Born in the bustling Indian city of Mumbai, into the lowest Hindu 'social caste' of a non-English-speaking conservative family, Darshita Gillies, founder and CEO of London-based impact-platform Maanch, credits her accomplishments to “grit and resilience” built into her character through her humble upbringing.
“In technology, it’s very hard to raise money, especially if you are going with the big vision,” says Ms Gillies. The scarcity of female role models in tech, especially for “well-funded start-ups with a bold mission”, adds to the challenge.
She relied mostly on loans from friends and family to get her business off the ground, to pursue her aspirations of “bringing the world community together to solve the big, global challenges we face”.
Thanks to parents who instilled the value of education in all three of their children, Ms Gillies acquired a professional background as a chartered accountant, investment banker and executive coach. More recently, she studied business sustainability management at Cambridge University, while fuelling her passion for fintech and blockchain through studies at Said Business School and Oxford University.
Maanch’s first demo was built in 2018 in her one-bedroom family home in Mumbai, with her siblings’ supporting the operations and technology side. Today Maanch – ‘platform’ in Hindi – works with 600+ partners across more than 15 countries, connecting philanthropic funds, impact investors and corporates with project opportunities around the world. The firm’s mission, implemented by its 16 “passionate changemakers”, is to provide collaborative technology to re-allocate capital and resources towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through data, intelligence, dashboards and networks.
Within the ‘money we give’ space, the scalable platform enhances operational efficiencies for stakeholders of the “very fragmented” philanthropy ecosystem, improving much needed visibility for charities. By automatically generating the impact report, it aims to cut down the cost of fundraising and impact measurement activities, while enabling funders to identify the impact of their giving.
The pandemic has driven a rise in collective giving, notes Ms Gillies, who was included among one of the 100 most Meaningful Business leaders 2020 and, the year before, listed as the 100 most influential in UK-India relations by India Inc, the London-based India-focused media house.
To meet demand, Maanch is introducing ‘thematic dashboards’, allowing donors to fund initiatives they are most interested in, such as mental health or biodiversity losses. The start-up currently has a handful of giving projects active in India, to fund infrastructure investments and fight poverty, and is also looking to combine efforts with third party organisations to help address the dramatic Covid-19 crisis in the country. “There is a lot more the country needs, it is not just oxygen,” says Ms Gillies, explaining how all issues are interconnected.
Impact-inclusive decisions
The fintech firm also offers a ‘money we invest’ solution for corporates, enabling them to identify and visualise their impact across their operation. “Focusing on the impact catch points of their business, much like charities, corporates can build their profiles on the system, offering that rich corporate data in a unified plate, which is what investors really want.”
Later this year, the firm is due to launch ‘the other side of the coin’, a platform for asset managers and their underlying investors. Leveraging emerging technologies, the solution, which is currently being B2B tested with a Swiss private bank’s asset management arm, aims to build predictive analytics to allows users to adjust their portfolio positions to align capital to their investment goals and impact strategy.
Its core focus is to help asset managers engage with investee companies, allowing them to view the number of interactions each team member has logged on the dashboard with any specific company, or the number of issues they have raised and solved over time, improving collaboration within teams and saving costs.
The financial services industry has developed competitive, proprietary models, which are not appropriate to address global challenges, explains Ms Gillies. The Maanch dashboard, which enables asset managers to have multiple feeds of data intelligence, aims to make impact data “visible, accessible and interpretable”, allowing them to make “impact-inclusive decisions”.
“Today, impact reporting or communication is mostly being carried out manually, but technology can play a big role in streamlining processes and aggregating data, which frees up human resources for more strategic work,” she explains. Technology can automatically link actions to the UN’s SGDs, while also detecting interrelationships between SDGs. Importantly, technology brings more objectivity allowing comparison of products, companies and projects. This happens thanks to “unified systems of impact aggregation”, with engagement and impact data stored in the cloud.
These types of platforms help build networks and communities, fuelling cross-collaboration among different stakeholders and organisations, across sectors, accelerating the transition to a more sustainable future.
Ms Gillies is convinced that when people realise “what’s making and what’s draining the system”, they will act differently, driving growth in impact-inclusive decisions. Access to instantaneous, data-driven information is especially important for the millennial generation she belongs to.
“There is an inherent expectation of information on demand, firms need to invest in that architecture now, because if they cannot cater to those immediate data needs, they will lose out to younger, more agile companies that come in,” she says.
