Inviting aspiring tech-first social entrepreneurs to build for Bharat with ACT!

At ACT, we believe that technology has a role to play in solving some of the most complex social and environmental challenges we face today. Over the last three years, we’ve had the privilege of interacting with 1500+ social entrepreneurs and supporting 50+ organizations through a combination of grant capital and access to network connections and collaborative platforms. We’ve helped founders identify growth pathways, unearthing business models that serve as proof points that technology can enable high quality, sustainable social impact at scale.

At the same time, we know we need many more passionate and talented founders to solve these systemic, complex problem statements. But building tech-first and impact-first is tough. One critical gap is the lack of early-stage capital for innovators to build and test contextual solutions, and the absence of build funding means founders also struggle to attract high quality tech talent during the early stages.

Hence, we’re piloting a different approach to our business as usual – we are looking to partner with aspiring social entrepreneurs to translate innovative ideas into scalable solutions. 

  1. You must be a full-time founder with a legally incorporated entity in India.
  2. You must be impact first and aim to create measurable impact across one of the below areas:
    1. Focus on Bharat as target audience: Solutions targeting underserved communities (households with monthly incomes below INR 25,000) to boost education, livelihood, health or gender outcomes.
    2. Focus on decarbonisation and/or water security: Solutions aimed at enabling India’s progress across both these goals by addressing the issue at source for outsized environmental impact.
    3. Focus on enabling the social impact ecosystem: Technology-driven initiatives that enable and build the capacity of social enterprises, NGOs, and other impact-first organizations, thereby strengthening the broader ecosystem for social change.
  3. You should have a clear problem statement based on user research and a tech-first approach as a solution to the problem statement.
  4. You should have a clear roadmap to develop software technology (standalone or integrated within a hardware product). We are not looking for deployment ready solutions here.

If this is you, please reach out to us with some details by filling out this form, and if there is alignment, ACT will provide support in the form of: 

  1. Capital for technology build: Up to INR 30 lakh grant support over a 6-month period
  2. Tech guidance: Dedicated tech advisory aligned to your journey towards building a minimum viable prototype (MVP)
  3. Fundraising and business model refinement: Targeted mentor connections on fundraising and business model strategy 

UnHerd with Shreyasi Singh: Empowering women to lead and succeed

Hosted by ACT, UnHerd brings you the unheard stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt the social impact landscape. From social entrepreneurs to venture philanthropists, dive into real-world conversations on what they’ve experienced and learned about changing the status quo.

Our latest episode of UnHerd features Shreyasi Singh (Founder, Harappa – now acquired by UpGrad), in conversation with Anupama Kashyap (Manager, ACT For Women). Shreyasi shares her journey from journalism to entrepreneurship, building Harappa into a leading online learning platform and her mission to empower more women leaders in India’s startup ecosystem and beyond.

Tune in on Spotify or watch the episode on YouTube to learn how Shreyasi is driving meaningful change in workplaces and breaking barriers for women in leadership.

Anupama: Hello folks, and welcome to the next episode of UnHerd – a podcast hosted by ACT. We bring to you the stories of extraordinary individuals disrupting India’s social impact & startup landscape by challenging conventional principles.

This episode is about a topic that is very close to our hearts at ACT; more women leaders within and beyond India’s startups. Highly resonant with my own professional goals, which is why I’m very excited to be joined today by someone who I’ve looked up to, and who truly embodies the spirit of breaking barriers. From journalism to entrepreneurship, an author and a passionate advocate for women in the workplace, our guest has led with purpose. She’s built a leading online learning platform – Harappa – which has redefined how Indian professionals hone their skills for success and growth in workplaces.

Welcome to UnHerd, Shreyasi!

Shreyasi: Thank you so much, Anupama. And thank you to the ACT team, who of course I love, for having me on UnHerd.

Anupama: Shreyasi, to give our audience a quick (insight) into you and your journey – we know that it has spanned from journalism to founding one of India’s most innovative learning platforms. And I think we all have these pivotal moments in our career that prompt that switch. I’m really curious to know about your story. Tell us more about that.

The spark that lit the fire: Of career pivots and crucible moments 

Shreyasi: Yes, I think my career really confuses people. I think we all have, in our lives and our careers, these crucible moments that set the direction of our next 10 years, next 15 years. And for me, that was the last stint that I had in journalism. 

Inc is an iconic American magazine on entrepreneurship and I was the editor of the India edition for four years. This was 2011 to 2015 and this is really when the startup boom was beginning to happen in India. It almost felt like doing a PhD in entrepreneurship because every month you’re bringing out 90 pages of a magazine. So from co-founder dynamics to how do you create a brand to what’s a great incentive structure for employees, how do you do performance management. Towards the end, you meet amazing entrepreneurs and founders who have this special conviction, right? Like there is this special ring in their voice, they bring this special energy to what they do and how they talk about their work. And more and more, I think I was feeling like, maybe I could do this too. I actually find great similarities between the skills that I learned as a journalist, and especially how well those skills were deployed. As a journalist, you’re very good at asking a set of structured, smart questions. 

As a founder, you also need to do that. You don’t know everything about everything, even in the company that you’re building. But I think there’s a very efficient way of (asking) a set of questions that gets you to that answer. Second, I feel like journalists come with a great deadline orientation. The magazine doesn’t wait for you to print it. It has to come out on the same day. But third and most importantly, and I didn’t know this six, seven years back when I started Harappa, there is an urge to create, you know? You start with a conversation and an empty word draft, and something emerges out of it. So I think these three skills really, I think, transferred very well and really helped me. But most importantly, it was the inspiration that I got from covering entrepreneurs and just entrepreneurship in general that let me think that I should aspire to do this and maybe I could do it too.

I actually had two pit stops between being the editor of Inc and finally being the founder of Harappa. And those pit stops were, I spent a year writing a book, which was a business non-fiction called The Wealth Wallahs. It was on the happy eventuality of entrepreneurial success for which I interviewed over a hundred people and spent a year, year and a half working on that book. And then after, working as a part of the founding team on an 18 month women’s only MBA program. And that was my first introduction to higher education and especially alternative higher education – how different models and formats (work), especially in a country like India where there has to be almost an insatiable appetite and need and demand for learning. I think that is when it first got kindled. So I think if these two (pitstops) hadn’t happened, maybe Harappa also wouldn’t happen. I also do want to give a lot of credit to my co-founder at Harappa, who’s a pioneering educationist of his own, Pramath (Raj Sinha). And I think he said that we should really work together.

And that’s really how Harappa happened. Harappa was incorporated in March 2018, which is just six and a half years back. But Harappa has just been on this ridiculous accelerated condensed kind of cycle that I think none of us imagined. Most startups don’t work, right? So you don’t take these questions so seriously. Because you’re almost like, let me try this for six months a year. We’ll see how it goes. We raised two rounds of funding from James Murdoch’s family office. And then of course in July 2022, we were acquired by UpGrad. And as of six to eight weeks back, I’ve also exited UpGrad and Harappa has fully merged into UpGrad. 

So I think it has been the most intense six years of living the entire life cycle of a business – from conceptualizing an idea, raising funds for it, building products, going through an acquisition and then finally merging that company.

First principle lens: Lessons as a first-time founder

Anupama: Sounds like such an invigorating journey over the last six years. Kudos to you for building something so amazing! I think for ACT also, we’ve come across Harappa mostly from the sense of working with women in the startup ecosystem and how we can set them up for success? Shreyasi, I know Harappa in the last six years has done a lot of intentional work with women – in supporting them and also building workplaces that work for them, right? I’d love to understand from you, how did that come to be? What was your vision, to be able to enable something like that?

Shreyasi: So very quickly, Harappa is essentially, as we used to describe it, a learning institution. And first we used to say an online learning institution, but then of course we also did blended programs. So we used to just say a learning institution that focused on cognitive, social, and behavioral skills for working professionals, right? Because the belief is that you could be a computer scientist, a public policy person, an HR manager and the fact is that these cognitive, social, and behavioral skills are critical in each of these roles, right? They transcend industry, they transcend companies, they transcend specializations.

So there was a school for managers and we had a series of programs for managers, first time managers, high impact managers, high performing managers. It had a school for CXOs where we would do a lot of programs for CXOs. But over the last three, four years across 100 plus companies and enterprises, we’ve probably trained the most number of women professionals.

I feel like this conversation has reached a crescendo sometimes. I feel like people think that we’ve talked about it so much and we’re so talked out that it seems like things would have actually changed on the ground. But in most companies, I would say, things actually change very, very slowly. Some of us might be bored of this conversation but many of us, I know, need to keep talking and need to keep speaking and need to keep doing. And I think that as a woman leader, that conviction was very personal. The cause or the calling is to leave the world of work for women better than I found it. Whether it’s Harappa or whatever, it’s going to be a thread across everything that I do in life. And one of the things that I always say is that when given a chance, make the change.  

So, I take that very seriously, that I was given a chance for whatever little change that I could make at that moment. And actually through the delivery of those programs and through us meeting women professionals from across IT, finance, manufacturing across the country, my conviction that this is necessary and needed actually kept deepening. Because honestly Anupama, the sad fact is that things are even worse. The situation is still very dire.

Traversing tough roads: Women’s careers as the greatest obstacle course in history

Anupama: I couldn’t agree more. I think having worked in this space for a while as well, the challenges, I mean, we can have a whole other podcast on what they are. What would you say are some key barriers that are holding women back?

Shreyasi: I’ll speak about both threads, my personal observations and personal experiences but also some of the things that we saw, not only through observation of our learners but we started to do a lot of research around this at Harappa.

