ACT Grants

ACT Grants is a non-profit venture philanthropy platform that backs organisations using innovation to solve some of India's hardest social problems. Its legal entity is ACT Capital Foundation For Social Impact, a not-for-profit registered under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. ACT was born in 2020, when leaders from India's technology, venture capital and startup ecosystem came together.

What they support

ACT backs organisations working across areas such as education and livelihoods, health, and the environment, along with adjacent fields. It funds through grants rather than taking equity, and it is not an incubator or accelerator: it offers no cohort or batch programme, no fixed-term acceleration and no physical space. The organisations it looks for are using innovation to address pressing challenges and can show a credible pathway to scale.

Programmes

ACT's support is organised as two grant stages. Catalyst Grants are early grants for organisations with a promising solution that are still building evidence, refining their model and proving a credible pathway to scale. Momentum Grants are larger follow-on grants for organisations that have shown strong progress and are ready to accelerate their impact. An organisation that does well on a Catalyst grant may see that partnership deepened into a Momentum grant.

Support beyond the grant

Alongside funding, ACT describes support that goes beyond the grant itself, including help with technology, fundraising and navigating the wider ecosystem.

Scale

ACT reports the organisations it has backed and the lives its grantees have reached, though its own pages give different counts: its homepage states more than 65 organisations backed and more than 35 million lives impacted, while its about page attributes more than 60 organisations backed and more than 30 million lives impacted to a 2022 to 2025 phase of its work. Read these as the organisation's own figures rather than audited totals.

Who runs it

ACT Capital Foundation For Social Impact is its own Section 8 company and names no parent organisation. News coverage has described ACT as a philanthropy collective set up by venture capitalists together with tech entrepreneurs and social-impact leaders during the pandemic, applying a venture-capital model to philanthropy.