NewsVoir
New Delhi [India], January 14: Change Engine announced the Mission Billion Summit on January 29, 2026, to be held at the India International Centre, Delhi. Designed as India's premier 'founder-first' platform, the summit will gather over 200 non-profit founders, philanthropists and policymakers with a singular goal: building 100 non-profit unicorns by 2030 - organisations impacting over a million people.
India's social sector stands at a critical inflection point. A new generation of ambitious founders is emerging, determined to solve complex social problems at 'India scale'. While the patient capital and catalytic ecosystems required to take these founders from pilot to million-plus impact are beginning to form, the Mission Billion Summit aims to bring these fragmented pieces together.
Speaking about the summit, Varun Aggarwal, Co-founder, Change Engine, said "We need a movement towards non-profit unicorns in India, much like the startup movement a decade ago. Mission Billion Summit will bring together all stakeholders to solve our most pressing developmental challenges. With founders at the centre, we are creating an ecosystem where you can move beyond pilots and master the playbook to reach national-level impact using evidence-driven interventions with the right collaborators."
Shubham Bansal, Co-founder, Change Engine, added, "Mission Billion summit serves as a startup school for non-profits, providing the actionable toolkits - from how to partner with government to building evidence to raising capital. Our goal is to empower founders to build for the entire nation, not just a single zip code."
The summit is structured across two parallel tracks featuring 25+ speakers, 12+ sessions, and 3 workshop-style masterclasses designed to address the core challenges of non-profit scale:
- Building Nonprofit Unicorns: A startup-school style track covering topics such as evidence-building beyond RCTs, fundraising and innovation capital, partnering with government, and community-led scale.
- Tackling Wicked Problems: Focused conversations on what works (and what doesn't) across key domains, including welfare and social protection, education, and governance, bringing together practitioners and thinkers working at the cutting edge of these challenges.
Each track will feature deep-dive sessions and masterclasses designed to surface actionable insights, cross-sector partnerships, and scalable innovations.
A key highlight of the summit will be the launch of Change Engine's first report in the 'Ease of Doing Non-profits' series. Based on a first-of-its-kind survey of social entrepreneurs, the report identifies the structural barriers preventing high-potential non-profits from reaching 'unicorn' scale. The preliminary findings reveal a systemic lack of 'innovation capital' - the flexible, high-risk funding required for non-profits to experiment and scale.
The summit will see participation from prominent philanthropists, including Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Info Edge), Aakanksha Gulati (ACT Grants), Murugan Vasudevan (Veddis Foundation), Chetan (Tech Mahindra Foundation), Riti Mohapatra (The Bridgespan Group), amongst others.
It will also feature senior leaders from organisations that have successfully scaled impact, such as Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Central Square Foundation, Avanti Fellows, Rocket Learning, Agami, CORO, Sneha, XKDR, amongst others.
Mission Billion Summit deepens Change Engine's commitment to building a thriving ecosystem for mission-driven founders by providing the capital, knowledge, and partnerships needed to transform pilots into national solutions.
For more information and registration, please visit the Change Engine website.
About Change Engine
Change Engine supports exceptional founders in building non-profit unicorns - organisations that can meaningfully impact a million people. We do this through our unique sandbox for non-profits, which includes support for leveraging data and evidence, partnering with the government, applying product and tech expertise, and deploying catalytic seed capital.
Over the last few years, we've worked with 10 non-profits that have raised over $2M in follow-up funding in addition to our support. We also published the Playbook for Nonprofit Unicorns - the first data-backed guide for founders created from insights drawn from 30+ organisations that have scaled. We've been featured extensively in The Economic Times, Mint, India Development Review (IDR) and Brut India for our work on scaling social impact through evidence-based frameworks and strategic partnerships.
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