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

The Invincible India

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

Company Give Foundation, operating as GiveIndia / Give (CIN U91110KA2000NPL151182), Bengaluru
Founded 2000, as a not-for-profit company (registered u/s 25 of the Companies Act 1956, now Section 8 of the 2013 Act)
Founder(s) Venkat Krishnan N (founder, 2000); Atul Satija joined 2017 as “Founder 2.0” and CEO
Businesses Online donation platform (give.do), payroll/corporate giving, crowdfunding, NGO due-diligence and disbursement
Latest FY total income (audited) ₹187.71 crore for the year ended 31 March 2023, of which ₹27.46 crore was donations retained to cover administrative costs
Latest FY result (audited) Surplus of ₹4.32 crore for the year ended 31 March 2023 (versus a ₹1.81 crore deficit the prior year)
Listed Private; not-for-profit Section 8 company, no equity listing and no shareholder dividends
Market value / last valuation Not applicable — grant- and donation-funded, not venture-funded, so no equity valuation exists
Key shareholders / CEO Atul Satija 79.76% and Vijay Mahajan 19.84% of shares (as at 31 March 2023); Atul Satija, co-founder and CEO

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:

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:

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.

Year ended 31 March (₹ crore) FY2020 FY2021 FY2022 FY2023
Admin-cost donations (operating income) 6.21 20.21 50.54 27.46
Total income as reported 6.55 21.48 820.84 187.71
Funds routed to projects/NGOs n/a* n/a* 766.53 155.55
Surplus / (deficit) (1.13) (0.61) (1.81) 4.32

*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:

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

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).

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

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