Startup Deep Dive : Milaap — raised Rs 2,040 crore for patients, took in just $1.3 million to build itself

Donors on Milaap have put together more than ₹2,040 crore ($212.5 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in donations since the platform started, across over 85 lakh individual contributions, according to a company statement issued in June 2022. Milaap itself, the corporate entity that built and runs the site, has taken in barely $1.28 million in outside investment across its entire life, all of it before 2014, as per startup-data provider Tracxn.

That gap is not a typo. It is the whole story of Milaap: a company that learned to move a very large amount of other people’s money while raising very little of its own, and that now has to earn a living on the thin slice left over once the money it channels has done its job for the family that needed it.

Quick facts

What they do

Milaap is an online fundraising platform that lets individuals in India collect money from a global pool of donors for a specific, named cause — most often a medical emergency, but also education, disaster relief and personal hardship. A family with a cancer diagnosis or an accident bill opens a campaign page with documents and a target amount; Milaap verifies the basics, lists the campaign, collects donations through its payment gateway, and — its stated safeguard against misuse — pays the money to the hospital or verified need directly rather than into the fundraiser’s own bank account, according to an independent review of the platform (serudsindia.org). Separately, and less visibly today, Milaap still runs the crowd-lending model it started with: small loans, sourced from its lender network, for rural enterprise, clean energy, sanitation and similar livelihood needs, tracked on its own impact dashboard as of 7 November 2025.

• Primary product: donation-based (not loan-based) crowdfunding for medical and personal emergencies, open to any individual in India
• Secondary, legacy product: peer-funded microloans for rural livelihoods — 161,237 loans and ₹324.91 crore disbursed cumulatively, per Milaap’s impact page as of 7 November 2025
• Customers: the fundraiser (usually a patient’s family) on one side, and a global donor base — a large share of it the Indian diaspora — on the other
• Offices: Bengaluru, Jersey City (US) and Singapore, per Milaap’s own overview page

The origin section, the struggle years and the turning point are told in prose below because that is where the human decisions sit; the sections after them lean on lists and tables because that is where the numbers do the talking.

The origin

Milaap was not built by people trying to disrupt Indian philanthropy. It was built by two people who had already spent time inside the problem. Mayukh Choudhury, an IIT Madras engineering graduate with an MBA from IIM Lucknow, had worked on rural ventures — solar lanterns, agricultural financing — that kept running into the same wall: creditworthy village households and small entrepreneurs simply could not get formal loans for things as basic as a water connection or working capital for a shop. Anoj Viswanathan, a National University of Singapore student, had taken a sabbatical to work at the grassroots on microfinance and arrived at the same wall from the donor side: there were people abroad, many of Indian origin, willing to put money behind a specific person’s need if they could see exactly who that person was and what the money would do.

The two of them, along with a third co-founder, Sourabh Sharma, also an NUS alumnus, put those halves together in 2010: a platform, registered out of Singapore, that let a lender or donor overseas fund a named, verified need in rural India. The Hindi word “milaap” means union, or a coming together — the founders’ own description of what the platform was meant to do between a donor with spare money and a household without access to it. The Indian operating company, Milaap Social Ventures India Private Limited, was incorporated a little later, on 11 July 2012, once the model needed a formal presence on the ground to vet campaigns and handle disbursals.

The struggle years

The first hard lesson was that the founding idea — crowd-funded micro-loans for rural India — was not, on its own, the business. Loans require collection, default management and a lending licence’s worth of regulatory overhead; a village entrepreneur’s ₹15,000 loan for a handcart is a slow, operationally heavy product to scale. Somewhere in Milaap’s early years, the founders noticed a different pattern emerging on their own platform: campaigns for medical treatment, which needed no repayment at all, only a donor’s trust, were growing far faster than the loan book. “When we started, one area was growing much faster and that was fund-raising for medical purposes,” is how the company’s own account, given to Gulf News, put it. That is an admission that the founding product was not the one that survived.

The second, quieter struggle is capital. Milaap raised a seed round and a Series A between 2010 and July 2013 — roughly $1.1 million in that final round, per Tracxn — from investors including Jungle Ventures, Capria, Village Capital, LionRock Capital and Khosla Impact. Then the institutional funding stopped. For more than a decade since, a platform handling crores of donor money every year has had to run itself on revenue rather than on venture top-ups, at a time when better-capitalised rivals in the same donation-crowdfunding category could outspend it on marketing and trust-building. The FY24 numbers below — a shrinking revenue line and a shrinking net worth in the same year, per Tofler — are the modern version of that same struggle: money keeps flowing through the platform for other people, while the platform’s own finances stay lean and, in that particular year, contracted.

The turning point

The clearest inflection in Milaap’s own numbers sits across the two years bracketed by the Covid-19 pandemic. As of August 2019, per Milaap’s own account of its history, the platform had helped raise nearly ₹700 crore across roughly 100,000 causes since inception. By June 2022, that cumulative figure was ₹2,040 crore across more than 6.52 lakh projects and over 85 lakh donations, according to the company’s own statement carried by ANI that month. In under three years — years that included India’s brutal second Covid-19 wave in April and May 2021 — the platform’s lifetime total nearly tripled.

