[Funding alert] Social enterprise startup Haqdarshak closes Rs 6.65 Cr in pre-Series A round

Pune-based social enterprise startup Haqdarshak Empowerment Solutions Private Limited (HESPL) has closed its pre-Series A round at Rs 6.65 crore.

Investors including The Deepak Group, Impact India Investment Partners, Beyond Capital Fund, Shalini Chhabra, and 3i Partners were part of the round, which closed this month. The round was kicked off in July 2020, led by Acumen Fund and supported by Upaya Social Ventures.

Looking at the current surge in COVID-19 cases, the company said it will use the funds to launch and expand vaccination plus health insurance coverage-focused services at the last mile with a digital push and invest in plug-and-play tech tools. These services will be mainly focused on migrants, daily wage earners, urban poor, and rural Indians.

The funds will also be used for hiring quality talent in execution and tech teams and strengthening the current monitoring and evaluation process.

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Using a mobile app, Haqdarshak is helping rural India benefit from govt welfare schemes

Aniket Doegar, CEO and Founder, Haqdarshak, said,

“Our commitment and vision of ensuring every citizen and small business in India gets access to government schemes and services is strengthened with this investment. We are focused on our solutions for COVID-19 response, services for MSMEs, and new digital offerings for our last mile. This investment round will help us scale up our core platforms and reach our goal of ensuring 100 million citizens get access to government financial services by 2030.”

Haqdarshak ensures citizens at the last mile get access to government and private welfare and schemes and services. This is done through a mobile and web SaaS platform for corporate partners complemented by a training platform used by community women entrepreneurs. Haqdarshak recently launched its app on the Google Play Store.

The company has also been recently selected in the Action CoVID 19 and has been on the Omidyar Covid Relief teams’ grantee list. It has launched a multilingual helpline to support users for vaccination registrations, as well as linking them to government health insurance which provides cover for COVID-19 related testing and hospitalisation expenses.

Haqdarshak had earlier raised angel funding in May 2016 from investors, which include PR Ganapathy, former President, Villgro India; Ravi Saxena, MD, Wonderchef; Sandeep Raju, Co-founder, Samaaru Pvt Ltd; Prabha Narasimhan, Executive Director, HUL; Ramesh Srinivasan, Senior Partner, McKinsey; and Ashish Goyal, Senior MD at OMERS Capital Markets, among others.

Founded in 2016, Haqdarshak has reached out to more than one million families to date and supported 600K+ beneficiaries with welfare schemes, while channelising Rs 500 crore ($67 million)) in benefits value.

Its tech platform has digitised 7,000 welfare schemes and field operations are present in 22 states. One of the most recent initiatives by Haqdarshak is the launch of its MSME-focused platform to offer application support services to them to apply for eligible welfare schemes.