Only 7% of the women that we polled said that they felt any kind of equitable proportion of seeing women in their management teams or super senior positions. Just 7%. I call women’s careers the greatest obstacle course in history. Because one of the things that we found is there are three almost super clear stages and cusps where fall off starts to happen. The first cliff happens at what I call the broken rung, which is the 28 to 32 year old (segment) – there’s almost a 37% drop. Then it happens just before the glass ceiling. And then over the last three or four years, another phenomenon that’s been seen is what they call the glass cliff, that even for women who make it to the top, [they] are actually leaving the workforce or are being almost ejected slash evicted from their roles or are set up for roles in which success was impossible, at twice the rates at which super senior male professionals are. So, almost at no point, can you take your continued success for granted, right? And this is happening when actually from an education, graduation outcomes perspective over the last seven to eight years, India has done so well – some streams graduate more women than men and most of those women graduate with better CGPAs. So while of course, education is a big leveler, certainly for women in India, educational outcomes have absolutely not correlated to income outcomes or career outcomes. You know, there is certainly something that we are missing there. In fact, workforce participation, especially in high value work in urban settings, has actually gone down after COVID in many aspects. 

I think the most upset and angry that I’ve been was with this data point. We actually found that the greatest pay gap between male professionals and women professionals was at the CXO and CXO minus one level. I think it was Rs. 74 to Rs. 100. I was like, my god, how much more do you need to prove yourself? This can’t be about merit and skill because you are a CXO or a CXO minus one. But at the time when you felt like, my gosh, I have made it, I am a part of the senior most whatever but actually you’re possibly confronted with the greatest pay gap. 

In fact, another thing that we found in the What Women Feel report, and this is my personal experience as well, especially over the last two years and my naive imagination or my naive assumption was that the more senior you get, you’re insulated from the petty biases and microaggressions. We’ve actually not found that. Tenure isn’t a sunblock against bias.

I personally experienced that as well. I think in a way it is sometimes a woman with power and influence who pisses off the world much more than somebody who doesn’t yet have that influence. In fact, we saw that early managers, first-time managers who were women faced the most biases because maybe their newfound status and power made others around them very uncomfortable.

Anupama: I think the greatest obstacle course in history is such an apt way of describing the problem statement we’re speaking about. And I can so well resonate with this. I did my engineering. I couldn’t see a career there mostly because of the dearth of women I saw in roles of leadership or influence. And I know it’s just one part of the huge pile of challenges women have to face. But Shreyasi, a lot of times when we speak about this with people, it becomes a very ‘inclusion and fairness’ conversation. But I know it’s so much beyond it. Research after research shows that gender diverse teams actually have a great impact on business outcomes in terms of employee culture, NPS, and investors having more faith in organizations, right? But what has your viewpoint been on this, being a founder yourself, but also being an advocate for having more women in the workplace? Why do you think gender diversity is important in workplaces for organizations?  

Shreyasi: You know, both with gender as well as in gender, if we talk about women. And I think race. To me, those are the two fault lines where it’s immediately apparent who you are. The minute you walk into a room, or the minute you speak on the phone, right, or even your email ID, people know that you’re a woman.

So I think it’s so immediate, it’s so tangible. It’s also half the world, right? In many populations, it’s 51-52% of the world. What are you going to be able to achieve with half the world locked out, it’s not 5%, 6%, 8%, right? It’s half the world. How does the world progress with half the world’s talent unvalued, half the world’s talent unlocked, half the world’s talent being unfair, half the world’s talent not being given opportunities for their potential. It’s an almost unfair or unreasonable expectation to imagine that with half the world not happily, fruitfully engaged in work that has value or is valued, where they are actually engaged.  

Think about having a world where that larger number is disenfranchised in such critical ways. And that’s why it’s important. It’s not a ‘nice to have’ (conversation). I think the orientation has to be to create that, especially when it comes to women and women’s agency.

Anupama:  Even at ACT, our whole thesis also focuses on the fact that having more women in roles of leadership or roles of influence, as we like to call it, shows so much more impact in terms of organizations, policies, culture, programs that are rolled out and has an impact throughout the pipeline. In your own experience, you’re a women founder and you’ve seen women in roles of leadership. How does it change? 

Shreyasi: So immediate downstream impact, it’s very tough to establish that right? And which is why people will disbelieve it, because it’s such a longitudinal impact. It takes, like I said, decades for businesses to really say, what this will become. But I’ll tell you the immediate and clear impact I think it has.

Even when you are running the business, right? I’d like to think that the fact that I was there and doing all of these uber cool startup things like raising funding and getting acquired – I do feel like it certainly added a set of confidence to many of my women colleagues. In fact, probably the best compliment that I feel like I’ve ever got as a CEO was this young – I think she’s a computer science engineer and she used to work in our product team – very smart young woman who had seven, eight years of work experience and then she was with us for two, two and a half years. And she was wearing this stunning sari and bright red lipstick. And she said, you know, this is the first time as somebody part of the product or engineering team that I can be dressed like this, yet go to a SCRUM meeting and give directions to engineers. She said, never before in my career as part of product and engineering teams would I have dared to be so feminine, yet be doing probably some of the best quality work that I’m doing in my career. I got goosebumps.

I think we were 50% or more women. But not only that, twice a year, I would write an email to the team to say that these are the six bands that we have. This is the percentage gap or not between women professionals in our company. So sometimes it would be like, wow, women associate directors are actually getting paid more than male associate directors and I’m hoping that that becomes a way that others also do it.

Anupama: What I’m hearing you say is that you’ve seen and witnessed a shift in terms of having a good role model, building that culture of inclusion. To a lot of people who ask why gender diversity is important within organizations, I think that’s just bang on. Just switching gears a little bit, Harappa I know has worked with both big corporate clients and startups. Our research on WISER (Women in India’s Startup Ecosystem Report) shows that in representation of women, startups are doing really well. There’s a long way to go, but it’s definitely better than where corporate India is currently at. So if I were to ask you, what are some broad trends you’ve observed, especially in the startup ecosystem in terms of what’s going well or what needs more focus on, what would you say they are?

Shreyasi: So here I have to be honest that I was really surprised when I saw the first WISER report in terms of the startups doing much better than established companies. I have to say that we actually found it much easier. Most of our, I would say 90% of our revenue from the women-focused programs actually went to some of India’s and the world’s largest companies. What I’m seeing in startups, one is of course that there’s just greater entrepreneurial activity. And many women, women across all tenures, are trying to be entrepreneurial, setting up businesses. I just feel like the overall culture and attitude to risk taking, to being on your own, to being a person with multiple skills if you’re starting out even a small business. I think it’s really overall good for women professionals because that will transcend. And it creates many more opportunities within the constraints of their societal structures for them to be able to create wealth.

I think the other thing that startups are really useful for is there’s no place to hide, right? Everybody, especially if you’re under a sub hundred people team, certainly there’s no place to hide. Everybody needs to pull their weight. So I think startups, if you find the right startup at the right time, I think startups can really script rewarding careers. Larger companies are still much more resistant to unconventional CVs, right? Startups are that way much more like, listen, you can do the job. If you can get the job done, come and do it, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. 

Future forward: Making workplaces work for women

Anupama: Shreyasi, that actually brings me to a very important question. Why should organizations focus on building workplaces that work for women? What is in it for them in terms of building gender diverse teams, why should they focus on it? Where do they start?

Shreyasi: It’s so tough to get good people, right? As an employer, as a manager, as a boss, all you want is good people to build products, sell products, manage people, manage teams, manage projects, all of that, right? The fact is that you want to look in every segment of the population to be able to get the skills. I say this sometimes, it’s controversial, I actually do believe that our companies and our employers are ahead of our homes and our societies when it comes to giving women an equitable (standing). I feel like most of us, many of us, including me, could face very different realities at home, or in our extended families, or in social situations than we actually do at the workplace. 

I place a lot of faith in companies and organizations being able to keep furthering that and hopefully society will catch up. I think professionals and certainly women professionals really need to be publicly praised for their contributions.

Public recognition doesn’t mean a town hall with 10,000 people CCed. They’re very small things. So one tip, and I used to say this, calendar it, right? Once a week, I would send an email highlighting or acknowledging other women peers. And I think we have to create some of these very large societal things into mini tasks that each one of us can do without any help from anybody else. Second is manager sponsorship. I feel like that the manager relationship is really one of the most critical relationships to get right. You don’t have to change the world for all the women you meet all the time, pick one. 

Over the last three or four or five years, I’ve used my role models really well, and really opportunistically, and I encourage all women professionals to do that. Role models are a guide to your future, who you will be in the next 10 years. I have Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as one of my five women role models. I find her incredible – her luminosity and her ability. She’s a great public intellectual, talks a lot about feminism, but her ability to talk about a lot of tough things with a smile. Particularly as a founder, I found those skills so useful. Because you need to wear, sometimes you do need in many contexts and situations, you need to wear your activism lightly for that activism to be impactful, right? So my homework for all of your listeners who are listening to me and actually, all professionals can do this, not just women professionals, is having a role model mood board. You are here, this is where you want to be in five years, 10 years, who are the people who you think are viable and for what skill? 

The last thing I always tell women, colleagues and professionals is you know when you say don’t talk behind people’s back? I said flip it. You must talk about a woman peer or colleague when she’s not in the room, but say good things. 

Anupama: Shreyasi, it’s been so lovely chatting with you thank you so much for your time and being on our podcast. 

