COVID-19 Focussed Grant, Announced by VCs & Entrepreneurs

The fund will support enterprises looking to provide COVID-19 testing, at-home disease management, mental health support &procurement of prevention, protection &safety gear, among others. 

The health crisis scenario has opened gates for social capitalism in several ways. From celebs, politicians, & influencers many are coming forward with helping hands to support the needy and back many drowning businesses. 

Now, Venture Capitalists &Startup Entrepreneurs are taking strides to join hands and launch Grant that is focussed to COVID-19. Several giant investing firms from Sequoia Capital, Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and renowned CXOs have collaboratively set up a grant of INR 100 Cr that would assist brands to work on products & services to help the society fight against the global pandemic. 

To our surprise, there are several advanced initiatives taken by the government to combat the situation. Among them, The Action COVID Team (ACT) Grants – one of a kind global initiative has already received about 40 per cent of its expected collection. With top-notch VC firms & successful entrepreneurs coming forward, the corpus is ready to meet the target capital and recognize potential brands that are at the budding stage too. 

Sources state that the participated entrepreneurs include:

• 
  AbhirajBhal, Co-Founder of UrbanClap


• 
  Mukesh Bansal, Founder of Curefit&Myntra


• 
  GirishMathrubootham, Founder & CEO at Freshworks


• 
  Rahul Garg, CEO at Moglix


• 
  Jaydeep Barman, Co-Founder at Rebel Foods


• 
  Kunal Shah, Founder of Cred

The nation with a huge population is slowly witnessing an increase in the COVID-19 positive cases. To stabilize the scenario, NachiketMor, India head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is heading the leadership team for ACT Grants. Other officers include Prashanth Prakash, founding partner of Accel India; MohitBhatnagar, managing director of Sequoia Capital and Vani Kola, founder of Kalaari Capital.

 The Grants Initiative has also onboarded capital investors from, Orios Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures and Matrix Partners. Under the initiative, startups have pooled grants ranging from INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore. 

The fund will support enterprises looking to provide COVID-19 testing, at-home disease management mental health support and procurement of prevention, protection and safety gear, among others. 

At this point of sinking economy, there are large expectations for several other investing firms &startups to join hands and it is crucial as well. A few investors-backed startups have already initiated many measures like offering micro-insurance for industrial workers to produce essential items such as food, healthcare check-ups, and others.