The mechanism behind that jump was not abstract. During the oxygen shortage of that second wave, ordinary diaspora networks turned to Milaap as infrastructure for emergency giving at a scale the platform had not seen before: one Singapore-based couple’s oxygen-concentrator campaign for India alone pulled in more than S$192,000 from donors in just eleven days that April and May, run through Milaap, according to an account published by the National University of Singapore’s computing school. Multiply that kind of urgency across thousands of simultaneous medical campaigns nationwide, and the pandemic becomes the single event that converted Milaap from a niche fundraising tool into something closer to a piece of national emergency-response plumbing — a role it has not fully relinquished since.

The money behind it

• Angel and seed rounds, 2010–2012: early institutional backing from Village Capital and Capria among others, per Tracxn — amounts largely undisclosed at this stage
• Series A, July 2013: roughly $1.1 million, with Jungle Ventures, LionRock Capital and Khosla Impact among the investors on record, per Tracxn
• Total raised by the company: approximately $1.28 million across all rounds — three seed rounds and one Series A — with no further institutional round recorded since 2013, per Tracxn
• Implied valuation: post-money valuations Tracxn estimates in the single-digit millions of dollars through 2011–2013, rising to roughly $9.8 million after the Series A; no valuation has been disclosed since
• What changed: the 2013 round, led by Jungle Ventures, is the capital that funded Milaap’s pivot years — the shift in emphasis from rural micro-lending toward donation-based medical crowdfunding described above — after which the company appears to have chosen to fund growth from platform revenue rather than further dilution

That funding shape is unusual for an Indian consumer internet company of Milaap’s age and reach. Peers that process similarly large donor flows in the same category have, in general, raised considerably more institutional capital; Milaap’s own capital-raising essentially stopped just as its donation volumes were about to compound. This piece did not find, and so does not cite, any Milaap funding round after 2013.

How it makes money

• No mandatory platform fee on standard fundraising campaigns — Milaap advertises “0% platform fees” on its own site for ordinary medical and personal causes
• Optional premium services — fundraisers who want marketing support, faster visibility or dedicated assistance can pay a fee in the region of 5–8% of funds raised, according to an independent platform review (serudsindia.org)
• Payment-gateway pass-through costs — domestic transactions carry gateway charges of roughly 0.75–2.71% depending on method (UPI, card, net banking), while international donations carry roughly 2.9–3.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, per the same review
• Interest income on donor funds held briefly in government securities between collection and disbursal to the hospital or beneficiary
• Corporate CSR partnerships, where companies route a share of their CSR budgets through Milaap’s verified-cause infrastructure
• The part people get wrong: donors often assume “zero platform fee” means Milaap earns nothing from a campaign; in reality the model shifts the cost from a flat cut of every donation to gateway fees, optional premium add-ons and the float on funds in transit — a thinner, less visible margin than the flat 5% fee the company reportedly charged in its early years, per a 2015-era Gulf News interview with its CEO

The numbers

Milaap’s own financial statements are not public in a form that discloses exact rupee revenue or profit figures; company-registry aggregators publish only ratios and broad bands rather than line-item numbers, and the two aggregators checked for this piece — Tofler and Tracxn — did not agree closely enough on absolute figures to be quoted with confidence, so no specific rupee-crore revenue or profit number for the company is stated here. What is verifiable, from Tofler’s reading of the FY24 (year ended 31 March 2024) regulatory filing, is the shape of that year:

What is precisely dated and verifiable instead is the platform’s donation scale over time, which is the number that actually matters to how Milaap is understood in India:

• As of August 2019: nearly ₹700 crore raised, across roughly 100,000 causes, per Milaap’s own history page
• As of June 2022: ₹2,040 crore raised, across 6,52,000+ projects and 85 lakh+ donations, per a company statement carried by ANI/ThePrint
• As of 7 November 2025 (lending vertical only): ₹324.91 crore disbursed across 161,237 loans, reaching 718,632 people, with an 83.05% repayment rate, per Milaap’s own impact dashboard

Where the money comes from

• Medical causes dominate: Milaap’s own history page describes medical emergencies as forming “an overwhelming majority” of fundraising on the platform
• Salaried professionals as a donor segment: more than 1 lakh of India’s salaried employees, across roughly 3,000 companies, had together contributed about ₹130 crore toward critical-care treatment costs as of June 2022, per the company’s ANI-carried statement that month
• A large share of donors give from abroad: in a 2014/15-era account given to Gulf News, the United States alone accounted for about 67% of donations and roughly 45% of all donations were international — a snapshot from Milaap’s early years that this piece could not confirm still holds today, since no more recent geographic breakdown was found
• The surprise: the platform’s original product — crowd-funded micro-loans for rural livelihoods, not medical donations — never disappeared. As of 7 November 2025, it had quietly disbursed ₹324.91 crore of its own, spread mostly across enterprise development (84,571 loans) and clean energy (40,740 loans), per Milaap’s impact dashboard, running as a second, smaller business alongside the donation platform most people associate with the Milaap name