This brings us to the end of our (season finale) episode of UnHerd. We’ll be back with season 2 in March 2025. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channels where we’ll bring you more unheard stories of people who are passionate about creating impact at scale in different ways. People who truly stand apart from the herd. Follow us, like, subscribe and share.

 

UnHerd with Bindu Ananth: Bridging gaps in affordable healthcare access

Hosted by ACT, UnHerd brings you the unheard stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt the social impact landscape. From social entrepreneurs to venture philanthropists, dive into real-world conversations on what they’ve experienced and learned about changing the status quo.

Our ninth episode of UnHerd features Bindu Ananth (Founder of Dvara Health Finance), in conversation with Anam Sherwani (Manager, ACT For Health). Bindu shares her journey of building NEEM, a subscription-based platform connecting rural patients to trained health workers for doorstep care and medicine delivery. 

Tune in on Spotify or watch the episode on YouTube to learn how Dvara Health Finance is  using tech-enabled innovation to transform access to affordable healthcare for Bharat.

Anam:  

Hello folks and welcome to the penultimate episode of UnHerd, a podcast hosted by ACT that delves into the extraordinary stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt India’s social impact landscape. Today, we’re diving into an issue that impacts millions of families across India – the rising cost of accessing quality (health) care. Every year, about 10% of Indians are pushed into poverty due to hospitalisation costs, and countless others skip essential healthcare altogether because they simply can’t afford it. 

Our guest for the day is Bindu Ananth, a social entrepreneur committed to enhancing the access to affordable quality care for patients in rural and underserved areas. As the founder of Dvara Health Finance, Bindu has developed the NEEM program, a tech-first subscription-based platform solution that provides patients access to a network of trained local health workers who deliver quality care and aid medicine delivery at their doorstep.  

Bindu, welcome to UnHerd! Thrilled to have you with us!

Bindu:  

Thank you Anam, pleasure to be here.

Anam:  

Bindu diving right into it, you come from a finance background. You’ve worked with companies like ICICI, chaired Northern Arc Capital, and have been a member of three RBI committees. How did you land up on public healthcare as a problem statement? Why did you decide to solve for it?

The spark that lit the fire: Identifying gaps in access to healthcare financing

Bindu: 

So most of my career has been focused on financial services for the poor. And I have done this within different institutions – first in ICICI Bank, where I was part of the wholesale banking team. I think ICICI was a real pioneer in some of this work – this was about 20 years ago – and then I had the opportunity to set up, along with my co-founders, an organisation called Dvara.

And there again, continuing with the same theme of what will it take for India to make its financial markets deeper, make formal access available to every last village in the country, what are the new innovations that are needed? And it was also an exciting time because at the same time that we were doing Dvara, you had all of these wonderful, bold experiments happening in the background of Aadhaar. And so, I think it was just a wonderful confluence of many entrepreneurs doing interesting work in this space, but also terrific policy work, terrific regulatory work by the RBI. But the common theme in all of this is thinking about, what are low-income households (facing) in India? What gaps are they facing? What are the shocks that finance is helping them deal with?

If finance works well, it should absorb a lot of the uncertainty, the anxiety in people’s lives and that state is what one might think of as being financially included rather than having access to product A, B, and C. 

And so, if you think about finance more broadly, we’ve done very well, I would say, in the last 20 odd years in terms of just physical access. But if you think, if you dig deeper and you think about, “How is people’s financial well-being? What are people doing with the money that they have access to?” I personally started to see many more gaps in that picture. For example, the fact that a lot of borrowing that our clients do essentially finds its way back to healthcare and hospitalisation, either for themselves or for a loved one. And that’s at least a good 25-30% of what probably constitutes all of lending to the poor. Now, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think if you have a loved one in hospital, really any source of money that helps get them the best treatment is fantastic. But if you think about what happens afterwards – hopefully the relative does well, comes back home. But there is a period of recovery both for the person who was hospitalised as well as the caregiver. And it won’t be an instant going back to things as they were. And now the additional point is that you have this sword hanging over your head, of this loan that has to be paid back pretty soon, starting next month onwards. That creates a very different sort of pressure. We find that borrowing for healthcare typically triggers a set of reactions that creates a lot more financial stress. And then to repay that loan, people potentially have to borrow from elsewhere or they have to sell assets. So all of this is somewhat of a negative spiral.

And so for me, the motivation was really that, well, a lot of the foundations of financial inclusion etc. seem to have been done well. Let’s think about what are some of the unsolved problems. And for me, certainly, this struck a deep chord to say that, can we think about better ways for people to pay for healthcare such that it does not end up creating this much financial stress? Surely there must be better ways to do this than the emergency sort of borrowing. What might that look like? How can we structure it? How can we deliver it at scale and offer it as a meaningful alternative to the microfinance type model that happens today? So that was, and I would say really for me, an important sort of starting point. 

Anam:  

As an organisation and as a founder, you’re really building a tech-first healthcare solution. There’s a massive behaviour change that you have to address, right? Underserved communities do have a preference for in-person consultations with doctors and they do believe in restorative rather than preventative healthcare. When one thinks of subscription-based models for these households, the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is very high, and the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is not as high, initially at least. So what were some of the (early) failures for Dvara, and what were the learnings that followed which allowed you to build better as an organisation for these households for this specific customer segment?

Bindu:

Let me just start with the fact that, yes, each low-income household or each informal sector household perhaps individually represents a fairly modest spending power or purchasing power. But if there’s one thing that financial inclusion, some of the other successful models in social enterprises, have taught us, it’s that the real power is in aggregation. So, if you put together the total spends of these households, it’s really in that sense a volume game. You cannot make this work by working with a modest number of households. It’s really about small amounts multiplied into millions and hundreds of millions. That’s what creates the magic. For our work right now at Dvara Health Finance, we are fairly focused on, I would say, the missing middle in the context of, let’s say, health insurance, which is to say people who are not working in organisations like Infosys or Wipro or ICICI Bank and hence covered by corporate insurance covers etc. Neither are they employed in the government, whether it’s railways or State Bank of India, and therefore covered by government funded insurance schemes. Neither are they poor enough to be eligible for social insurance programs like Ayushman Bharat. Because often some of this is confusing because you have so many different pieces of the puzzle. There’s really this large missing middle, you know, 200, 300 million people, who are not poor, who have enough cash flow, so to speak. 

Let’s just put a face to this person. Think about this as somebody who in town of Satara is running a shop, is running a stall near the temple, is somebody who’s on his feet for 12 – 14 hours of the day. The number one issue that this individual running the shop is facing is that he’s time poor, which is to say that if he’s not at the shop, he has to put the shutter down. It’s literally a one-person enterprise. Now if you tell this person, “Listen, travel 4-5 kms away, there is a friendly neighbourhood clinic, go wait for an hour and the doctor will see you,” you’ve lost the person’s attention. So I think the thing to appreciate is that there is a very large segment that values convenience enormously, because time is money for them, as much as it is for a person running a much larger business. And therefore services that are conveniently delivered, ideally at the doorstep or at the shop front. This is the core insight that microfinance tapped, because there was always this puzzle to say here are banks willing to provide loans at 8%-10%. How come customers are borrowing money from microfinance lenders at 24%. That just seems irrational. But I think the missing piece was the one that was available at my doorstep, whereas in the other I had to travel, I had to wait. And these are real costs. So that’s the opportunity that we are going after.  

But if you think about the total spending that this group does on healthcare out of pocket, it’s a pretty large number. So in India, the overall out of pocket expenditure is roughly in the region of three lakh crores or three trillion rupees. That’s a pretty big chunk and a lot of that comes from this segment that doesn’t have insurance. 

But I would argue that the bigger problem is what are they spending that three lakh crores on? 80% of that is curative in nature. And within that, specifically spends at hospitals, typically specialty type centres. Very little of it is primary preventive. And even within that 80% of curative, there’s a lot of unnecessary diagnostics, expensive medication that I didn’t need. I had a headache. I went to a nearby doctor and the doctor just immediately sent me to get an MRI done, so there is a lot of wastage. Clearly, there’s a large number of people who today are paying out of pocket. However, that is not yielding any meaningful results for them in terms of good health outcomes. What if we really focus sharply on that market and deliver a consistent, reliable, convenient service. Our experience on the ground is certainly very, very encouraging in terms of adoption. I think a lot of the things to figure out is about how do I deliver it consistently and at scale. Those are the real challenges. 

Traversing tough roads: Pivoting from a financial service to a health product

Bindu:  

I will say that one of the things that we did early on which did not work and probably because of my own background is that we approached it too much as a financial services problem. The first version of our offering was actually something called a health savings account in which we said, “Let’s just help people instead of borrowing at 30% rates of interest for health. Why don’t we help people save for emergencies?” And savings represents a kind of lower cost for the household. And so we built a lot and we created a fintech type proposition, all of it of course aimed at health. And that simply did not work out at all because in some sense, it did not resonate with the customer.

Health as an issue was well understood but savings specifically for health that just did not, I think, feel right to the customer. So we, in some sense, completely pulled back from it. And instead of a health savings account, effectively we then launched a health subscription product. And the big difference between the two is that the first one feels like a financial product. The second one feels like a healthcare product, in which I’m subscribing to NEEM, what do I get in return? I get actual access to a healthcare team. I get a health worker who comes to my home, takes my vitals, monitors me, delivers me affordable medicines, all of that, which feels a lot more tangible. And of course, in the process of accessing the subscription from us, the household did save quite a bit. Because, for example, we provide generic medicines for chronic diseases, which are a good 50%-60% cheaper than what they would buy from the local chemist. So the intent in both cases was the same, to bring down the monthly expenditure on healthcare for the household. But the first version of it was the financial offering. And this is given that my experience and my lens tends to be financial.

