Session IV from the AndPurpose Forums in Bengaluru, on aligning philanthropy, impact, and venture capital for a livable future.
In this session from the AndPurpose Forums, leaders across philanthropy, venture capital, and social impact come together to explore how aligned capital can shape a more livable and equitable future.
Transcript
This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.
Speaker 4: We are late beyond our scheduled time and I think I have put myself in a very tight spot and got the investors waiting for us. Really sorry for that. Yes, so the idea of building this particular panel was if we can have many voices in our panel from philanthropy to impact capital to venture capital and if we can cover all aspects of, you know, we have a lot of people in the room sitting who are actually innovating for India.
Then we have how they can unlock finance in various stages of their business cycle is what we want to achieve out of this session. We have Gautam. Gautam is the CEO of 211 KD Philanthropies.
We have AB Chakraborty. He is the co-CEO of Apaya Social Ventures. And we have Shilpa Mann from Eleva Equity.
She is a partner at Eleva Equity. I will quickly dive in. I know I have a tight deadline also to follow.
I start with Gautam here. I wanted to just build up the session, you know, how at various stages of our building a business, you know, philanthropy and then impact capital and then venture capital. In that order itself, you know.
Okay. So, you at 211 KD Philanthropies have this philosophy of Sarkar, Samaj and Bazaar. You have often said philanthropy can stand in Samaj so that Sarkar and Bazaar can be accountable.
Can you give us a concrete example of how supporting civil society has led to systemic change? Arjun, we have talked so much about how Arjun has really led in that domain. Maybe you can start with that.
Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me. It’s nice not to be late because of the time you are running. The question about philanthropic capital and Samaj is very foundational to us because we believe that the role of philanthropic capital is without foundation.
It’s to build… Or just turn them down. Oh no, it’s the projector as well.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It’s the projector, yes. To the question. If you look at the model that Arjun pioneered, it was the idea that communities can be responsible stewards for their own water.
The traditional idea was that water was managed by the state, or water was now managed by companies, but not so much in India. But that water was a state subject. And I think what we realized is that communities are better stewards of common resources.
And the work that Arjun did was initially to create more capacity for communities to map their groundwater resources and then decide on usage, etc. But the real impact of Arjun has been in moving the model from a state-controlled model to a community-controlled model. And that became the basis of many government programs, not just in areas of water stress, but in areas where water was traditionally very, very scarce, like hills and springs and things of the sort.
And over the years, Arjun has then looked to build more capacity for organizations and individuals to take ownership of their community resources. And it kind of centers around the idea that the best stewards of common resources and scarce resources are ultimately communities and not necessarily states or markets. So that’s one example.
We have others. For example, an organization called Adami that works in the justice space. Kind of rebuilt the idea of what dispute resolution would look like over the pandemic.
And their work was to bring a citizen focus to it and build something called the Online Dispute Resolution Ecosystem in India, which has multiple pillars now, including Samachar Dharamdasar. It’s used for civil disputes. It’s used for commercial disputes.
It’s used for interpersonal disputes. And again, it just comes from centering society, I guess, rather than the states or markets first. Which is just to say that states or markets don’t have their role.
That is not true, particularly in terms of capital and scale and things of the sort. But sometimes we think that starting from the perspective of community and citizens is important.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for that, Arjun. Chakra, I wanted to ask you, OPAIA operates as a unique intersection of poverty alleviation, gender equity, climate decisions, and racial solidarity, often in communities where others hesitate to step in. What are the key lessons you have seen on how such organizations can earn trust, build credibility, and still grow sustainability in these deeply human contexts?
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me here. Good evening, everyone. So, a quick online introduction about OPAIA.
We are an impact investment firm who are focused on creation of dignified jobs for the underserved community. That is what we believe is one of the effective ways to lift people out of poverty. We go and invest in companies in food and agriculture, waste management and circularity, rural manufacturing, urban manufacturing, skills and employability.
Those are the spaces that we are involved in. I think, Kamal, you asked about intersection, gender, climate, and the jobs. Naturally, all this came from the learnings that we have in the community, what the community wants.
