New Delhi: Prashanth Prakash, renowned Venture Capitalist and Philanthropist was honored as one of the ‘India CSR Top 10 Impact Leaders of India‘ during the ‘India CSR Leadership Summit – 2021‘, organized by India CSR Network on January 16, 2021.
Prashanth Prakash, founder of Accel Partners India is a leading venture capitalist.
Playing the role of a Bridge between the Startup Ecosystem and the Government of Karnataka, he leads India s first Vision Group for Startups.
Under his leadership as Chairperson, Sikshana Foundation has pioneered a ‘motivational model’ to improve learning levels of Govt. School Students in India serving 50,000 schools impacting 3 Million students.
Under his chairpersonship, United Way of Bengaluru (UWBe) through Its ‘Wake the Lake’ campaign has rejuvenated 35 plus lakes.
Responding to the Covid19 Pandemic along with other Venture Capitalists, formed the 100 Cr ACT Grants fund to provide financial support to startups working on ready to deploy disruptive scalable solutions to combat Covid19.
About ACT Grants
Just before the lockdown early March, some entrepreneurs came together on a Telegram group called ‘Startups Against Covid’, which quickly became a group of over thousand people from the startup ecosystem.
Prashant said, “They wanted to create solutions. They had ideas on what they can do in their own capacity to fight Covid.”
“What they required were a structured framework and a small capital that could help take their solutions to market. That’s where some of the investors came together. Venture partners from about 15-20 venture funds and private equity funds and investment banks came together to form ACT”, he added.
A grant corpus of INR 100 crores was raised both from venture partners and some of the seasoned industrialists and entrepreneurs to help entrepreneurs take disruptive scalable solutions to market to fight Covid19. The grant focused more on solutions that were ready to go to market and had great teams who had disruptive technology based thinking and were able to be scrappy and quickly take the solutions to market.
The ‘India CSR Awards‘ is certainly an inspiration to the leaders who are committed to driving transformations in the society with their dedicated service and commitment in the areas of sustainability and CSR.
Such acknowledgement and felicitations are aimed at recognising the industry leaders who are raising benchmarks by bringing transformative change in the society through innovation and excellence.
India CSR wishes him a happy and healthy life ahead to carry on his mission to make a positive contribution to a larger good in India.