Whereas the improvement on that spoke to the customer a lot more because it felt real, felt tangible and felt like it had a services component, not just a financial component. So that pivot was critical for us.  

Anam: 

How did you build out the user-centricity within NEEM as a program? 

Bindu: 

We have to be deeply focused on the customer and as we already talked about, even rural India for that matter is many many segments all bunched up. So it’s always helpful to have a clear sense, like in any company that you would do, to say exactly who are you building for, what problem are you solving. But going with the hypothesis and keep iterating to say, okay, maybe this segment is already well served by government schemes and it would be hard for them to get a good value perception of what NEEM is. So for example, we’ve crystallised many things such as the fact that our typical customer underneath would be somebody with a monthly household income between let’s say Rs. 18,000 to Rs. 40,000. But the question is, is NEEM the right solution for them? If you bring in a fairly low-income person into a subscription program, then the month on month payment is soon going to become a challenge because of income uncertainty. 

Start with some clarity, refine it as we go along and then start to crystallise many of these things for the team at the frontline. Because I think one mistake that many of us founders tend to make is the assumption that we operate sometimes at 30,000 feet and it’s all clear in our head, of course. But if your execution is happening, let’s say, through a frontline sales team or a frontline service team, who’s local, you owe it to them to provide them clarity in terms of this is a criteria for people who you want to bring into this service or this offering. These are the five benefits that we will provide. These things we do not provide because there’s also a fair bit of confusion in terms of what does the government do versus what do you do, what do private hospitals do. So I would say that’s really important and as much as possible, we’ve tried to write these down and document it so that people when they go out have a sense of exactly what to do. I think that’s really important for scalability.

If you listen carefully to your teams, make sure that your teams are listening carefully to customers, then that whole feedback loop starts to build, which is fundamental for any organisation, particularly anybody in the social impact space. 

Anam:  

That’s super interesting, Bindu.From a founder’s perspective, what really keeps on driving your conviction?

Bindu:  

Yeah, I think 2-3 things. My team and my conviction in subscription is coming from, I would say, almost a conceptual angle to say that, can we take the one-off, Rs. 1,00,000 payment to the hospital, which is what we think of as a problem, and instead of that, break it into small chunks of 100 rupees, 200 rupees paid for every month so that we don’t end up with that Rs. 1,00,000 situation. So our approach to this is very much rooted in the customer and what will make sure we produce good outcomes there. But that’s my point of view. Now the whole challenge in all of this is to say what does the customer think about all of this? And particularly in healthcare, it’s very well known behaviour that people would much rather pay for things that are curative when it comes to that, rather than demand for primary care services.  

I think by going on the field, talking to customers, listening deeply to customers, you figure out what is the right balance to strike. So the focus area for NEEM, for instance, given this constraint is to say, it’s going to be really challenging for me to work with a person who feels completely well, whose vitals are normal and then say, okay, pay me something every month to make sure you remain in the pink of health and so that you dont get hospitalised. But the customer’s point is, “Who’s thinking about hospitalisation anyway? I’m not going to get hospitalised because I’m in the pink of health.” So that would have been a very hard challenge. And we realised that quickly.

Bindu:  

And we said, okay, maybe the real opportunity here is to focus on people who are newly diagnosed, let’s say, with blood pressure, newly diagnosed with diabetes, a stage one or stage two. And now it’s not about preventing diabetes from occurring. The conversation really becomes about, if you don’t do anything about your health, you could end up with a significant event like hospitalisation etc. Work with us so that we can keep you managed at your home and so, maybe closer to thinking about it as what one might think of as secondary prevention rather than primary prevention. And again, that’s where I think all the detail comes in because healthcare is such a vast space.

Somebody could be working on smoking cessation. Somebody could be working on health or weight loss. All of those are valid. You have to figure out where the circles intersect in terms of where you can make an impact, where it’s meaningful, and what is the customer willing to pay for. 

So back to your question Anam, around what makes subscription tick. I think one is making sure that your offering speaks to a real felt problem of the customer, not something that I think is good for the customer to do, but the customer has to feel it. One of the things we did, for example, again, based on feedback is that we were initially doing only diabetes and CVD, cardiovascular diseases. A lot of patients told us, “Listen, one of the things that I’m spending a lot of money on is pain – lower back pain, neck pain.” And remember, we talked about our typical customer being somebody who’s on his feet for 12 hours a day or a woman who’s working on the farm for long stretches of time. So just the physical wear and tear. They said, “If this is about us, then why not include that in your offering rather than talk about things like diabetes, which frankly, I don’t right now care a lot about.” And you know, health workers brought that message back to us and we’ve now integrated chronic pain into a subscription because it felt widespread enough of an issue. So one, think, get the kind of core segment value proposition right to the specifics of what is included in your subscription has to be the right mix of things that affect the customer here and now, versus things that are more sort of medium term impact because the longer the time frame, the less salient it feels today for me, right?  

And then finally, the number one most important thing Anam, is the front line. I think one of the most differentiating aspects of NEEM is the fact that it’s delivered by a local trained health worker, the name is Sakhi. She is somebody who is the face of the program. This is not, at least for this market, a pure tele-medicine type approach or an app based approach. We are convinced it’s not the solution at all for all the reasons that we talked about. There needs to be a strong, obviously, technology backbone, but it has to be what one calls an assisted model.

So the health worker is really driving a lot of that action. She’s driving a lot of the adherence because, in chronic diseases, there is no magic. I mean, what has to be done is very clear. The medicines have all been around for many, many years. But the key question is, can you persuade your patient to stay on medication for extended periods of time, even if she feels better? That’s where a lot of the programs go off the rails and that’s where the health worker engagement is so critical and at least in our case that those set of reasons seem to be contributing to pretty good retention rates on the subscription.

First principle lens: Raising the bar on what trained healthcare professionals can do

Anam: 

That is very fascinating, Bindu. How did you approach integrating this component of a NEEM Sakhi into your tech based model?  

Bindu:  

Before I started Dvara Health Finance, right before that, I worked with this wonderful company called Niramai (another ACT For Health portfolio startup), which has a unique technology for breast cancer detection using AI and thermal imaging. Working in that setup, one of the things that surprised me early on is that we do these Niramai screenings for a whole bunch of women. And at that point, it was not a diagnostic technology, it was a screening technology. So, for every 100 people that we screened, perhaps for 6 or 7, we’d say, “Listen, it seems that there is some suspicious activity, a suspicious looking lump. Please get it confirmed using an ultrasound was the typical recommendation.” And that would be signed off by a doctor. To my utter surprise and shock, almost nobody would go on to do that confirmatory ultrasound.

So they do the screening, they take the trouble to come do the screening with us, take that fairly troubling report to say there’s some suspicious activity and then disappear. And during my early days in Niramai, I would tell Geeta (Founder, Niramai) to say, “I am going to chase these women down.” I said, okay, maybe it’s just that travel is a problem, planning is a problem. So we’d get appointments for them to do their ultrasounds. And I personally said to a few women to say, “I’ll come with you. Let’s go do this ultrasound. Can I pick you up from the passport office?” “Yes, yes, madam. I’ll be there at 10 a.m.” And they would simply not show up. So it was a surprise for me. But if you talk to people who are veterans in healthcare, in cancer care etc., loss to follow up is a very widespread phenomenon, which is just people who don’t pursue the next logical step of whether it’s diagnosis or treatment. And all of these things remind you that, gosh, how in this context then are you going to go in with a pure tech solution? Because you need to have a muscle around persuasion, kind of getting the job done, right?

Your first instinct is to say that in all healthcare, the human should be a doctor so that you have the least issues with respect to expertise, compliance of law etc. But again, the penny drops that listen, if you want to serve the vast parts of our country, not just tier one, tier two, tier three locations, there are simply not enough doctors who can provide that sort of coverage. And there are, again, many people before us who figured that out. When we scanned the space, we saw fantastic examples of health worker-led models. What we did notice was that there was a distinct difference in the level of ambition that Indian programs had for their health workers relative to some of the global exemplars. If you look at the Indian health worker experience, it’s fairly low skill, low trained, often unpaid volunteers.

I think what helped us is that we went in with a little bit of that clean sheet of paper and said, we are going to push this as hard as we can within what laws permit us to do so I think we approached that health worker role with fresh eyes. We did not think that this was some low-level unpaid work, we immediately said this is full-time work. This is not an individual who’s a volunteer. I also walked away from this notion that the health worker should be some sort of entrepreneur, generating sales to pay for her salary to say, why would we do that? The service is conceptualised by us. She’s the one delivering the service. If we are confident that what we have designed is good for the customer, it will be adopted by the customer. We should not let the health worker take that revenue risk. So we pay the health workers like it’s a full-time job, because it is. And then this revenue risk is taken by us. That freed up the health worker. 

And we found them not surprisingly, immensely trainable, very hungry to pick up new skills. Manisha Adkari, one of our best health workers – she comes from a small village in Mhasward in Satara. She used to work at a wonderful local bank called Mandishi Mahila Bank, who was one of our early partners. She used to be one of their savings agents. And remember I told you our initial sort of product was a health savings account. So the initial cadre were people who were encouraging people to save, leaders of self-help groups. Again, no clinical background at all. But what does it mean that they really knew how to do well? It was to connect with people. It was to sort of understand what their anxieties are vis-a-vis themselves, their kids.

What are your fears with respect to this medicine, why you’re not taking it regularly, what’s going on?

