Pre-grant checks and surprise site visits on NGOs for family offices and donors
TL;DR Donorlens checks an NGO's papers before a family office or giving circle writes a grant, then sends a trained visitor, unannounced, to see whether the work is actually happening. The donor pays, not the NGO. It swaps the seed's blockchain for the thing donors really lack - an independent pair of eyes.
Indian donors have said for a decade that they don't trust how charities track money. A big consulting firm's 2015 philanthropy report described "a general level of misgiving" among donors about how non-profits track funds and grants[1]. I found no newer survey that measures it, which tells you something in itself.
The money at stake has grown a lot. Private giving reached about ₹1,31,000 Cr in FY2024, families give roughly 40% of it, and family offices went from 45 in 2018 to 300 in 2024[2].
So how often does a family office in Mumbai funding a school programme in rural Odisha actually visit? Rarely. It reads the NGO's own report, which the NGO wrote. Compliance papers matter too, since an NGO that misses its Form 10BD filing faces a ₹200-a-day fee[3] and donors can lose their 80G certificates.
The seed wanted to put charity spending on a blockchain. A ledger can show that a record was never edited, but it can't show that the classroom exists or that 40 children attend it, because someone still has to go and look. Crypto donations would also bring tax and foreign-contribution headaches. So I kept the goal and dropped the chain.
Donorlens does two things. Before a grant, an analyst checks the NGO's registrations, 12A and 80G status, foreign-contribution standing, recent filings and audited accounts, and writes a two-page risk note.
After the grant, a local visitor turns up without notice at one or two sites each quarter with a fixed checklist - attendance counts, timestamped photos, stock of materials bought and short talks with beneficiaries. The donor gets a plain report comparing what was promised with what was seen.
Visitors are paid per visit and drawn from retired teachers, social-work graduates and auditors in each region. NGOs see the report before the donor does and can respond in writing, which is only fair.
The user and the payer are the same person - the donor's philanthropy desk. That means family offices, giving circles, small foundations and CSR teams with budgets too small for a consulting firm. About 65% of philanthropic families already have dedicated staff for giving[2], so there's someone to sell to. One Indian donor-advisory site charges a 5% fee on donations routed through its site[4]. Donorlens would charge per NGO checked and per visit instead, so it never touches the money.
Family offices multiplied more than six times between 2018 and 2024, and 41% of philanthropic families now prefer grant-making as their main route[2]. That means more grant-makers funding NGOs they've never met. Compliance has tightened as well, and the Form 10BD and 10BE regime fixed a 31 May deadline for donor statements, with penalties of ₹10,000 to ₹1,00,000 for missing it[3].
There's no public figure for spending on NGO due diligence in India. The base is firmer - 300 family offices in 2024 and a family share of about 40% of ₹1,31,000 Cr in private giving[2]. If 100 of those offices each paid for 10 NGO checks a year then that's 1,000 engagements, which is plenty for a focused firm. That count is my assumption, not a published figure.
That site has run donor advisory and NGO due diligence since 2000 and lists 700+ verified NGOs[4]. One large giving platform verifies the 4,000+ nonprofits on its platform and posts fundraiser updates, but the NGO supplies those updates[5]. In the UK, one startup began with blockchain impact tracking and now sells impact-data dashboards[6], which backs up the reframe. The gap is post-grant checking in the field, done by someone the NGO doesn't pay.
| Difficulty | Moderate (34/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹40–75 L |
| Time to launch | 3–5 months |
The software is simple. The hard part is a trustworthy visitor network across districts, with training, spot audits of the visitors themselves and rules on conflicts of interest. Report wording matters too, because one careless line about an NGO can cost it funding and land you a defamation claim.
No licence is needed to run due diligence on NGOs. The rules you work with are the ones your NGOs must follow, plus the baseline for your own firm.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI write the final judgement on an NGO. A wrong line can cost a charity its funding, so a person must check every claim in the report.
Want to work out the AI layer for Donorlens? Talk to Yash →
Here's what can go south -
I think this is a solid, unglamorous business. If you come from audit, philanthropy advisory or a large NGO's monitoring team and already know family-office staff then it suits you. If you're hoping to build a tech platform then skip it, because this is a service business with software behind it.
Prove one thing first - that five paying donors will buy a second round of visits after seeing the first report.
Plan for roughly ₹40–75 L, most of it on analysts, visitor training and travel across districts in the first year.
No. Due diligence needs no licence, but you'll check NGOs' 80G, 10BD and FCRA compliance, and you must follow the DPDP Act for beneficiary photos and interviews.
Yes. Donors everywhere fund work they can't see, so field checks travel well. Swap in your country's charity register and tax rules, and check local defamation law before reports go out.
The free Donorlens validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the tax and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for donors and NGOs, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Donorlens or something close to it? The make-or-break work is building a visitor network that donors trust and NGOs accept, and that's the kind of thing I help founders with. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.