At 21, Abhishek Humbad co-founded his first company the same year he graduated from BITS Pilani. Not as a side project - as a full bet. NextGen, co-built with Richa Bajpai, became India's first cloud and mobile-based CSR management platform. It was incubated at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore, raised funding from Mumbai Angels, and attracted redBus co-founder Phanindra Sama to its board. Not bad for someone who started the Wall Street Club at a campus in Rajasthan.
The origin of Goodera is one of those stories that sounds inevitable in hindsight. Humbad received a grant for NextGen that required photo documentation of project completion. As an engineer steeped in data, submitting photos felt wrong - like proving a bridge worked by sending a picture of someone crossing it. The real question was impact, and the sector had no good answers. So he built the infrastructure to find them.
Goodera launched in 2014 as a backend CSR reporting tool: a plumbing layer that helped nonprofits capture last-mile data, gave funders real visibility into outcomes, and let corporations actually understand what their grants were doing. By 2020, Humbad saw a larger opportunity and pivoted the company entirely - from measuring impact to creating it.
The volunteer platform launched quietly, then grew fast. Today Goodera is the largest corporate volunteering platform in the world: 500+ enterprises, 75+ Fortune 500 companies including Amazon, Nike, Oracle, Target, and Visa, 50,000+ nonprofit partners, and operations across 100+ countries in 30+ languages. The company operates offices in San Mateo, Bengaluru, and Barcelona.
Humbad's frame for what he has built is deliberately structural: "Volunteering is infrastructure, not an activity." That's not just language. It's a decision about what Goodera is trying to be - not a one-off app for service months, but the persistent connective tissue between corporate employees and community need. The kind of thing that runs in the background, reliably, at scale, whether or not anyone is paying attention.
The 2022 Series A - $10 million from Zoom Ventures, Elevation Capital, Xto10X, Nexus Venture Partners, and Omidyar Network India - came with unusual company. Ursula Burns, the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company as Xerox CEO, joined Goodera's board. Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal came on as a mentor. Goodera was no longer just a startup - it had graduated into a category it was still in the process of defining.