So we are not going to spend any time training Manisha Adkari on, “These are the body systems. This is the left ventricle. This is the right ventricle.” If you think about clinical education, there’s a good reason why doctors take at least 10 years to get to a minimum level of training. But that’s not what we’re trying to do here. We are trying to get this health worker well-versed in using, for example, an electronic health record system. She has to be well-versed in taking accurate blood pressure measurements. Tomorrow, we’d like her to be well-versed in taking a blood draw and preparing a sample. So these are very different skills. You’re not creating a mini doctor or a low-skilled person, you’re really creating a new set of skills. So I think the fact that we were able to approach it without any of that legacy around how health workers usually behave helped us a lot.  

Anam:  

I want to shift the gears a little bit here and really understand what your journey has been like as a founder in the social impact space. Because you’ve been at it for a while and (having spent time with) a lot of time with social entrepreneurs and founders in this space, it becomes more about how they’re always looking for a silver lining that keeps them going without really having a (silver) bullet in the hand. What has that journey been like especially given the multiple pivots, the new learnings and deeper insights that you’ve uncovered? What has really kept you going at it?  

Future Forward: Staying aligned with your mission and with happenings on ground

Bindu: 

I think most people in this space are here because of a deep sense of mission. And I think that’s a given. Otherwise, you would not be here trying to do these things. And if you’re one of the people lucky enough to assemble a team around you, that shares that mission. I mean, I think to me, that’s really critical. And that keeps you going. It can be a co-founder but it can also be, I think the rest of your early team. And that’s something that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have. 

It’s the health workers, it’s the sales team, it’s the program management team. And one of the things we consciously do is to make sure that you’re very tightly connected to that team.  

So I would say, you know, always surround yourselves with people who give you that energy. And that’s the fuel that we need because none of these problems, if they were all easy they would all be done by now. So we do need to build that mental energy for the marathon. Ultimately, in some sense, how do I, how do the teams have a sense of progress? Typically, it’s customer volumes, transaction volumes, etc. but I think for enterprises like us, it’s good early on to start to measure outcomes much more directly. So one of the things that I’m very grateful for is that our medical advisory board pushed us on is to say that, “I want to see you publish almost in real time your data in terms of what’s the change in status on blood pressure, what’s the change in status on diabetes, what’s the change in status on chronic pain.”

Make the data very visible, right from the CEO down to the health worker, to our partners, so that there’s a sense of this is what drives us. So we recently celebrated the fact that at the end of September, we had achieved 70% control among all our hypertensive patients, which means that when they came into the NEEM program, they were hypertensive. Anything over 140 by 90 at the time of entering the program. And in the most recent home visit that the health worker did, 70% of people were below 140 by 90, which is what represents control in the context of diabetes. So, 7 out of 10 people and the balance 30% may not have achieved control, but are starting to show significant improvement. And I think aligning everybody to that kind of north star, that in my experience also provides just more enduring motivation of the type that’s very different than a quick win. You do need some of those.

Anam:  

Thank you for sharing that Bindu and honestly couldn’t agree more on that one. How do you see the financial inclusion space within the public health care system evolve? What do you feel is something that needs to evolve for meaningful impact to get created at scale for India? 

Bindu: 

I would think about it as how do we deliver financial protection to all Indians, which is to say, you often hear this in our circles, that most Indians are one hospital visit away from poverty, right?

That’s really what I think we need to change. How is that going to happen? It’s going to happen when more and more people have that safety net of saying, if something happens to me, I don’t have to draw on my own personal resources to pay for that event. It may or may not be insurance, but some pooling that’s happening so that it’s not literally just me left to my own devices to pay for that one lakh rupee hospital bill, right? And like I said, it’s not just a problem of poor people in India. We saw during COVID how vulnerable we are even in terms of the upper middle class, how one would think of it. If the hospital bill jumps from one lakh to three lakhs, you’re another 20% of the population that will go into poverty. So that’s the overall kind of problem statement in terms of how we solve that at scale. I think certainly organisations like Dvara but many more people are working at the primary care level.

Bindu:  

We need, I think, hundreds of organisations relative to what we have now working on primary care. And using interesting payment models – we are big on subscription, but there surely are other models out there. But the whole point is to say, don’t wait for the patient to walk in and pay every time they see you.

The problem with fee for service is that you will come only when you fall sick. We want to figure out payment models where the patient is incentivized to come to you with everything. I have a cold, my kid has diarrhoea. The more you come to us, the happier we are, right? It needs to be that sort of approach at the primary care level.

So that I think that has to evolve a little bit. There is a fantastic role for technology to play there to say, how can that layer of primary care organisations now start to do a lot more? I certainly see in the not too distant future, our health workers being able to do a fair bit of cancer screening using mobile ECGs etc. So a lot more information action can happen at the primary care level. That starts to become substantive.

I think a significant piece of digital public goods infrastructure that needs to get created is between players like us and where the hospitals and the insurers currently sit. Today, the links between these two simply don’t exist. We are doing our own thing. They are doing their own thing. Is there a way to build the connectivity between these two layers such that only

people who pass through a primary care organisation, they get referred to a specific hospital, let’s say for surgery. So that it starts to rationalize some of these flows a little bit more, rather than people directly ending up at the hospital for something that could have been resolved at the primary care layer. So I think about this more broadly Anam, you need to build a little bit more middleware that helps connectivity between primary care and secondary tertiary care. And the middleware is typically around protocols for payments, protocols for referral, insurance, sort of participation, claim settlement. I think the path to scale is in leveraging the work of primary care organisations, but making sure that the handshake to the rest of the system is also getting built out properly.

Anam:

With your journey in perspective, what would be your advice that other founders can also keep in mind as they try to build for this problem? 

Bindu: 

Rural healthcare is a tough nut. There is no willingness to pay. CAC is too high. I personally think that you got to go deeper and solve for this at a segment level. And hey, this is India, right? Any micro segment you take is a hundred thousand plus people. So we should not be afraid of going deep.

And the second piece of it is what are you bringing to this whole problem statement? And in my case, I’m acutely aware that I am not a health expert.

You can think about my lack of health background as a disadvantage. I think of it as an advantage because I’m able to look at it with a different pair of eyes. Having said that, you do need genuine expertise, if you are offering a healthcare program. So build a personal advisory board that will give you that guidance, be willing to give you tough, harsh feedback early on. Because you may not always get that from investors. So I think building that group around you is always helpful. 

And then I think the third thing Anam, that you had asked me earlier on, is around keeping the veil of motivation always running deep. Which is getting in knowing that there is not going to be a quick win, right? So build stamina to stay in it for a while and pivot as needed, driven by customer feedback. But you know that the payoff when it happens is going to be huge because that’s the nature of the problem. I do think thinking of it as a marathon rather than a quick sprint is really important.

Anam: 

This, Bindu, has been an incredibly inspiring conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today! 

Bindu: 

Thank you so much, Anam.  

Anam: 

This brings us to the end of our episode of UnHerd, a podcast presented by Team ACT. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube  channels, where we’ll bring you more unheard stories of people who are passionate about creating impact at scale in different ways. People who truly stand apart from the herd. Follow us, like, subscribe and share.

Women in startups: Transforming the leadership landscape 

Launched by ACT For Women in 2023, the Women in India’s Startup Ecosystem Report (WISER) found that women made up 35 percent of the startup workforce in 2022 (the corresponding figure for the corporate sector was 19 percent) and indicated that, with timely and targeted action, that number can rise to 50 percent by 2030. However, it also highlighted the need for deepened focus as 10 years into their careers, 8 out of 10 men in startups occupy Director-level positions or higher, compared to only 5 in 10 women. 

At ACT, we believe strongly that the problem is not women but the systems around them and so, to build on this actionable insight, we partnered with Harappa education (now acquired by UpGrad) through a strategic grant to pilot a transformative Women’s Leadership Program designed to bolster the representation of women leaders within Indian startups. The pilot cohort of 28 high-potential women managers from varied backgrounds were given the opportunity to hone critical skills such as personal branding, professional networking, and negotiation in male-dominated settings over a 12 week period. The program included 6 self-paced virtual courses, 2 strength assessments, 3 live masterclasses, fireside chats and an in-person city meet. For instance, the “Networking: The Skill That Never Stops Giving” course taught participants the nuances of creating meaningful professional relationships, while the “Get Out of Your Own Way” session addressed internal interferences like imposter syndrome. The cohort also benefited from Thrive Drills, which reinforced these concepts in practical scenarios. The program also went well beyond the learner and engaged a sponsor from the startup on a parallel journey of learning gender-agnostic decision making, inclusive leadership techniques and more. 

The results have been promising. A significant majority of participants reported increased confidence in building their professional networks, crafting personal brands, and supporting other women in their fields. Many experienced positive shifts in self-awareness, with 73% showing improvements in networking and 59% becoming more adept at handling challenging conversations. Feedback from participants highlighted the program’s impact, with several noting newfound confidence, enhanced communication skills, and a commitment to support other women. 

As ACT For Women continues its mission to foster a diverse and inclusive startup ecosystem, the Women’s Leadership Program stands as a powerful model for nurturing future women leaders in India holistically without solely putting the onus on women themselves. 

Khushi Baby joins the ACT For Health portfolio

Across India, over 1.3 million community health workers —including ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) and ANMs (Auxiliary Nurse Midwives)—work tirelessly to bring healthcare to the nation’s hardest-to-reach communities. These health workers are often the first and only link to healthcare for populations in rural areas, urban slums, migratory groups, and families with low health literacy. Yet, despite their invaluable role, community health workers face immense challenges due to inefficient, paper-based reporting systems and fragmented digital health tools. These issues contribute to data inconsistencies, misaligned health targets, and delayed remuneration leaving community health workers overburdened and spending over 25 million hours each month on redundant data entry. Without real-time, high-quality data, public health officials are limited in their ability to drive targeted actions and data-driven decision-making.

