 Team eyes Rs 500 crore philanthropic fund

New Delhi: Action Covid-19 Team, which was based final yr by numerous founders, leaders and enterprise capitalists from India’s startup ecosystem, plans to lift a Rs 500 crore philanthropic fund over the subsequent two years to again options for societal issues throughout training, healthcare, setting and girls’s participation within the workforce.

Action COVID -19 Team was launched in March final yr with a Rs 100 crore grant with a imaginative and prescient to help innovators engaged on options to regulate the coronavirus pandemic.

With this strategy and the collective help of the startup group, ACT in part one was in a position to fund 54 startups and over 100 tasks, impacting 49 million lives throughout 27 states, in keeping with a press release. Leveraging Startup India’s energy of collaboration, bias for motion, and entrepreneurial vitality, ACT in 2021 will proceed to be a motion for social change.”

In part two, the Rs 500 crore-fund shall be deployed throughout 4 key areas—training, healthcare, setting and girls’s participation within the workforce, it mentioned.

“ACT was born out of a Saturday afternoon call in March 2020 where a bunch of us from 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 associate of Accel and Investment Committee Member at ACT, mentioned.

It made a distinction to individuals’s lives throughout the nation and it taught the crew that ACT can grow to be a very highly effective 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 mentioned.