Social Entrepreneur of The Year winner Haqdarshak raises fresh funds to connect citizens with welfare schemes

Social impact startup Haqdarshak, which connects citizens with government schemes, has announced a new investment to close its Pre-Series A1 round. The funding amount is undisclosed.

New institutional investors including Innovating Justice Fund and Village Capital-managed Financial Health Innovation Fund have joined the cap table along with 22 other investors.

Some of the new investors in Haqdarshak include Abhishek Rungta (Founder & CEO, of INT), Deep Bajaj (Co-founder, Sirona Hygiene), Bhavin Pandya, (Co-founder and CEO, Games 24X7), Morpheus Ananta and Bindu Subramaniam (Singer-Songwriter), Girish Kulkarni and Mohit Bajaj.

Earlier in January, Haqdarshak appeared on Shark Tank India (Season-2) and raised Rs one crore in funding from panelists — Namita Thapar, Peyush Bansal and Aman Gupta.

Existing investors including The Deepak Group, Acumen Fund, Beyond Capital Fund and Shalini Chhabra, 3i Partners, and Mukund Santhanam, were also part of the round, which closed in March 2023.

Founded by Aniket Deogar in 2015, Haqdarshak is bridging the information and access gap between citizens and social protection services using tech and a last-mile field agent network of ‘Haqdarshaks’ (most of whom are women).

The funds from this round will be utilised for investment in tech and talent with a focus on growing the company’s latest product—the Yojana Card, which is a digitally-enabled social security card for beneficiaries to access welfare services for their family and business via a single channel enabled by last-mile support.

“The investment funds will help us build tech infrastructure for the Yojana Card platform with government integrations, software and hardware to scale, with marketing expenses towards user acquisition,” said Aniket Doegar, CEO and Founder, Haqdarshak.

“Over the next 12 months, we aim to reach two million families. The Yojana Card platform will give them access to a host of welfare services and financial inclusion products,” he added, highlighting that Haqdarshak aims to impact 100 million Indians by 2030.

Currently present in 24 states in India, Haqdarshak has trained over 30,000 agents and claims to have provided benefits worth over Rs 4,200 crore to over 2.7 million families through its digital portals that are available in 11 vernacular languages.

Haqdarshak is also working towards building solutions to accelerate the adoption of climate-friendly subsidies and programs implemented by the government. The company was recently awarded a design funding grant by Convergence, the global network for blended finance to test models to encourage the adoption of climate-friendly assets among farmers in rural India.

In fact, Haqdarshak’s founder Aniket Deogar won the 2022 edition of the Social Entrepreneur of The Year (SEOY) award, which is given out each year by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and Jubilant Bhartia Foundation (JBF).