Khushi Baby is a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving primary healthcare through digital tools by empowering health workers, partners, and governments to build integrated health systems and enable data-driven decision-making. With its Comprehensive Integrated Health Platform (CHIP), Khushi Baby has created a single, unified interface to streamline data collection, remuneration, and real-time tracking across primary healthcare programs. This allows community health workers to focus on what truly matters—caring for their communities—while providing public health officials with hyperlocal insights to make informed, data-driven decisions.

Founded in 2014 by Ruchit Nagar and Mohammed Shahnawaz, Khushi Baby has grown from a maternal and child health solution to a health system solution using a tech-first approach. This is evident through Khushi Baby’s CHIP model.. Initially launched in Rajasthan, the platform has onboarded 75,000 community health workers and integrated 12 vertical health programs, reaching over 46 million people across 40,000 villages. By digitizing health records, Khushi Baby enables seamless data sharing, facilitates early interventions in high-risk pregnancies, improves vaccination rates, and supports community health workers in reducing malnutrition as the technical nodal partner to the Ministries of Health.

ACT For Health is now supporting Khushi Baby to scale this proven model to the state of Karnataka, building a new and improved version of CHIP as an open-source Digital Public Good (DPG) and laying the groundwork for similar efforts in Maharashtra. “ CHIP 2.0” is projected to reach a total of 100 million citizens at the last mile and empower a total of 150,000 ASHA workers at a cost per beneficiary of 2.62 INR. This open-source approach not only provides a pathway for Karnataka but also paves the way for other states to adopt and tailor similar digital health solutions.

At ACT For Health, we are excited to support Khushi Baby’s mission to empower health workers and enhance primary healthcare delivery for India’s most underserved communities through a tech-enabled approach!

ACT For Environment welcomes Alt Carbon to its Portfolio

The Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) sector, though still in its early stages globally, is emerging as a key driver for achieving net-zero emissions. While traditional emission reduction strategies could reduce emissions by 11%, prioritising CDR offers a potential 38% reduction annually. As an area with exponential growth potential, the CDR market is primarily fueled by voluntary carbon credits, which are expected to expand 20-fold to reach $1 trillion by 2037. And within this VCM market, removal credits—particularly engineered solutions like Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW)—are gaining traction. ERW stands out for its capacity to store carbon for over a thousand years, ensuring high levels of permanence and offering robust verification protocols.

Positioned as India’s frontrunner in ERW, Alt Carbon is leveraging this technique to capture CO2 by applying finely crushed basalt, rich in essential minerals like magnesium and calcium, to agricultural lands. This process binds atmospheric CO2 with soil minerals, transforming it into stable carbonates that sequester carbon in the ocean for thousands of years. Beyond its carbon capture benefits, ERW also raises soil pH, a vital improvement for the highly acidic soils of tea estates in India’s North-East, where declining productivity has long challenged farmers.

Founders Shrey and Sparsh Agarwal, fourth-generation tea estate owners with deep ties in the tea community, have secured access to 2,000 hectares for expansion, with partnerships covering an additional 8,000 hectares and potential access to 40,000 hectares across Darjeeling, Assam, Tripura, and Uttarakhand. With rigorous measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) protocols established in partnership with IISc, the company is close to obtaining certification for its removal credits. With a solid foundation and early results, Alt Carbon has attracted $7 million in forward purchase orders, including $500,000 in pre-purchase from Frontier, and is well-positioned for further growth.

To drive scalability, the company is now establishing the Darjeeling Climate Action Lab (D-CAL), an in-house MRV facility that will allow it to process over 600,000 samples annually, enabling credit commitments to Frontier and NextGen starting in 2025. This internal facility is also projected to bring credit costs down to $100, improving the economic viability of carbon removal. For the broader ERW ecosystem, D-CAL offers a cost-efficient MRV service to help other ERW players achieve market viability.

Backed by a dedicated team of 35, including geochemists and business development experts, Alt Carbon is on a promising trajectory with clear targets: removing 0.23 million tons of CO2 by 2027 and scaling up to 1 billion tons by 2040. At ACT For Environment, we’re excited to support Alt Carbon’s journey as they set new standards in scalable, scientifically rigorous carbon removal, advancing India’s progress toward net-zero emissions!

ACT For Health doubles down on AdagioVR

India’s mental health crisis is a silent epidemic that affects over 197 million people, with 70-90% of mental illnesses remaining untreated. Factors such as lack of awareness, deep-rooted stigma and a significant resource gap – with <1 psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers per 100,000 people – contribute to the growing severity.

 

To address these challenges ACT partnered with AdagioVR in 2023 – an early-stage start-up making Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy available to the vulnerable communities through virtual reality. The therapy program entails working with the user to  identify core target issues and delivering personalised VR sessions with facilitator support. With ACT’s support AdagioVR launched their first pilot in India, delivering EMDR therapy to 150 members of the transgender community in partnership with MITR Trust. The pilot helped validate the effectiveness of AdagioVR’s solutions with:

 

  • A 93% reduction in depression/ stress levels and 90% reduction in trauma impact
  • Unlocking a partnership with the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) for an ICMR-funded clinical study in leading hospitals in Delhi
  • Onboarding various NGOs and Corporates as clients in B2B segment

 

Given such strong outcomes and traction, ACT For Health is excited to double down on AdagioVR with a follow-on grant to help them establish a product market fit for the Bharat audience through product testing on a diverse user cohort of 3-5K, and to enable them to experiment with pricing models to identify a revenue generation model viable for grassroots and government, while building a strong team. 

 

We look forward to partnering with AdagioVR in making quality and affordable mental healthcare accessible to Bharat!

 

Medoplus joins the ACT For Health portfolio

Of India’s population, 68% – or 900 million people – live in rural communities. Yet 80% of healthcare infrastructure and manpower is located in urban areas, with residents there living five years longer, on average, than their rural counterparts.

A typical household in Bharat spends a large portion of its income on healthcare expenses that skyrocket during a health crisis, with less than 1% of the rural population covered by insurance. This financial strain, combined with the loss of income associated with travelling to urban areas for treatment, causes many patients to delay seeking medical care. These delays contribute to worsened health outcomes and ultimately higher treatment costs. Additionally, purely digital solutions have shown limited potential to address these problems as a significant portion of the rural population struggles with levels of digital literacy and maintains a strong preference for physical interaction.

Medoplus, a healthcare startup founded in 2020 by Dr. Prakash Bakshi, Neeraj Chandra, and Shekhar Yerramilli, is committed to addressing these primary healthcare challenges in rural India sustainably, leveraging the founding team’s collective experience of over 50 years in executing large-scale initiatives and a deep understanding of rural communities. Over the last 4 years, MedoPlus has operated an online platform that connects rural patients with qualified healthcare providers – including doctors, labs, and hospitals – from primary to tertiary care. Platform users can map symptoms to the appropriate healthcare professional, search for nearby providers, book virtual or in-person appointments and tests, pay digitally at discounted rates, and securely store their medical records.

Given the low levels of digital literacy in rural India, Medoplus operates through a network of local health agents who assist patients in navigating the platform and the healthcare system. Through this model, Medoplus has unlocked quality and affordable primary care for 275,000 patients in Uttar Pradesh, resulting in a savings of 600,000 hours in waiting time and INR 3 crore in direct healthcare costs for these patients. Medoplus has observed a clear preference among patients for in-person consultations, with many opting to delay their healthcare visits by several days, even when teleconsultation options were available. In response to this trend, Medoplus is excited to launch a cluster-based e-clinic model designed to better meet these preferences, while ensuring access to high-quality and affordable primary healthcare in a sustainable manner.

With ACT’s support, over the next 14 months, Medoplus will test this cluster-based e-clinic model that harnesses technology and a community-driven service model. These eclinics, staffed by a rotating team of five specialists, will facilitate doctor consultations, medicine purchases and pathology testing closer to home for over 100,000 patients in Uttar Pradesh’ Barabanki district. The patients will also benefit from a network of community health workers, supporting their health journeys at these clinics and across the secondary and tertiary levels of care via the Medoplus app.

At ACT For Health, we look forward to catalysing impactful healthcare solutions by funding Medoplus’s initiatives towards improving access to quality and affordable primary care for patients in rural India, while setting the foundation for a scalable and sustainable model!

UnHerd with Amrit Om Nayak: Turning the tide on wastewater treatment

Hosted by ACT, UnHerd brings you the unheard stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt the social impact landscape. From social entrepreneurs to venture philanthropists, dive into real-world conversations on what they’ve experienced and learned about changing the status quo.

In our latest episode, we welcome Amrit Om Nayak (Co-Founder, Indra Water) who speaks with Sruthi Shanmugam (Manager, ACT For Environment) about leveraging technology to tackle India’s water crisis, collaborating with industry giants like Tata and Unilever, and unlocking new ways to make water treatment both economically and environmentally viable.

Listen to this episode on our Spotify channel or watch the conversation on YouTube.

Sruthi: Hello folks and welcome to the eighth episode of UnHerd, a podcast hosted by ACT that delves into the extraordinary stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt India’s social impact landscape. 

Water, one of our planet’s most precious resources, is being pushed to the brink. Did you know that 54% of India is classified as water stressed? This means over half of our country is grappling with severe water scarcity, yet we often take this resource for granted. In fact, 74% of water and 81% of sewage in India goes untreated, with industries frequently releasing harmful forever-chemicals into water bodies, which is further complicating the challenge. 

