Startup Deep Dive : GiveIndia — the non-profit that routed Rs 766 crore in a pandemic year and still booked a loss

In the year to March 2022, GiveIndia moved ₹766.53 crore ($79.8 million) of donations out to NGOs, vendors and families across the country, according to its Deloitte-audited accounts. In that same audited year it kept just ₹50.54 crore of donations to run itself, and still closed the books with a deficit of ₹1.81 crore.

That gap is the whole story of GiveIndia. It is one of India’s oldest online-giving platforms, registered as a not-for-profit, and it is built to pass almost everything through to other people’s causes rather than to keep it. This piece separates the two numbers that get carelessly merged in headlines: the donations routed through the platform, and the far smaller sum the organisation books as its own income. Both are drawn from audited filings, and the distinction is where the real business lives.

Quick facts

What GiveIndia does

GiveIndia runs a donation platform, now branded give.do, that lets individuals and companies give money to vetted Indian non-profits and to individual medical or disaster emergencies. A donor picks a cause; GiveIndia collects the money, earmarks it to that specific project, and disburses it, typically monthly, to the NGO or beneficiary after checks. The company describes its purpose in its audited notes as working “in the area of education, medical relief and relief of the poor.” As at its September 2022 rebrand it said it had served 2.6 million donors and 15 million people, and supported 250-plus partner organisations covering more than 2,800 non-profits (company-stated figures). It is registered as Give Foundation, a Section 8 not-for-profit, so it is legally barred from distributing profit to members.

The founding insight

GiveIndia was conceived at the very start of India’s consumer internet. Venkat Krishnan N, an IIM Ahmedabad graduate who had worked at The Times of India and on the founding team of Sony Entertainment Television, set it up in 2000 (its corporate identity number dates the incorporation to that year). The insight was simple and, for its time, radical: ordinary Indians would give to good causes if someone removed the two frictions that stopped them, namely not knowing which NGOs to trust, and not having an easy way to pay. GiveIndia’s answer was to vet non-profits for transparency and credibility, publish them, and take the donation online, then follow the money to the beneficiary and report back. It was among the first online-giving platforms anywhere built purely for social causes. Krishnan ran it through its early years and stepped back from day-to-day leadership around 2008, handing over to professional management; he has remained one of Indian philanthropy’s most-quoted evangelists for the “joy of giving.”

The struggle years

The two decades between the founding and the pandemic were not a smooth climb. After Krishnan’s exit the platform plateaued for years while newer, slicker crowdfunding rivals appeared and while online payments in India remained clunky. Its own accounts record the strain in plain figures. In the year to March 2020 the foundation took in only ₹6.21 crore of administrative-cost donations and ran a deficit of ₹1.13 crore; the year to March 2021, the first pandemic year, brought a further deficit of ₹0.61 crore even as activity picked up. Growth, in other words, did not automatically mean surplus.

A second, quieter struggle runs through the filings: tax. The audited statements disclose an income-tax demand treated as a contingent liability of ₹18.10 crore as at 31 March 2023, covering assessment years from 2008-09 to 2019-20, with ₹3.78 crore already paid under protest. The dispute turns on whether the platform’s activities count as a “charitable purpose” under Section 2(15) of the Income Tax Act, which would decide whether it keeps its exemption under Section 11. Management says it expects to win and has made no tax provision, but the matter has run for years and sits with appellate tribunals and, for one year, the High Court. For an organisation whose whole model depends on tax-deductible giving, a charitable-status fight is close to existential, and it is not resolved.

The third setback was self-inflicted by the crisis itself. During the pandemic procurement rush GiveIndia advanced money to suppliers who did not deliver. In the year to March 2022 it wrote down ₹13.17 crore of advances as doubtful — money paid to vendors Stag Sports Solutions and Tewari Enterprises — and began legal action to recover it. Only ₹17.5 lakh had come back by March 2023. That single write-down is the main reason the busiest year in the platform’s history still ended in the red.

The turning point

The turning point was COVID-19, and the numbers on either side of it are stark. In the year to March 2021 GiveIndia’s total audited income was ₹21.48 crore. In the year to March 2022 it was ₹820.84 crore — a nearly forty-fold jump — as the platform became one of the main channels for pandemic relief money flowing into India. The organisation routed ₹766.53 crore to projects that year, against ₹155.55 crore the following year once the emergency passed. When the second wave hit in 2021, GiveIndia raised over ₹70 crore in the first two weeks of its India COVID Response Fund and more than ₹240 crore ($32 million at the time) within roughly three weeks, according to YourStory; CEO Atul Satija later put the cumulative COVID total at around ₹700 crore. The audited accounts, which show ₹766.53 crore disbursed in the year to March 2022 alone, are consistent with a figure of that size. The pandemic did not just spike the numbers for one year; it turned GiveIndia from a steady, mid-sized non-profit into the default plumbing for large-scale Indian and diaspora giving during a crisis, and it reset donor expectations of what the platform could move.