The risks

• Verification and misuse risk: donation crowdfunding depends on self-reported medical documentation before money moves; Milaap’s stated mitigation is to pay hospitals directly rather than release funds to a fundraiser’s personal account (serudsindia.org), but that only manages where verified money goes — it does not eliminate the industry-wide risk of exaggerated or fabricated need at the point of listing, which every platform in this category, not just Milaap, has had to design controls around
• Thin and shrinking margins: FY24 revenue fell 9.04% year-on-year and net worth fell 32.72% in the same period, on a net profit margin of just 7.77%, per Tofler — a company with that little cushion has limited room to absorb a bad year, a payment-gateway dispute, or a costly technology failure
• Dependence on foreign, diaspora-driven donations: if the roughly two-thirds US-donor concentration reported in Milaap’s early years (Gulf News) is still broadly representative, the platform’s donation inflows are exposed to currency movements, cross-border payment costs and shifts in the giving capacity of Indian communities abroad — risks largely outside Milaap’s own control

The takeaway

Milaap’s real lesson is about the difference between the money a company moves and the money a company owns. Most founders are taught to chase the first as a proxy for the second — bigger gross transaction volume is supposed to translate, eventually, into a bigger, better-funded company. Milaap shows that the two can decouple almost completely: a platform can become the conduit for thousands of crores in donations, a genuine piece of how urgent medical bills get paid in India, while its own balance sheet stays small, its own fundraising stops after one modest round, and its own margins stay thin enough that a single bad filing year shows up as a near one-third drop in net worth. That is not necessarily a failure. A platform that only routes money, rather than holding financial risk on it, does not need a war chest to keep functioning. But it also means the trust Milaap has built with donors is a far bigger asset than anything on its own books — and it is the one asset a thin balance sheet cannot easily protect if that trust is ever seriously damaged.

Frequently asked questions

What is Milaap?

Milaap is an Indian online crowdfunding platform, founded in 2010, that lets individuals raise donations for medical treatment, personal emergencies and other social causes from a global donor base; it also runs a smaller, older crowd-lending line for rural livelihoods.

Is Milaap a nonprofit organisation?

No. The platform is operated by Milaap Social Ventures India Private Limited, a for-profit private limited company incorporated in Bengaluru on 11 July 2012, itself a subsidiary of Singapore-incorporated Milaap Social Ventures Pte Ltd, per company-registry data (Tofler, give.do).

How much money has Milaap helped raise, and is that the same as the company’s own funding?

No, and this is the most commonly confused fact about Milaap. Donors on the platform had contributed more than ₹2,040 crore by June 2022, per a company statement. That is money raised by donors for fundraisers, not capital raised by the company itself, which totals only about $1.28 million across rounds ending in 2013, per Tracxn.

Does Milaap charge a fee on donations?

Milaap does not charge a mandatory platform fee on standard campaigns. It instead earns from optional premium fundraiser services (roughly 5–8% of funds raised), payment-gateway pass-through charges, interest on funds held briefly before disbursal, and corporate CSR partnerships, per an independent platform review (serudsindia.org).

Who runs Milaap today?

Mayukh Choudhury is the CEO and Anoj Viswanathan is President; both are co-founders, along with Sourabh Sharma. All three have held these roles since the company’s founding era, per company records reviewed via Tracxn.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Tracxn, Milaap company profile (funding rounds, investors, founders, employee count), accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Milaap Social Ventures India Private Limited company page (incorporation details, FY24 financial ratios), accessed September 2026
• give.do, Milaap Social Ventures India Private Limited organisation profile (registration and entity type), accessed September 2026
• ANI press release via ThePrint, “Crowdfunding platform Milaap crosses Rs 2000 cr”, 10 June 2022
• Free Press Journal, “Crowdfunding platform Milaap crosses Rs 2,000 cr with over 85 lakh donations”, June 2022
• Milaap.org, “About Us — Overview” (history and August 2019 milestone), accessed September 2026
• Milaap.org, “About Us — Impact” (lending-vertical data as of 7 November 2025), accessed September 2026
• Gulf News, “A crowdfunding app that takes care of the needy” (founder interview, referencing 2014 healthcare-spending data)
• serudsindia.org, “Milaap Crowdfunding Review” (fee structure), accessed September 2026
• Indiaspora, “Building a Brighter, More Compassionate Future” (co-founder background), accessed September 2026
• National University of Singapore, School of Computing, account of a 2021 Covid-19 oxygen-concentrator fundraiser run through Milaap, accessed September 2026
• ImpactGuru, “Crowdfunding Founders in India” (founding history), accessed September 2026

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