Our guest today is someone who is working tirelessly to address these challenges. Amrit, the co-founder of Indra Water, is leading the charge on wastewater treatment, developing a technology that not only reduces water wastage, but also tackles those difficult to remove forever-chemicals. Under Amrit’s leadership, Indra has saved over 2.5 billion litres of water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions significantly. 

Amrit, welcome to UnHerd!

Amrit: Hi Sruthi, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It’s a real pleasure.

The spark that lit the fire: Creating the economic value of water 

Sruthi: Amrit, let’s kick things off by diving into your journey. What inspired you to focus on water treatment? Was there a specific moment or challenge that made you realise this was the problem you wanted to solve?

Amrit: I think the inspiration to work on water goes long back, because I’ve grown up in the southern part of India, in the city of Chennai. When we used to wake up early in the morning, our daily activities used to be planned around the availability of water. It was so integral to everything we did. My co-founder, his father was into the chemicals trading business. So he had been to multiple factories and seen effluents or toxins being discharged untreated into freshwater bodies. So these vivid images from our childhood kind of stayed with us. We might have taken a different path in our academic careers and in our professional careers later, where I was into automotives followed by clean energy. Same thing with my co-founder. 

But we got this opportunity to treat stormwater in Seattle. We were roommates there, we were doing our masters at the University of Washington in Seattle. And we asked ourselves that if we could recover this water using our skills in energy, that we have learned over these years, can we extend it to really bad quality toxins and dirty water? So that was the trigger point for us that got us closer to water and we felt that we could do much more than just discuss it.

Sruthi: Your solution specifically works with forever chemicals. How have you managed this specific challenge? 

Amrit: See, we are an electrically driven solution unlike many others who rely predominantly on biology or chemical usage. Now, being electrically driven allows us to do multiple reactions at the same time. We could be coagulating suspended particles inside. We could be oxidising pollutants through multiple pathways which means we could be breaking them down by pulling away their electrons. The ability to be able to modulate that as water flows through your system holds us in great stead to be able to tackle very difficult toxins. 

Now, these are carbon fluorine bonds and these are very strong generally. So if you’re able to supply the right kind of potential and make the right kind of energy available, you could pull away the electron that holds that bond together and that has helped us become very effective. So the understanding of what is the right energy utilisation for treating different water, better process control, and of course, the innovations that we have unlocked with micro-electrolysis – we call it Electrox – these have kind of helped us unlock more value in these segments, enabling water which is safer for even human consumption.  

Sruthi: Out of curiosity, in your installations, is the water used within the industries itself or are they then being distributed to water bodies where they then get accumulated and improve the water tables?  

Amrit: The first step is the use within the industry. Water body cleaning and reclamation – these are activities where at least today, economic value cannot be quantified to a great extent. Who is it actually benefiting, apart from the environmental footprint? But when you are talking about industrial process reuse, there is a clear economic value which can be quantified.  

So it has got to start with this and it’s already happening. A lot of players in North India, Western parts of India and Southern India are already doing it and Eastern part of India will also join in because they are the bulk users when it comes to mining industry, steel industry and all that, where there can be huge impact.

Once we enter into that phase, where industrial process reuse has become mainstream, that’s when you have more water available for domestic use cases and sewage treatment. So industry comes first, because there is a business continuity case here, there is an economic value case here, followed by sewage treatment. Because if you are going to tap all the pollutants and ensure that the water is not going out, your water bodies are anyway going to start becoming better. 

Sruthi: I think you’ve had tremendous success working with marquee clients like Unilever and Tata and your technology has been implemented in various industries, right? Could you share a story or an example of how your solution has created real impact for your clients?

Amrit: I think one of the interesting parts of our journey is the first five years, where we were actually working with much smaller clients. Companies which have a much smaller balance sheet and where the requirement for water was much lower. And these customers were textile customers, they were customers in the food production area, they were customers in the pharmaceutical area. Now, working with these customers actually helped us understand that our product could be deployed either standalone, it could be combined with existing technologies, and more importantly even customer personnel – people at the ground level there could be trained to work with us and respond to different situations with our deployed water assets. Now that builds a certain kind of confidence not just in the product but also builds a confidence in our ability to control the performance of assets over a period of time. 

Now, there is a very unique use case with a textile customer and it’s a garment washing facility. We have been doing a very tricky wastewater [intervention] which has a lot of surfactants. Now at this facility, we have managed to recover almost every drop of water for reuse. It has either been used in industrial processes or it has been used for other non-portable activities like flushing or irrigation or even floor washing. So not a single drop of water is actually being wasted at that facility. And all this has been achieved with the help of the customer where they have also risen up to the challenge and worked with us. 

Our end customers include the likes of Unilever, Tata, and the Aditya Birla Group. All of these customers are important from the perspective of a recurring pattern of requirement across their businesses. So for Indra, progressing from these smaller customers to the larger ones has been very natural. And it has also helped build successful use cases, which can be applied to these larger use cases. 

First principle lens: The role of water treatment in business continuity

Sruthi: Thank you for sharing that story, Amrit. Water is a very complex space, right? Especially water treatment. And again, with industrial waste water, it unfortunately doesn’t have a direct economic value attached to it. Can you talk us through how you’ve tackled this mindset, how have you created adoption for your solutions in an environment where water is often undervalued?

Amrit: So I agree with you Sruthi. Water as a resource has been extremely undervalued and we have taken it for granted. We do not associate a monetary value with it because we get it almost for free most of the time. But it is critical to understand that water is not just important for our daily activities but it’s important for business continuity. 

A lot of the critical products that we use in our daily [lives] consume huge quantities of water [to manufacture]. So it was first important to understand that any disruption to water availability could impact businesses by not allowing them to continue production. The other part to understand is the economic value of water. Like, what if water is not available? What’s a value that can be attached to the downtime of your factory? Is there a value that can be attached to non-compliance or is there a value that can be attached to having to purchase more water at a higher cost? I think we are at a crossroads today where all of these questions have become really pertinent. It was important for us to go to our customers and help them understand that this is not just an activity you’re doing for the environment, nor is it just for compliance, but it actually makes business sense.

To use water and then treat it and reuse it at the point of source is actually an economically viable activity which can result in tremendous savings. It can also help them reduce the dependence on a centralised resource. Over a period of time, our customers have really come to see it. We have been able to demonstrate it with pilots and then with commercial systems. And the acceptance rate has significantly gone up. And we intend to continue on this path where we are going to spread more awareness. We are going to help them reuse more water and more importantly we are going to help them understand that industrial water does not need the highest quality fresh water. It could be done with treated water and freshwater should be left for human consumption, which is essential for life.

There are also a few new standards which have kicked in, which talk about minimum reuse for bulk users. The government has recently mandated that bulk users need to reuse at least 50% of the water. So that helps, because then they’re talking about offsetting freshwater demand and also reducing water pollution downstream because there aren’t enough centralised facilities which can deal with that. Further, there are policies around what is the minimum water generated by your facility versus the sewage treatment plant that you need to put up. So the government mandates that if you are generating more than a certain quantity of wastewater you compulsorily need to have that. So these things are egging people along and the compliance is becoming stronger. 

But what we lack in India, is differential pricing. Today water is priced only on volume.  Somebody like a textile plant which has about 10x lower pollutant load but generates 10x higher volume of water is charged higher than a pharmaceutical company which generates a very small quantity but with a very highly concentrated polluted load. So people should be charged on the basis of a volume slag based on consumption and they should be charged on the difficulty in treatment based on the pollutants or toxins that they are generating.  

Sruthi: Do you think the policy landscape is taking that turn right now? Do you see any early emerging trends toward that or is it more in the long future and not the near future?

Amrit: I think the first steps have already been taken where the National Green Tribunal has already made the draft norms of water discharge significantly tighter and stricter compared to before. That is the first good step. And there have been regulations like the water reuse policy for bulk users or looking at how a CETP (Common Effluent Treatment Plant) should be designed. So certain steps are being taken. 

I think it’s also related to the maturity of the water market. As the maturity of the market improves and adoption keeps going up, there’s going to be better economies of scale. The financials are going to make more sense and the cost of water is going to get better regulated along. In fact, there are a lot of facilities which are generating excess water after treatment, but they are unable to uptake it. So probably there could be a water exchange in urban areas where they are able to sell this water which could be easily used by industries in the industrial zones. They don’t need to use municipal fresh water for that. So this is another area which can come in, because we are looking at very large volumes of water in India.

Sruthi: Amrit, I know one exciting development we’ve heard and also supported is the launch of your upgraded technology, which is Electrox. It promises better efficiency and lower operational costs. Can you tell us what’s new with this version and how it’s going to take water treatment to the next level for you?

Amrit: Yeah, first of all, a big thank you to ACT for supporting the development of Electrox. It’s a massive upgrade over our previous reactor technology. And what really changes here is that we’ve been able to increase the amount of active oxidation sites, which is technically the amount of treatment sites available inside the reactor by 10X. Now, this automatically allows our reactors to treat water far more quickly than before. In fact, we’re able to treat sewage water in just 40 seconds of contact time in the reactor. Now that’s 25% faster from our previous generation reactors and our energy consumption has reduced by more than 15%, and in some cases, we’re able to actually see up to 30% reduction in energy consumption when we’re deploying it in commercial sites. Now all of this is possible because it’s not just been an iterative improvement, but it’s been a complete overhaul, keeping in mind the customer requirements in India. We encounter hybrid wastewater most of the time in India. So it was important for our reactors, our algorithms, our power supply systems to be able to respond quickly enough to these changing variable loads that come in. And the ability to have more treatment sites increases the probability of pollutants breaking down inside our reactor. 