So, especially on climate, right? The geographies where people want the most employment, where they want income levels to grow, and those are the ones that are immensely affected by climate change, and what are we doing about it, right? So, that’s where our portfolio, whatever companies that we end up investing, 43% of them will do it, 50% of them will naturally become working on climate adaptation, litigation, and all that team.
I think one of the underlying principles of the enterprise that what we are looking at as a human centric model is traditional capital is available for companies which are creating exponential growth. So, that is where we said, you know, the capital has to talk to the enterprise and the entrepreneur founder’s aspiration also. It cannot be always what a funder wants, right?
That is when we said, you know, all the companies, enterprises cannot run the same sprint or whatever you want to call it, a competition, but how can we create financial instruments, products that actually talk to what the aspirations are, to give you an instance. If I take the whole portfolio of ours, one third are doing exponential growth, which means that is what the promoter wants. They want to attract more investment, they want to build capital, and there is good business model, there is a good business environment to build in cases, right?
For example, enterprises, let’s say in Bangalore, just as a concept. Now, if we take and say that we are interested in companies in a place called Barpeta. Any of you know where Barpeta is?
Okay. So, Barpeta is in Assam, three, three and a half hours from Dohati. So, first of all, there is no business environment, right?
Now, the question is, we backed a company which is in the eco-mineral-making place back in 2014. Now, who would go into an environment and give a capital to that enterprise, right? So, that’s number one.
Second is the force and the growth that we expected. It will be very different from an enterprise that we would have done in Bangalore, you know, or a traditional capital investment. That’s where our model goes.
We do more quasi-equity than equity. The third part, you know, just to give one more example, we have invested also in a company called, in Bazaar itself, called Bazaar Say, Bazaar Say, Bazaar Say. Again, not traditional capital investment.
But these are companies that would have taken a little more time, what others would have taken, built out very strongly, become more cash flow possible, eventually create more impact in the community. So, we said, how can we cater to the diverse set of entrepreneurs and promoters who are creating a very diverse set of business models, but the underlying principle is driving impact. So, that is what we see.
Speaker 4: Wonderful. I think one of our conversations with Chetra and we said, we don’t look at, you know, typically what ROI we get, but what kind of driving is taking place. I think that’s a great metric to just look at.
Suman, I wanted to, you know, ask this from you.
Speaker 1: And if I could- Why do you man me when you don’t serve me? I have a question. I have discrimination.
Speaker 4: It’s coming from my heart, I’m unable to confess. And if I could be at a time when 50 companies with $200 million in capital. Actually, close to 400.
Close to 400. Wow. Okay, roughly searched.
So, $400 million in capital. That’s a huge number. Proving that venture-serving entrepreneurial households is not the vulnerable communities, but entrepreneurial households is something which Eleva believes in.
Can deliver venture-safe returns. With Epic World, you are now building a global platform to identify, say, 50 plus venture companies. Yes.
Can you share what patterns and opportunities you see for businesses at this stage? What makes them fully investable and how Epic World aims to help both founders and investors reclaim these markets? And also, please tell us more about what is Epic World and not vulnerable communities, but entrepreneurial households.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Linares, for having me here and it’s very easy to come to me. I feel like Gautam should actually reimagine a role that I won’t come back to. What will actually play is this continuum that will go from the tables.
Just a quick note on Eleva, you’ve been investors in the VC space for 20 years. You’ve been doing all the emerging markets, so Latin America, so we believe that within these markets, there is a lot of learning opportunities and that was your case. And so your companies in Brazil, Argentina, and in India as well, and in very similar patterns.
As an investment approach, we only look at the customer. Our fundamental belief is we are only calling the customer, trying to understand how they are evolving, what they want, what is their problem, what are they solving for today? The first, I think, absolute principle is leave your judgment at the door.
You have no right to decide whether you should aspire to buy a scooter or a BMW. That is not your question to answer. The second, I think, is to say that we are, after 20 years, saying we fundamentally want the world of capital to start reimagining the role that they play here because if you refer to them as low income, vulnerable, fragile, these are all the connotations that straight away go with the investment.
