In this time of crisis when the market is suffering huge financial crunches, more than 150 investors and investors have decided to come forward and help startups carry throughthe projects that are initiative to combat Covid-19. They have taken this initiative to help the falling market gain stability and provide a helping hand to startups to strengthen their grounds.

The investors said they have contributed 1 billion Indian rupees — or $13 million — of their own money to the ACT Grants initiative, which was unveiled late last month. The group — which includes several prominent industry figures, including NandanNilekani, Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Flipkart’sKalyan Krishnamurthy, Oyo’s RiteshAgarwal, Udaan’sSujeet Kumar, Freshworks’ GirishMathrubootham, CRED’s Kunal Shah and Times Internet’s MitenSampat — has funded 32 projects to date.

These projects span six themes, including solutions that could help curtail the spread of the COVID-19 disease, development of testing and detection kits, building medical equipment such as ventilators and taking care of mental health. The group came together last month when India had just begun to see cases of the coronavirus disease.

“As governments across the globe started to take measures to combat this pandemic, one thing that came up in our conversations with other investors, startup founders and startup employees was this urgency to not sit and watch what the government does but help and pitch in as an industry,” said DevKhare, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in an interview with TechCrunch.

There have been 29,435 known cases of coronavirus in India, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Investors from dozens of venture capital and private equity firms, including Accel, Lightspeed  Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India, Kalaari Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, 3One4Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global, have personally participated in the initiative.

Several trade bodies, including Nasscom and TIE Global, that count American tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon among their members, are also supporting ACT Grants. Amazon’s  AWS additionally is helping these projects with infrastructure services.

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