Goodera Secures INR 80 Cr Funding, Sells India CSR Vertical To Donor Platform Give

Employee volunteering startup Goodera has raised INR 80 Cr ($10 Mn) in funding from a clutch of investors. The funding round saw participation from Zoom Ventures, Elevation Capital, Xto10X Technologies, Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network India and angel investors, including former Xerox executive Ursula Burns, and Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal. 

Goodera will use the funding to scale up infrastructure and shore up its product catalogue. The startup will also deploy the investment for hiring and to ramp up its technology stack. 

As part of a deal that happened parallelly, Goodera also sold its India corporate social responsibility (CSR) platform business to donation platform Give. Goodera said that the sale will allow it to focus on the global growth of its volunteering platform.

“Millions of employees can now volunteer without spending time and effort on volunteer management. We are proud of the social impact we have created for thousands of nonprofits and relish the joy and empathy we bring to millions of employees. This fundraise will help us scale our infrastructure to enable millions of employees to volunteer,” Goodera CEO and founder Abhishek Humbad said. 

Echoing the sentiment, Elevation Capital’s Ravi Adusumalli said, “Goodera’s growth in the last two years is the reward that the market gives you to build novel solutions from 0 to 1. Abhishek and the team at Goodera have unmatched expertise in the domain and are building a whole new category with their employee volunteering solutions, and we are excited to continue supporting them with scale.”

Founded in 2014 by Humbad and Richa Bajpai, Goodera enables companies to scale their employee volunteering. With presence in more than 100 countries and support in 20+ languages, the startup curates volunteer opportunities across causes from more than 50,000 non-profits. 

The startup also had a management platform for Indian companies to manage their CSR investments and assess social impact. It was this vertical that was sold to Give as part of a separate deal. 

Goodera last raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding in 2018 from SAIF Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Omidyar Network. Prior to that, it had also secured $5.5 Mn in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network in 2017. 

Goodera counts as many as sixty Fortune 500 companies as its clients, including IBM, Target and Amazon. The startup claims to power corporate volunteerism at over 400 enterprises across the globe. 

In total, the platform has provided volunteer opportunities to more than 10 Mn employees so far. Goodera said that the startup plans to increase this number to more than 100 Mn by 2025. 

Goodera competes with startups such as Hyderabad-based Chezuba as well as global players such as Salesforce and Alaya.