And what you do is you start putting hurdles to capital coming in. I am, of course, speaking as an investor who would like to stay in the business, so let me also say that there is a section of population that, of course, needs help, very vulnerable, all of it, but I believe the aspiring or the rising middle income is actually not any longer the missing many, but the missing two-thirds. And that is a huge chunk of the population.
India being the size it is, it cannot be ignored. It’s not a market that can be sidelined. Given all these, we at Annapurna are saying, we’re not looking at discretionary spending.
We’re just looking at what are you doing for education? We’ve all talked about how imperative education is, how it forms a base for aspiration. What are you doing for healthcare access?
You know, like if somebody has to drop their baby wage to go three hours because their hospital is that far away, how can we solve for access? How can we solve for financial inclusion? You know, the fact that you have informal income, should we bring in a non-religious component?
So this is really the thing that kind of answers, bugs us, and we’re obsessed over it, and I think in its own way, the pandemic has also helped, because the kind of digital infrastructure that kind of got into place is something that most people would imagine would happen. A lot of the problems we were solving 20 years ago, how do you resolve for cash and exchange and in remote locations? Now, three hours out of the garden, you have, like, for 20 rupees, you can do it, and you can get on with your life.
Let’s look. Things have deepened, and I think we’re at a very unique position as a country, as a population, and as a people now, to look at the largest, youngest workforce, the most productive, and it is, like, a challenge for us. What do you do?
And as capital providers, I think we have to start reimagining as well, so, you know, to your point, that I think philanthropy comes first, and philanthropy is almost always the one to push the edge, because they’re inefficient. They are not. They’re willing to take those chances as long as they are the state, and they are in need, right?
What the fire does, in terms of just poverty alleviation, is really protecting the vulnerable, which is almost like a diamond when you step in, and you can help them. But once they get out of that, let’s say you want to do a group out of being vulnerable, who are worried about their next deal, and now they’re finally going to think, what next? Who’s going to step in and suffer?
That’s what keeps us busy, and I think what we realized a little bit after the pandemic is after 20 years, we find ourselves experiencing a lot of the same things again. A lot of the capital aggregators sit outside of markets. They judge people, based on what they see in the news articles or in some research report.
So it’s like, oh, if you say India, there are thousands in the room, but there is no electricity or something. It’s like a very dated approach. So there is this obsession of, how do we now change that?
How do we make the world of capital understand that things are very different from the ground? Then you also see that capital will only follow data. You have to provide them the data at any price.
You see that? This is not BS. I’m not making this up.
We’ve done this for 10 years. We’ve done it with so many companies. In the companies that we invested in close to $200 million, we had $3.2 billion come in just for our own capital. That’s not a small sum. But if you look at the need, that’s like taking an antidote and you have to avoid that. It’s not enough.
For the pace of what we have to solve, it is not enough. So how do we kind of drive that urgency is our darling ground. So the partners at Alibaba, Chitra Candy, and Karma Daily, we formed Epic World, which is our way of saying there is an entire opportunity that exists, and we have to react with urgency.
We have to react with passion. We have to react with imagination. And the time to do it is now.
Speaker 4: I think a few of your investment companies include The Better India, Least Roads, which again works, you know, in entrepreneurial cases.
Speaker 1: So, you know, Microfinance started with the Philadelphia group. SPSG, without the work that they did in the American states, I think even just organizing farmers into FPAs would not have been possible. Right?
So, philanthropy is the one that sometimes reimagines things and casts things out there as possibilities. Right? How, once you succeed, somebody has to take it and run for it to create that entire scale.
Right? And that’s where the adventure is possibly one end of the funnel. You have PA, you have VC, you have public markets, you have venture tech.
So every stage, there’s of course a different scale of capital that has to be available. And at every stage, there’s a different lead. So, we have Ujjivan, you know, which is small finance bank.
