The/Nudge Institute, which has enabled hundreds of social enterprises and non-profits scale up their impact, was formed by Satija after he quit his high-paying corporate career to build solutions for poverty alleviation and livelihoods
Atul Satija, founder & CEO of The/Nudge Institute, at a farm near Bengaluru, where one of the non-profits from their accelerator programme, Gramhal, is helping farmers leverage technology for sustainable agriculture. Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India
Atul Satija says that starting social enterprises will become the next big aspiration for youngsters.
Over the decades, he has seen people’s aspirations shift from government jobs to private company jobs, to careers in multinationals, to launching their own startups. Satija hopes, and also believes, that next in line will be building social enterprises. “In a country like India where talent is coming primarily from smaller towns, Tier-II cities and beyond, the proximity of the people there to social problems is far higher than the rest of the country,” he says.
Satija admits to his bias even as he says this. After all, he funds and helps scale non-profits and social enterprises for a living. He is the founder and CEO of Bengaluru-based The/Nudge Institute (previously called The/Nudge Foundation), which has supported over 120 non-profits and social enterprises—over 70 of them led by women—through their incubator and accelerator programme.
An additional 10-odd social impact startups have been recipients of the The Nudge/Prize ranging between Rs 5 crore and Rs 10 crore. The founders win this grant by participating in a Grand Challenges format, in which they present population-scale solutions and implementation roadmaps for various issues.
Around Rs 50 crore worth of funds have been disbursed to NGOs and social enterprises so far as part of the incubator, accelerator and the Prize. The average grant multiplier is 8.6x for the incubator and accelerator. These organisations collectively serve around 100 million people in India, Satija says.