TILT, the impact-first investment platform incubated by The/Nudge Foundation, has launched a ₹250 crore venture fund dedicated to early-stage Indian enterprises serving what its founders describe as the country's Next Billion — the vast population of informal workers, smallholder farmers and low-income households that remain largely outside the reach of mainstream venture capital. The fund marks one of the more ambitious attempts yet to institutionalise patient, mission-aligned capital within a domestic startup ecosystem still dominated by consumer internet and enterprise software bets.
The vehicle will invest across the seed to Series A continuum, writing cheques ranging from ₹2 crore to ₹16 crore into science- and technology-led businesses operating in agriculture, climate resilience, informal-sector livelihoods, MSME productivity, employability and financial inclusion. That range positions TILT to lead early rounds outright or to co-invest alongside larger institutional players once a company has demonstrated initial traction, a gap that impact-focused founders in India have long argued leaves them stranded between grant funding and commercial venture capital.
Anchored by the Livelihood Impact Fund, the new vehicle counts a roster of prominent backers including MakeMyTrip co-founder Deep Kalra, Head Held High Foundation co-founder Amit Gupta, Bigbasket co-founder Hari Menon, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, and the Raj and Indra Nooyi Family Office. Their collective involvement signals a growing appetite among India's most successful entrepreneurs and executives to redirect a portion of their wealth toward ventures whose primary metric of success is livelihood impact rather than growth multiples alone.
TILT's ambitions are explicitly long-horizon. The fund aims to back more than 150 startups and improve the lives of 100 million people over a 15-year period — a timeline that stands in sharp contrast to the typical seven-to-ten-year cycle of a conventional venture fund. That patience is by design: enterprises serving low-income and informal markets frequently require longer paths to profitability, deeper distribution build-outs in tier-two and tier-three geographies, and business models calibrated to thin margins and high transaction volumes.
The launch builds on years of groundwork by The/Nudge Foundation, which has supported more than 190 livelihoods-focused enterprises since its founding and deployed roughly ₹180 crore in grants to early-stage social enterprises and skilling initiatives. That track record gives TILT an unusually deep pipeline of vetted founders already familiar with the foundation's operating philosophy, potentially shortening the diligence cycle for the fund's first tranche of investments.
Industry observers see the fund as part of a broader recalibration within Indian venture capital, where investors are increasingly distinguishing between businesses that merely operate in emerging markets and those explicitly engineered to close inclusion gaps. Sectors such as agri-fintech, climate adaptation technology and MSME digitisation have historically struggled to attract growth-stage capital in India despite addressing enormous underlying markets, largely because return timelines and unit economics differ from software-first businesses.
For founders building in these categories, TILT's entry adds a credible, well-capitalised option at a stage where capital scarcity is most acute. Whether the fund can consistently identify businesses capable of scaling commercially while sustaining social impact — without diluting either objective — will determine whether it becomes a template other Indian family offices and impact investors choose to replicate, or a well-intentioned outlier in a market still finding its footing on blended-value investing.
The fund's sector choices are themselves instructive. Agriculture and climate resilience remain chronically underfunded relative to their share of India's workforce and GDP, largely because return profiles in these categories are shaped by monsoon cycles, commodity price volatility and fragmented land ownership rather than the more predictable subscription or transaction-based revenue models that dominate venture-backed software. Informal-sector livelihoods present an even starker funding gap: the segment employs the overwhelming majority of India's workforce yet attracts a fraction of the venture capital directed toward formal-sector digital businesses, largely because informal workers rarely generate the clean digital data trails that underwrite most fintech and consumer-lending underwriting models.
MSME productivity tools occupy similarly underserved territory. India's roughly sixty-three million micro, small and medium enterprises collectively account for a substantial share of national output and employment, yet remain chronically under-digitised, under-financed and under-served by enterprise software built primarily for large corporates. Startups addressing this segment must design for lower price points, simpler user interfaces and often offline-first functionality — constraints that have historically made the category less attractive to venture investors chasing the higher average revenue per user associated with enterprise-grade software sold to larger companies.
TILT's structure as a fund rather than a grant-making vehicle is itself a deliberate design choice with implications for the kind of businesses it can realistically back. Grant capital can subsidise activities with no clear path to commercial viability; venture capital, even patient and mission-aligned venture capital, ultimately requires portfolio companies to generate returns sufficient to compensate limited partners. That discipline can be constructive, pushing founders toward sustainable business models rather than perpetual dependency on philanthropic funding, but it also inevitably narrows the set of interventions the fund can support to those with a credible commercial thesis attached.
The involvement of backers such as Deep Kalra and Binny Bansal — entrepreneurs who built and scaled some of India's most recognisable consumer internet companies — brings more than capital to the table. Their operating experience in navigating India's uniquely fragmented, price-sensitive and geographically diverse consumer markets could prove valuable to founders building livelihood-focused businesses that face many of the same distribution and trust-building challenges, even if their target customer segments and unit economics differ substantially from mainstream e-commerce or ride-hailing.
As TILT begins deploying its first tranche of capital, the broader Indian impact-investing ecosystem will be watching closely for signals about whether blended-value investing — explicitly optimising for both financial return and social impact rather than treating the latter as a secondary consideration — can be executed at meaningful scale within a venture fund structure, or whether the tensions between the two objectives prove too persistent to resolve cleanly over a full investment cycle.
The fifteen-year horizon TILT has set for itself also invites comparison with the typical limited-partner commitment structures common in Indian venture capital, where most funds operate on ten-year cycles with extensions rarely exceeding two additional years. Securing limited partners willing to commit capital against a genuinely longer time horizon requires a different kind of investor conversation — one centred on patient, mission-aligned capital preservation and compounding livelihood impact rather than the more familiar venture narrative of rapid markups and defined exit windows. That TILT has already assembled a roster of high-profile backers willing to engage on those terms suggests a meaningful, if still nascent, appetite within India's wealthiest entrepreneurial circles for capital structures explicitly designed around long-term societal outcomes rather than conventional fund-cycle economics alone.