We have any school in the airport space. We have some of the three which deals with agriculture. We have Summer Ground, which looks at households, not individual, you know, revenue and underwriting individuals, but looking at household cash flows and how the underwriting cash flows in the household manage.
So, we have Pure Lead, which is trying to do remote healthcare.
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 1: Like, how do you not lose your daily wage or your farm time, but you can still get your thyroid checked, your blood pressure checked, all of that. These are all things you take for granted. So, to not make location a hurdle and all that, is still a big deal in a country as big and diverse as India.
Speaker 4: And that’s where you come in when you’re waiting in that kind of space. Yes. I’ll go to you, Gautam, again.
Thank you, Ma’am, so much for that. Gautam? Gautam?
Speaker 7: Okay.
Speaker 4: So, Gautam, you often remark that doing what’s right and not just what’s easy is foundational to philanthropy. And like Shilpa said, this is important. Philanthropy for us, when we look at it, it’s like the Catholic capital.
It is the patient capital. Amit writes in Civic Fatigue and Centralised Power, what sustains your belief in citizen agency? You work a lot in citizen advocacy.
What evidence convinces you that this remains India’s greatest hope?
Speaker 3: Not just in the other world. The thing that convinced us more than any other report or evidence or data was the pandemic. Who were the first responders to the pandemic?
It was your neighbours, your immediate civic peers. And our thesis is that as the world, and India in particular, experiences a frequency and intensity of shocks, that we’re going to have to rebuild civic and societal capacity for mutual aid and peer support. Because that’s what all that’s going to respond to.
That’s all that’s going to be able to be the first hope of God. Of course, safety markets will follow, but the immediate response will continue or more immediately need to be built in societies and in citizens. So, for us, civic agency is a non-negotiable and it’s a big part of what makes us citizens.
It’s not subject to the state or consumer market alone. And I think for too long, we’ve outsourced community and civic reliance, resilience, to governments. But the scale of what’s coming, what’s already here, just isn’t going to be possible anymore.
And at some level, I believe the role of philanthropy is to assist philanthropy to build that capacity and capabilities in its citizens and societies. And we’re going to make for more resilient markets and more resilient societies and more resilient states as well. So, yes, the thing that convinced us was the pandemic.
The thing that continues to both terrify but also give us some sense of opportunity in why this work is important and urgent is the frequency of climate crisis. I mean, recently, there was that massive flood in Texas. I mean, for all of the civic and governmental capacity that the U.S. had, a hundred people died. And the first responders throughout the region were neighbors, non-flag fighters, government communication, marketplace communication field. So, yeah, that’s why we believe in civic agency and why we believe in retaining our role as citizens first.
Speaker 4: Good point. Chakra, I know we are past the time, but let me open this. Yeah, okay.
What have been some key lessons in deploying capital to capital at this stage and how does Upaia strike the right balance between patient capital and enterprise growth and accountability to the communities these businesses serve?
Speaker 2: Just look at it in two parts, actually. So, one, actually, accountability to the communities, I think, I think, very relevant and very should have pointed out, right? Because one of the things on, when you are doing impact-first investing, the question is actually where is the impact happening about?
And most of the time you don’t have data and information, right? And are you reasoning from the community? So one of the things that we said fundamentally when we started Upaia 14 years ago was we are learning to talk to the community.
And understand what is happening in their lives let’s say when a job is created, especially from minimum and upper system, pre- and post- changes that. Across different dimension of job, you know, somebody may give good quality of life, quantity of income, but let’s say that quantity of income is going to be dead, then how is the job is helping you, right? Quantity of income, what is the quality of income?
So, if it is all there, but, you know, let’s say there is no predictability. I’ll just have it for one season and then the job is not there anymore. If it is season, again, you can find job creation but it’s not there.
So we said we have to be very serious about going about correcting this. So when we report in our dashboard currently, which is 51,222 jobs means, 10% of our job holders are directly spoken to by our dedicated team of professionals who, you know, we have collaborators who go around different parts of the country and we survey them and from that we learn what we should be doing and what we should not be doing. And, of course, we share it with our partner to say what they have done well, which we can improve on and what is that something, you know, support that we can bring from our network or otherwise that this can be further enhanced because these are early stage companies, we can’t ask them to do everything.
