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For eight years, the Bengaluru-based The/Nudge Foundation has handed out grants to social enterprises working on India’s hardest livelihood problems. Along the way it noticed something: at a certain point, philanthropy stops being enough. A promising venture serving low-income communities does not need another grant to scale a real business; it needs investment capital. That realisation is the seed of TILT, the foundation’s new impact-first fund, which launched this week with a Rs 250 crore corpus, roughly $30 million, to back early-stage startups serving what it calls India’s “Next Billion.”
TILT will write cheques of Rs 2 crore to Rs 16 crore from seed to Series A, into science- and technology-led businesses tackling agriculture, climate resilience, informal work, small-business productivity, employability, and financial inclusion. The roster of backers is a striking one: alongside the Livelihood Impact Fund sit founders who built some of India’s biggest consumer companies, including Flipkart’s Binny Bansal, Meesho’s Vidit Aatrey, BigBasket’s Hari Menon, MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra, InMobi’s Amit Gupta, and the family office of former PepsiCo chief Indra Nooyi.
Why this is not ordinary venture capital
The distinguishing word is patient. Businesses serving poorer customers tend to take longer to find product-market fit, build distribution, and reach sustainable economics than a typical venture darling. Conventional VC, with its ten-year clock and hunger for quick, outsized returns, often gives up on them too early. TILT is designed around that reality, offering money that can wait, plus support beyond the cheque: research, market development, partnerships, and the unglamorous ecosystem plumbing these companies often lack. As co-founder Atul Satija frames it, the aim is to show what becomes possible when capital is built around the realities of impact-led businesses rather than the other way round.
The foundation has earned credibility to make that pitch. Over eight years it has supported more than 190 social enterprises and deployed around Rs 180 crore in grants, and its alumni include 23 Forbes 30 Under 30 founders, three Earthshot Prize winners, and 18 Acumen Fellows. Graduating from grants to equity is a logical next step for an organisation that kept watching its best ventures hit a funding wall.
The honest tensions underneath
None of which makes impact investing easy, and it is worth being candid about the hard parts. Patient, impact-first capital, by definition, accepts slower or gentler financial returns in exchange for social good, which is exactly why it stays scarce; most investors want their money back faster and larger. That is the field’s central tension, and TILT is not exempt from it. Its stated goal, backing 150 startups and improving 100 million lives over 15 years, is inspiring, but “lives improved” is one of the slipperiest things in all of finance to measure, and the proof will be in how rigorously TILT tracks it.
There is also the question of scale. Rs 250 crore is real money and a serious commitment, but a modest sum against the size of the problems it targets. TILT is best understood not as a fix for India’s livelihood gap but as a demonstration, an argument that capital designed for impact can build durable businesses, and a nudge for larger pools of money to follow. So can patient capital do what grants and conventional venture funds could not? That is the bet. If TILT proves the model, its most valuable output may not be any single startup, but the example it sets.
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