Reimagining Access: How Impactis Global Is Funding the Future Through Scholarships

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“What truly catalyzed Impactis were two moments: reading about the Tata Group’s purposeful philanthropy, and watching Super 30. It made me ask, Why stop at 30? Why not 30,000 or 3 million? That was the lightbulb moment.”

That question, part cinematic awe, part product-scale vision, is the kind of mental leap that defines Pankaj Asthaana (Founder and CEO of Impactis Global).

After two decades building payment infrastructure across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, much of it inside Mastercard, Visa, and Western Union, he could’ve comfortably stayed in the world of billion-dollar financial systems. Instead, he decided to engineer something far messier: a human-centered, tech-enabled engine for redistributing opportunity.

Impactis Global is not a traditional scholarship platform. It’s a social infrastructure layer where mentorship, capital, and ambition collide through software. The goal? Help one million students a year. Not with blanket charity. With structured, traceable, emotionally intelligent support.

The thesis is straightforward yet ambitious: philanthropy can function like a fintech product, efficient, trackable, and designed to achieve outcomes. It just hasn’t been built that way yet.

And while most entrepreneurs in the edtech or CSR space focus on institutions or delivery models, Pankaj is obsessed with the middle layer. This connective tissue enables strangers to help one another with confidence.

So what does that mean in practice?

“We don’t charge students or NGOs. Instead, we offer value-added services to companies and professionals with reporting, engagement, matching, and talent discovery.”

This isn’t a non-profit trying to ‘scale good.’ It’s a system design challenge. Pankaj wants to make giving work like investing with dashboards, KPIs, match scores, and actual feedback loops.

His product isn’t just financial, it’s emotional. He knows that companies don’t just want to cut a CSR check. They want to feel it made a difference. 

An intern from IIT Kharagpur, who received a scholarship, can now contribute to the codebase and mentor others. That kind of loop creates meaning.

Which raises a question most people don’t ask in philanthropy: how do you measure emotional returns?

In Pankaj’s world, you build the product in a way that makes it obvious. You show the student’s progress. You let volunteers track their involvement. You let the system reflect the soul.

“We’re not a charity, not a pure edtech play, and not just a CSR tool. Creating something new means building awareness and trust from scratch.”

This is the founder problem no one glamorizes: naming the thing you’re building when no category exists for it. If you’re too soft, no one takes you seriously. Too commercial, and you seem extractive. Pankaj is trying to walk that line firmly, mission-led, but unapologetically systemic. He’s building an architecture for empathy that doesn’t run on hope alone.

What’s clear is this: Impactis is less a platform and more a philosophy that helping others should be organized, not chaotic; trackable, not vague; deeply personal, not transactional.

What’s the infrastructure of trust when strangers support strangers?

This is the central question baked into everything Impactis does. Tech can scale behavior, but it can’t manufacture intent. So how do you design for intent?

The answer, according to Pankaj, lies in a mixture of structure and story. Structured onboarding for funders and mentors. Curated student pipelines via NGO partnerships. Milestone-based reporting. Community nudges. And above all, stories, because the narrative of impact is often as important as the data itself.

There’s an old fintech wisdom: make trust the default. Pankaj is now applying it to hope.

Is it possible to build a product that’s emotional and enterprise-ready?

That’s the paradox at the heart of Impactis. The clients are names you know: Salesforce, Bosch, Standard Chartered. The users are idealistic, overworked professionals. The beneficiaries are students striving to overcome systemic barriers.

To hold all three together in one system without breaking—that takes more than empathy. It takes engineering.

Pankaj isn’t selling CSR products. He’s shipping systems of shared belief. That’s harder to demo in a pitch deck but easier to feel when you hear what happens next:

“One of our first scholarship recipients from IIT Kharagpur ended up interning with us this year. Watching him evolve and mentor others was a full-circle moment.”

That’s the loop. That’s what this product is chasing—not just money flow, but meaning flow.

Can emotional value be productized without diluting it?

Yes, but it’s tough, and most companies fail at it because they try to quantify what should be felt.

Pankaj’s approach avoids that trap. Instead of reducing emotional value to numbers, he uses structure to create the conditions for emotional moments to happen.

Think about it this way: the goal isn’t to manufacture emotion; it’s to architect environments where emotional connection becomes likely and meaningful.

That’s why Impactis includes features like mentorship progress tracking, student milestone reporting, and volunteer impact dashboards, not because they replace the joy of seeing someone succeed, but because they extend that feeling across time and scale.

A professional in Bengaluru can see a student in Bihar hit a career milestone they helped make possible. That’s emotional UX, not just UI.

The product isn’t about replacing empathy with code. It’s about removing friction so empathy can show up more often, more clearly, and with more context. This is not a CRM for good intentions. It’s an empathy amplifier.

The key is intentional friction nudges, check-ins, and meaningful updates that don’t feel automated even if the system behind them is. That’s where tech doesn’t dilute emotion—it directs it.

What does scalability mean when your “metric” is human progress?

In traditional SaaS terminology, scale refers to growing the user count while minimizing the cost per user. But if your product’s north star is life transformation, that math doesn’t hold. You can’t achieve a 10x impact by simply writing better code.

That’s why Pankaj reframes scalability not as volume, but as replicable transformation.

He’s not trying to track clicks or churn. He’s measuring growth arcs: a student funded by a stranger, mentored through a career hurdle, and then looped back into the system to fund or guide others. When that cycle happens reliably, at any level, the system is scaling.

It’s not just about more users, it’s about more loops. It’s about creating a mesh of micro-commitments that sustain themselves, not a funnel that ends at conversion.

That’s a very different form of scale and arguably a much more resilient one.

How do you build trust faster than cynicism in a world flooded with platforms?

This is the hardest one because cynicism is cheap, contagious, and often justified.

Pankaj’s strategy? Use utility as a bridge to belief. Don’t preach purpose. Prove it.

Most platforms tell you they’re making a difference. Impactis strives to demonstrate this through traceable actions, real student journeys, and ongoing interaction. The product doesn’t ask for blind faith. It gives receipts.

That’s why there’s no paywall for students, no vague “good vibes” reporting for funders. It’s all traceable. Logged hours. Volunteer actions. Student feedback. These are trust signals—not marketing messages.

But the deeper layer here is transparency without performativity. Not everything is a social share. Sometimes, trust is built in quiet moments, such as a funder reading a mentor log or witnessing a student’s confidence grow over six months.

The system doesn’t ask people to trust strangers out of guilt or charity. It shows them why trust is logical, supported, and safe. And once that baseline is built, emotional buy-in follows.

That’s how you fight platform fatigue. Not with slogans—but with systems that feel real, earn respect, and hold up under scrutiny.

So, where does this go from here?

Pankaj isn’t building for headlines. He’s not aiming for a milestone IPO.

He’s building a system that quietly asks: What if hope had infrastructure? What if generosity scaled like APIs across people, borders, and belief systems?

The win condition isn’t a billion-dollar valuation.

It’s something quieter:
A loop closed.
A stranger helped.
A life changed.
And then again.
And again.

Until it stops feeling rare.