So, this overall jump from our previous generation flow series and structural flash reactors to Electrox has allowed us to do much larger projects. In fact, we were earlier doing ~2-3 million litres per day projects and now we are able to target and actually deploy systems in the ~30 million litres per day category. So that’s a 10x jump in our ability to deploy systems at scale. And all this has come, while saving more [carbon] footprint. When we were small, we were saving about 70 to 80% [carbon] footprint compared to others. Now we are saving almost 90% [carbon] footprint compared to others. So you’re saving space, you’re able to consume less energy, and you’re treating water faster, and you’re generating less solid waste compared to before, you’re almost generating 23% less of solid waste. So all of this is translating into economic benefits for the customer. But one of the critical things here is that it’s not just improving the lives of our customers, it’s improved our own lives as well. We are making far fewer interventions with our system. Our operators do not require very high skill sets, nor do they require any critical assets for making interventions with the system.

So it’s become much easier now to work with extended partners as well for deployment of our systems. So overall it has impacted our scalability and the timelines over which the scalability could play out. 

Sruthi: Absolutely, I think one with the technology, you’re also saying time is of the essence and it fastens the process, but also it’s a huge cost benefit analysis for enabling adoption, at the same time creating massive impact, right? So very impressive, really excited to hear about Electrox and how it can scale. I just wanted to maybe shift gears a little – huge, huge congratulations on your recent fundraise. Could you share how this funding will help the larger vision for Indra? Where do you see the company heading, both from a business growth perspective and in terms of the impact Indra can actually achieve?

Amrit: Thank you so much about that. We did raise our Series A in January of this year. It was led by Emerald Technology Ventures and co-led by Mela Ventures and we had participation from Peak Sustainability Ventures who have been long time backers of our work, as well as Climate Angels and a few existing investors who reinvested. Of course, existing investors reinvesting is always a good thing because it shows that they continue to have the same kind of confidence in the company. For us, it is a watershed moment. In fact, internally, we call it kind of like the Henry Ford moment of, you know, water where we believe that we are creating a new framework where water systems can be built at scale. It’s no longer important to customise every system. It’s not really important to build every system from scratch. What is important is to shift this complication away from hardware, so the things can be scaled.  

We had deployed just 5,75,000 litres worth of treatment systems, daily treatment systems, in the first five years of our growth. And in a year after that, we deployed 37,80,000 litres worth of treatment capacity. And now, the next three months, we’re deploying another 48,000,000 worth of treatment capacity with our different customers. So this calls for a very different kind of strategy with regards to our ability to produce more in terms of the reactors and the critical components, our ability to provide our electrodes which are consumable to our customers at scale, even capacities for training and processing more of the client sample water because Indra doesn’t really believe in going blind.

We have a process in place where we allow our customers to use our pilots as trial systems. And our pilots use the same reactors as the ones that are used in our commercial systems. So what you get in a pilot is very close and reflects the true performance that you could get with a real commercial system at play. So with all of these factors, we’re trying to upgrade our capacities here, get in more team members, get better training modules in place.

We’ve been also focusing a lot on the partnership program, where we’re working a lot more with larger water players and EPC contractors or technology integrators and providing them training to be able to deploy our assets in multiple process schematics. So, this focus on scale for the next two, three years is going to be there. And we anticipate that this is also going to be helping us across other geographical regions.

Traversing tough roads: Changing behavioural mindsets towards water security

Sruthi: What were the challenges you overcame in your founder journey, even in the first two, three years? What were the challenges that would have almost had you say, okay, I’m dropping this now, but you didn’t? 

Amrit: I think the challenges were a lot about the mindset. Because water has been a commodity that’s been available at such an underpriced value. It’s been about why should we pay for our water, and more importantly why should we pay to clean it up? So that was a big challenge we had to work on, because we had to prove to people that it can actually be economically viable to clean up a resource which is so underpriced.

I think the other challenge was that the water industry is so fragmented and at such a nascent state, though it has been existing for over 100 years now, but the actual development of technology, actual development of financing models, or the industry itself in terms of maturity and execution, all of these are not at the same level of maturity as some of the other industries like automobile industry or manufacturing industry for that matter.

And it was important for us to help our customers understand that not every water plant has to be designed from scratch. It is possible to have a modular approach to water treatment as well. In fact, some of our customers earlier would not believe that you could segregate streams and have a small module taking care of one stream and another taking care of the other polluted stream and then you could combine it. That kind of flexibility to treat different streams differently and have different mixes of treated water. It could not, one could not think about it earlier.

Sruthi: I do want more words of wisdom from you as a founder that we can pass on to our listeners. Building a tech-driven solution in a critical sector like water is no easy feat. What advice would you give, especially when it comes to scaling, securing adoption for innovation?  

Amrit: I think it’s very important to realise that if you’re solving a tech problem and it unlocks great value for your customers, especially in the B2B space, it’s important to create use cases and that calls for restraint. It’s a general mindset that we scale very quickly the moment we build something. But if you’re in the infrastructure space, it can really backfire on you. So what’s important is to take time, perfect your product, get it as close as possible to where you really want it to be. It’s not going to be perfect, but then you need to get it out there to customers, especially smaller use cases. It’s always better to start small. Get the feedback and make it a part of a natural product development cycle that you’ve built a POC, you’re able to test it at the customer side, get their feedback in. So what you build ultimately is going to be what the customer is asking for. It’s never about us wanting to build something and then trying to convince a customer that they need it. Demand has to be organic and we need to respect that. So that’s one of the things that we forget in our quest to scale very quickly. 

For deep tech companies or companies working on hardware, it’s really important to go through this life cycle, really understand the market dynamics, understand what are the value adds, where do you position yourself? Understand your unit economics really, really well. Because since you’re doing R&D and you’re making mistakes and you’re also spending money on projects, it can all go wrong very quickly. So it’s critical to understand these aspects of your business before you walk up to a venture capitalist to ask for money. 

Future Forward: Indra Water at 2030

Sruthi: What is the vision for Indra Water maybe at 2030 or 2050?  

Amrit: As we get closer to 2030, we want to be able to treat that much water each day. That’s the kind of impact we want to make. We want to impact the lives of more than 500,000 people positively each day and not just over five or six years. And for that, scale is so critical. The other aspect that we’re really looking to do is that we want to drive the sector itself towards more maturity. Maturity in product offerings, maturity in how we improve the lives of operators on the ground and what kind of tools we make available. It’s important to upskill people in the water sector. 

So we want to create a framework where something like that is possible, where water quality is being monitored, decisions are better, there is preventive maintenance in play, reduce downtime, and make the life of an operator simpler so that they can upskill further and probably progress in their life. And the last part of the impact is we want to get to really high quality purified water while conserving more energy. 

In India, I think we generate about 72,300 million litres of sewage per day and we generate almost 13,000 million litres of industrial effluents per day. So that is a massive quantity. And even with the work that we’re doing in Indra, we’re not even scratching the surface with that. So [I think] it is important for a lot of innovators to come together, collaborate, and build solutions at scale by supporting each other. So we really look forward to collaborating with people who come up with new ideas.  

Sruthi: Thank you so much, Amrit. This has been such a fascinating conversation. The work you and your team are doing at Indra Water is just not solving an environmental problem, but you’re also reshaping how we value and protect one of our most essential resources.

Amrit: Thank you so much, Sruthi.  

Sruthi: This brings us to the end of our eighth episode of UnHerd – a podcast presented by team ACT. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channels, where we’ll bring you more unheard stories of people who are passionate about creating impact at scale in different ways. People who truly stand apart from the herd.

ACT For Environment welcomes Greenpod Labs to its portfolio

Food waste is a global challenge with alarming environmental implications. It accounts for a staggering 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, surpassing even the aviation industry’s carbon footprint. In India alone, nearly 40% of fresh produce is lost post-harvest due to inadequate storage and transportation, further exacerbating the problem. This waste not only contributes to climate change but also represents a significant economic loss.
Greenpod Labs is tackling this challenge of food waste with its innovative biotech solution. By harnessing the power of biomimicry, they have developed a patented sachet that when placed in crates during transportation, significantly extends the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. This innovative approach has the potential to revolutionise the food supply chain, reducing waste and its associated environmental impact.

Greenpod Labs’ technology leverages natural plant extracts to activate the inherent defence mechanisms of fruits and vegetables, slowing down the ripening process and preventing microbial spoilage. Their product has already demonstrated remarkable success, extending shelf life by 40-80%. Since its commercial launch, Greenpod Labs has demonstrated strong progress by conducting more than 200 B2B commercial pilots. Their solution has already prevented an estimated 20% of food waste, resulting in the abatement of approximately 1,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. With ambitious plans to expand their product line and market reach, Greenpod Labs is projected to mitigate 400,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions within the next three years.

ACT For Environment is supporting Greenpod Labs to accelerate the product development of 2 high-demand products – Strawberry and Grapes – which will help them go to market in time for the upcoming season to rapidly enable market expansion. Our funding will enable them to use specialised equipment that will help measure product efficacy and influence 7x faster product development.

We are excited to partner with Greenpod Labs on this journey and are confident that their innovative solutions will play a pivotal role in creating a more sustainable and resilient food system for India and beyond!

ACT Capital Foundation For Social Impact is a not-for-profit company incorporated and registered under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. All donations made to ACT Capital Foundation are eligible for income tax deduction under Section 80G of the Income Tax Act.

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