The money behind it

GiveIndia is not venture-funded, so there is no valuation, no cap table of investors and no priced round. It is capitalised instead by philanthropic grants, a modest corpus and the float of donations passing through. The named backing that shaped it includes:

• ₹23.4 crore grant, November 2019 — from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the A.T.E. Chandra Foundation, Omidyar Network India and philanthropist Vikrant Bhargava, earmarked to scale the donor base (Inc42).
• LetzChange merger, 2018 — GiveIndia absorbed the peer-to-peer crowdfunding platform LetzChange, founded by Vikrant Bhargava (a PartyGaming co-founder) in 2012; Bhargava joined the board and the group said it would invest over ₹15 crore in the combined platform (DealStreetAsia, Give.do).
• Give Foundation Inc (US 501(c)(3)) — a US partner entity that channels tax-efficient diaspora and foreign giving into India; foreign contributions are a large share of the money the Indian entity handles.
• Corpus fund of ₹6.76 crore — unchanged across FY22 and FY23 per the audited balance sheet, a small permanent base for an organisation that moves hundreds of crores.

The contrast with a typical startup deep-dive is the point: there is no equity story here. The “money behind it” is other people’s donations plus a handful of institutional grants, and the organisation’s own reserves have been negative for years (accumulated deficit of ₹1.61 crore as at 31 March 2023).

How it makes money

GiveIndia does not “make money” in the profit sense; as a Section 8 company it cannot distribute any. But it does have to fund itself, and its accounting policy makes the model unusually clear. The pieces:

• Project donations (pass-through): money a donor gives to a specific cause is recognised as income only when it is disbursed to that project, and is matched by an equal expense. In FY23 this was ₹155.55 crore in and ₹155.55 crore out; in FY22 it was ₹766.53 crore each way. This flows through and leaves nothing behind.
• Administrative-cost donations (the real operating income): donors are asked to add a separate contribution to cover due diligence, follow-up and running costs. This is what actually funds the organisation — ₹27.46 crore in FY23 and ₹50.54 crore in FY22.
• Grants: institutional grants (such as the 2019 Gates/Omidyar/A.T.E. Chandra grant) are booked within administrative-cost income; grants for administration were ₹5.69 crore in FY23.
• Other income: mostly interest earned on the donation float held before disbursal — ₹4.70 crore in FY23 and ₹3.77 crore in FY22.
• Costs out: the big operating lines are employee benefits (₹9.87 crore in FY23), campaign and program expenses, technology and, tellingly, payment-gateway and bank charges of ₹2.46 crore in FY23.

The part people get wrong: they read “₹766 crore” or “₹820 crore” as GiveIndia’s revenue. It is not. The organisation’s own income — the money it may spend on itself — is an order of magnitude smaller, and its effective “take” from what it moves is deliberately thin.

The numbers

Four years of audited figures show how volatile the top line is and how small the retained portion stays. Note the accounting change: from the year to March 2022 the foundation began recognising donations earmarked for projects as income (matched by equal expenditure) when disbursed, which is why total income leaps; the administrative-cost column is the like-for-like measure of the organisation’s own operating income.

*In FY2020 and FY2021, project donations were routed through the balance sheet rather than recognised as income, so a comparable “routed” income line is not stated in those years’ income statements. All figures above are from the Deloitte Haskins & Sells-audited statements of Give Foundation. The FY2023 surplus of ₹4.32 crore is the organisation’s first in this four-year window, helped by the absence of the large doubtful-advance write-down that dragged FY2022 into deficit.

Where the money comes from

The audited segment note splits income by the source of the donation — domestic (local) versus foreign contributions received under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, or FCRA. The split is revealing:

• FY2022: local income ₹402.89 crore and foreign/FCRA income ₹417.95 crore — foreign money was 50.9% of the total, slightly more than domestic.
• FY2023: local income ₹119.87 crore and foreign/FCRA income ₹67.84 crore — foreign fell to 36.1% of the total as pandemic-era overseas giving receded.
• Foreign-currency donations received were ₹306.71 crore in FY2022 and ₹64.54 crore in FY2023 (audited note on income in foreign currency).
• By instrument, the money arrives as individual online donations, corporate and payroll giving, crowdfunding campaigns and institutional grants; the platform then disburses through NGOs, vendors and, at times, directly to individual beneficiaries.

The surprise is how much of GiveIndia’s crisis-era scale was diaspora and foreign money: in the pandemic year, more than half of everything it handled came from outside India. That is a strength — access to global Indian giving — and, as the next section shows, a concentrated regulatory risk.

