While every section of the business and industry is offering to contribute its might to the efforts at battling the coronavirus pandemic, the venture capitalists (VC) and angel investors have come up with their own innovative method of making a mark. Some of the top VCs and startup CEOs have come together to announce a new and dedicated fund called the Action COVID Team (ACT) Grants. It will be a ₹100 crore fund and will offer investments which will be more in the form of grants to those startups which are engaged in any activity related to the Coronavirus fightback.
Sequoia Capital, Accel and Lightspeed Venture Partners are spearheading the ACT Grants and 40% of the targeted amount has already been pledged. Apart from these VCs, there are a number of CEOs who have come forward to support this initiative. These include Mukesh Bansal, founder of Curefit and Myntra; Abhiraj Bhal, cofounder of UrbanClap; Kunal Shah, founder of Cred and earlier FreeCharge; Freshworks’ Girish Mathrubootham; Moglix CEO Rahul Garg; and Jaydeep Barman, co-founder of Rebel Foods. There are others as well.
United Way Worldwide, a global non-profit organisation through its Indian arm has been asked to manage the grant.
From the functional side, Nachiket Mor, India head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is heading the leadership team for ACT Grants. He will be supported by Prashanth Prakash, founding partner of Accel India; Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director of Sequoia Capital and Vani Kola, founder of Kalaari Capital. They will receive assistance from Accel Partners’ Shekhar Kirani and Matrix Partners’ Tarun Davda to look for the right candidates among the applicants, worthy of the grant and possibly fix the quantum as well. Some of them will try and tap their international contacts to firm up the corpus to the projected level.
In an effort to widen the pool, individual members are also believed to be reaching out to global funds for contributions. Some of the fund managers from Kalaari Capital, Orios Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures and Matrix Partners has also been roped in to provide professional inputs for ACT Grants.
It has been clarified that the investors will not pick up any stake in the startups being offered the grants.
It is understood that the fund managers have not made the companies make the investments. Instead, the capital will be coming from the fees they charge and the carry that they earn from managing their respective funds.
The funds collected so far vary from ₹1 crore to ₹20 crore. The startups picked for the grant will be asked to bring in between ₹5 lakh and ₹1 crore each.
The startup ventures being chosen for the grant have to be involved in any one of COVID-19 scale testing, at-home disease management, mental health support, and procurement of prevention, protection and safety gear. If there are other dimensions, those will be considered as well.