Globally, endowment funds have played a crucial role in strengthening an academic institution’s forte, such as in maintaining excellent standards in teaching, research, staffing, on-campus innovation and entrepreneurship and more. However, India’s education ecosystem, despite being a potent breeding ground for avant-garde innovation, has been alien to the concept of endowment funds, thereby never reaching its full potential.

At IvyCap, we have set ourselves on a mission to harness this untapped potential in college campuses across the country by enabling long-term endowment models. We helped create the structure and initial corpus for India’s first endowment fund at IIT Delhi with a target corpus of US$ 1 bn, launched by the Hon’ble President of India in October 2019. The endowment fund also became the passion for our alumni to create as much value for the IvyCap ecosystem and in return generating returns that could go back to their alma maters for further fueling Innovation and Entrepreneurship right on the campuses.

And we are on our way to enable more such endowment frameworks to be set up across other institutions in India. Our ultimate objective is to make the endowment system in India as robust as in the developed world and make our education system self-reliant. For IvyCap, a large part of the fund manager’s profits go back as endowments to various IITs.