So that’s on the accountability part. Now the second accountability part lies with the funders because you are working on two things, right? Because your traditional capital, that’s what, it’s not going into traditional sectors because the flow of capital is coming from somebody who wants returns on X amount of penalty.
That is where actually our biggest dilemma is to say that how do you work with funders when you say patient first capital? Immediately when you go for any registration of fund, the first question they ask you is, okay, how long is the fund? Then traditionally they say, okay, this is five to seven years.
That starting point itself, you are already starting to start transferring some sort of pressure back to the productors, the founders, the enterprise. If they can observe what I mean with it, there are well deserving enterprises who are there in India, Uttar Pradesh, those are the ones that should be traveling. There are many other enterprises, you know, who are very different and the capital should speak to that, So our work is more on convincing the founders that you need a lot longer gestation period for somebody to develop such businesses.
Classical example, waste management today is what microfinance was two decades ago. Somebody has to take the first step and say, you know, let me back few waste management enterprises who are working in sanitation and all that. The first question anyway would be, where is the technology?
If they would have gone to a traditional mechanical industry, where is the differentiator? Absolutely, there won’t be any differentiator because they don’t have even a 3 lakh 1 crore put into the company. How is the differentiator possible?
So somebody has to go through the system so that at some point of time, there is an inflection point where these enterprises will take off and become almost mainstream. What microfinance institutions become day in and day out today and FinTech of tomorrow. So that is what we are sort of defending as a path on the final side.
I will be going to sign up for a patient first category.
Speaker 4: Ask the last question and then open up for Q&A today in this session. Ethic World aims to build a portfolio of group tech companies serving entrepreneurial households. Ventures that have often come to you out of the support of either philanthropy or impact investments.
What patterns have you seen in companies that successfully make this leap to venture-scale capital? We have a lot of them in our room today who have different life cycles of their business. How do they prepare themselves for venture-scale capital, whether distribution models, data use, or capital alignment?
And what should founders know about building inclusive businesses that will thrive beyond their cost? Distribution models, data use, and capital alignment?
Speaker 1: I think that’s like a triangle. You can’t choose one way or the other. You cannot at any point in time say that this one is more important at any point in time.
But it’s never going to be that you can say, distribution is not important. Especially for companies that are in this, what I would call serving the ordinary households, which is really the emerging middle class, which is the largest population section in the They have to be able to distribute. Otherwise how are you going to make your product or service accessible to them?
access has been the challenge they’re trying to overcome. So there is no escaping distribution What we’re trying to do with Epic World is both in some ways it’s brand management as well. We are actually almost branding the customer and saying this is a virtual customer segment for the world of capital to look at and look at the opportunity.
We think it runs into the dreams, if you look at what with Epic World looking at what companies need to succeed. I think my advice to founders is always raise capital before you need it. Recruit people much smarter than you before you need them.
And just have the humility to say I will execute. I will I think the last point which we have all alluded to in different ways is that to an underserved or an overlooked community, every such company is a hand that is reached out which is an effective building trust. So if you go with an approach are going to fail fast, you are breaking cusps every single time.
So do not do that if you think you are going to fail. You do your tests, you do your research, you do your samples, whatever it is. But the burden is on us as people of survival, people of the luxury of being able to sit back and evaluate this investment opportunity to say what is it that I can do to give it the best chance of success.
Because when that company feels somebody in that village who came to that health center the next day goes in and finds it is shut down, it’s never going to trust them again. So we have got to always be aware of the implications of these trust building initiatives that we make and that has to be part of the DNA. That’s my advice.
Thank you so much for that.
Speaker 4: I want to ask the same question that Shobhaji answered it.
Speaker 7: I have no control over this please.
Speaker 4: I want to ask this from both of you also and you have answered it. When people are building for a state, this is what they should be getting prepared for. A lot of us in the room are looking for capital and that’s what brings them and gets them to stay here.
