The/Nudge Foundation Launches TILT, a ₹250 Crore Fund for India's 'Next Billion' Tech Startups

A New Fund With an Old Mission

The/Nudge Foundation — the Bengaluru-based nonprofit that has spent a decade building programmes around poverty alleviation and livelihoods — has stepped into venture investing. On August 27, 2026, it launched TILT, a ₹250 crore impact-first venture fund aimed at science- and technology-led startups that serve what the fund calls India's "next billion": people and small businesses outside the reach of most mainstream venture capital.

The/Nudge itself was founded in 2015 by Atul Satija, a former Google and InMobi executive, and has spent the decade since running large-scale livelihood and skilling programmes across India in partnership with state governments and corporates, moving lower-income youth and workers into jobs and entrepreneurship. TILT extends that mission into equity investing, betting that some of the startups best positioned to move the needle on livelihoods will need growth capital, not just grants.

TILT will write cheques of ₹2 crore to ₹16 crore at the seed to Series A stage, positioning itself between grant-style philanthropic capital and the growth-stage funds that already crowd India's better-known startup sectors.

Who's Backing It

The fund draws its corpus from the Livelihood Impact Fund and a roster of Indian entrepreneurs and investors who built some of the country's largest consumer and mobility businesses: Deep Kalra (MakeMyTrip), Binny Bansal (Flipkart), Vidit Aatrey (Meesho), Amit Gupta (Yulu), Hari Menon (BigBasket), and the Raj & Indra Nooyi Family Office. That lineup signals an attempt to bring operator-investors — people who built and scaled Indian startups themselves — into a segment of venture funding that has traditionally leaned on either pure philanthropy or pure return-maximizing capital.

Where the Money Will Go

TILT's mandate spans a deliberately broad set of "livelihood-linked" sectors: agricultural value chains, climate resilience, informal work and emerging employment models, MSME productivity, employability, financial inclusion, and market access and distribution for small businesses. Technology and AI applied to livelihood challenges is called out as a specific area of interest — positioning the fund to back applied-AI and data-infrastructure startups that serve blue-collar and informal-economy use cases rather than enterprise SaaS or consumer apps.

The fund aims to back more than 150 startups over the next 15 years, a horizon far longer than the typical 7-10 year life of a venture fund, reflecting its framing as patient, impact-first capital rather than a conventional return-driven vehicle.

Filling a Gap in India's Deep-Tech Funding Stack

TILT arrives at a moment when a cluster of new funds — from Aum Ventures' Deep-Tech Fund II to Piper Serica's Bharat Tech Fund and Inflexor Ventures' Fund III — have been raising capital specifically for India's frontier-technology and deep-tech startups. TILT's own focus is narrower and more mission-driven: rather than chasing semiconductor, space or quantum plays, it is betting that some of India's hardest technology and livelihood problems — reaching informal workers, smallholder farmers and small manufacturers with usable technology — need the same kind of patient, founder-friendly capital that has powered India's consumer-tech boom, just pointed at a different set of customers.

Whether TILT can deliver venture-style returns while holding a 15-year, impact-first mandate will be the fund's real test. For now, it adds another well-capitalized, high-profile pool of early-stage money to an Indian startup ecosystem that has increasingly split into distinct tracks — consumer, deep-tech, and now, explicitly, livelihood-tech.

Sources

• https://yourstory.com/2026/08/thenudge-launches-rs-250-cr-tilt-fund-early-stage-impact-startups
• https://www.business-standard.com/companies/start-ups/tilt-capital-launches-250-crore-fund-to-back-next-generation-startups-126082601147_1.html
• https://indiaeducationdiary.in/664343-2/