The risks

• Charitable-status and tax litigation. The ₹18.10 crore income-tax demand disclosed as a contingent liability (assessment years 2008-09 to 2019-20) challenges whether the platform’s activities are “charitable” under Section 2(15). An adverse final ruling could mean back taxes plus interest and, more damagingly, cast doubt on the tax-deductibility that draws donors. Management expects to prevail, but the case is unresolved.
• Foreign-funding (FCRA) dependence. With foreign contributions at 50.9% of income in FY2022, GiveIndia is exposed to India’s tightening FCRA regime, under which thousands of NGO registrations have been cancelled or lapsed sector-wide. Any disruption to FCRA compliance would strand a large share of its inflows.
• Extreme income volatility. Total income swung from ₹21.48 crore (FY2021) to ₹820.84 crore (FY2022) to ₹187.71 crore (FY2023). A model that leans on episodic, crisis-driven surges is hard to staff, budget and sustain between crises, and the retained operating income (₹27–50 crore) is thin cover for that swing.
• Counterparty and procurement risk. The ₹13.17 crore of doubtful advances to pandemic-era vendors, still largely unrecovered, shows how fast-moving disbursement to third parties can turn into losses that the organisation, not the donor, absorbs.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from GiveIndia is about the difference between the money you move and the money you keep, and about designing for that difference on purpose. Plenty of platforms — in payments, marketplaces, logistics and giving — quote gross flow as if it were revenue. GiveIndia’s audited accounts refuse to let anyone confuse the two: hundreds of crores pass through, tens of crores stay, and in three of the last four years even that was not enough to avoid a deficit. That is not a failure of the model; it is the model. The organisation’s job is to be a trustworthy, low-friction conduit, and it has chosen to keep its own cut deliberately small so that more reaches the cause. The harder truth underneath is that being essential during a crisis does not make you financially comfortable the rest of the time. Anyone building infrastructure that intermediates other people’s money — charitable or commercial — has to answer the same question GiveIndia’s filings answer honestly: what, exactly, is yours to keep, and is it enough to survive the quiet years between the loud ones.

Frequently asked questions

Is GiveIndia a company or a charity?

It is both in form: Give Foundation is a not-for-profit company registered under Section 8 of the Companies Act (formerly Section 25 of the 1956 Act), with corporate identity number U91110KA2000NPL151182. It cannot distribute profit to its members and operates the giving platform now branded give.do.

How much money does GiveIndia actually route to causes?

In the year to March 2022 it disbursed ₹766.53 crore to projects, NGOs, vendors and beneficiaries, according to its audited accounts; in the year to March 2023 it disbursed ₹155.55 crore. These are pass-through amounts, distinct from the organisation’s own income.

What is GiveIndia’s own income, and does it make a profit?

Its operating income — donations retained to cover administrative costs plus other income — was about ₹32.16 crore in FY2023 (₹27.46 crore admin donations plus ₹4.70 crore other income). It posted a surplus of ₹4.32 crore in FY2023 after deficits in FY2020, FY2021 and FY2022. As a Section 8 body it does not pay dividends.

Who founded and who runs GiveIndia?

Venkat Krishnan N founded it in 2000. Atul Satija joined in 2017 as “Founder 2.0” and chief executive and, as at March 2023, held 79.76% of the company’s shares; Vijay Mahajan held 19.84%.

How does GiveIndia earn the money to run itself?

Donors are asked to add a separate contribution toward due diligence and running costs, which the accounts call “donations received for covering administrative costs.” That, plus institutional grants and interest earned on donations held before disbursal, funds operations. The take from money routed is kept deliberately thin.

Sources

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

• Give Foundation, audited financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2023 (with FY2022 comparatives), Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP — giveindia.org / cdn.givind.org, accessed September 2026.
• Give Foundation, audited financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2021 (with FY2020 comparatives), Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP — cdn.givind.org, accessed September 2026.
• GiveIndia, “About us” (legal entity, registration, board) — giveindia.org, accessed September 2026.
• Give.do, “India’s largest and most trusted online giving platform is now Give.do” (rebrand, September 2022; donor and impact figures) — give.do blog, September 2022.
• Inc42, “GiveIndia Bags INR 23.4 Cr From Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Others” — November 2019.
• YourStory, “How GiveIndia raised Rs 70 Cr in two weeks of ICRF-2” (COVID relief figures) — May 2021.
• The CSR Journal, interview with Atul Satija on raising ₹700 crore for COVID-19 — 2021.
• DealStreetAsia, “Crowdfunding platforms GiveIndia and LetzChange to merge” — 2018; Give.do blog, “LetzChange merges with GiveIndia.”
• Tracxn, Give Foundation company profile — accessed September 2026.

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