What is it that you look for when you work with them in different life cycles of working with them and you are like early supporters of these centres. What is it that you look forward to?
Speaker 3: Pick up on what Shobhaji said. It’s a good question but I want to go back to something that Shobha said which is the ability to sit with uncertainty and the sense of curiosity and humility saying that I will do what it takes to deliver not just service but trust as well. I’m not saying that you have to be modest but I think there needs to be a curiosity and a humbleness in your approach and an openness to learning because otherwise it’s just very difficult.
Speaker 4: What is it that how can they be ready?
Speaker 2: I think the raising capital whether it is grant equity I think there are enough knowledge out there today than even what it was there five years ago or ten years ago. I always think that all the founders have enough resources to go to any advisors to turn and do how to go about the process. For me that’s not a big thing.
This is something I share with a lot of founders that can be patient capital but if the founder is not patient enough to run the company for ten years then there is a problem. Our recent thing has been with the trend that we are observing. So that is the fundamental thing.
We are sitting with impact and patient capital but after five years I say okay now I am getting very tired and I should push everything down. So for me that’s the biggest level. How do you get through this?
Speaker 4: That’s a great answer. We are open for Q&A. We will spare the five minutes.
Yes. Go on.
Speaker 6: Hi. So one of the questions is how do you get out of this situation? do you get out of this situation?
Speaker 3: I can’t speak for all financial capital but I can say there is definitely an increasing amount of capital that I am disposing of. I can’t speak for financial capital but I there is definitely an increasing amount of I am disposing of. I financial capital but I can say there is an increasing amount capital that I am disposing of.
I can’t financial capital but I there is definitely increasing capital that I am disposing of. I can’t speak for all financial capital but I can say there is definitely an increasing of capital that I am
Speaker 6: disposing
Speaker 8: I can’t speak for all financial capital but I can
Speaker 2: say there is increasing capital that financial I can say is definitely increasing capital that say there is definitely an increasing capital that I say there is an increasing an increasing that can say there is an increasing can say is increasing capital that I can say is definitely increasing there is an increasing capital that I can say there is an increasing capital that I can So that’s where I think there’s a large scope of benefits.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 5: Did that answer?
Speaker 4: Yes. Can you take this question outside, please?
Speaker 5: Could I at least take the question?
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. I’m here for two reasons, right? One, because I look forward to look up to the kind of work that you have already done.
And sitting here and being able to hear you say that, our role is to push, look beyond the kind of investment that we would normally be doing. To be able to hear that is really inspiring. But I’m also here for the second reason, which is I’m really anxious about the kind of climate change and the sustainability factors that are being talked about here.
So my question here was, would you be willing to consider the kind of conversations about one thing which usually does not get spoken about as much is the kind of food that we eat that’s on our plates, right? That is meat, dairy, and eggs. We don’t talk about it as much because it is very complicated and it’s very complex, especially in a country like India, right?
But I think putting you, Dr. Munna, said that doing what is right and not necessarily just easy is important, right? So maybe not a question, but at least I’m putting forward this thought here that it is something that is extremely important from a climate and sustainability perspective. And given that all of you are so committed to this cause, perhaps there is some stokers to think about this.
Not saying that we reduce the food consumption, but in the space of alternative proteins, right? There are startups that are working on it, but it is an emerging field, so we need a lot of patient capital and we need a lot of philanthropic initiative in order to push it forward, right? So I know that I may not have a leading answer right now, but I’m putting this forward so that maybe some months down the line you may hear this concept somewhere again.
But I do think that the food on our plate is a very big space in terms of the climate catastrophe that we are heading towards. Thanks so much. Is there a question?
Would you be willing to consider these conversations in this space?
Speaker 3: Of course.
Speaker 5: I don’t think that goes without saying. Okay. So then my name is Nitish.
I represent the Good Food Institute. I know a lot of your questions. So yeah.
Perfect. So maybe I will take this forward. But thank you so much.
Originally published by AndPurpose on 5 August 2025. View on YouTube →
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