Abhishek Humbad

Founder & CEO Goodera

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Abhishek Humbad founded and runs Goodera, which solves a problem most large employers have and few solve well: corporate volunteering that people actually want to do. The friction is logistical rather than motivational. A company with thousands of staff spread across time zones cannot easily find enough vetted nonprofits, design experiences that work for remote and in-person teams simultaneously, run them in the languages its people speak, or measure any of it afterwards. Goodera does all four as a service — a network of more than 50,000 nonprofit partners, over a thousand curated volunteering experiences in more than 30 languages, around 2,500 trained hosts, and virtual, in-person and outdoor formats — and sells it to CSR teams, HR and people-operations functions and employee resource groups at companies including PayPal, Kyndryl, Sanofi and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Its stated mission is to “make social impact accessible to every team on the planet.” Humbad’s route here ran through NextGen, the CSR and sustainability management company he co-founded while barely out of his own studies.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of Goodera, working alongside co-founder and COO Sriram Shankar, with the company headquartered in Menlo Park and offices in Bengaluru and Barcelona.
• Built a nonprofit partner network of more than 50,000 organisations and a catalogue of over 1,000 curated volunteering experiences in 30-plus languages.
• Grew the customer base past 500 enterprises, with more than two million volunteers taking part by the company’s count.
• Raised a $10 million round from Zoom Ventures, Elevation Capital, Xto10X, Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network India, with total funding above $25 million.
• Brought Ursula Burns, the former Xerox chief executive, and Binny Bansal in as advisers.
• Co-founded NextGen at 21 with Richa Bajpai, developing “p3”, described as India’s first cloud- and mobile-based CSR and sustainability management platform, used by Fortune 500 clients across 16 sectors including Bharat Petroleum, HDFC Bank and the Vodafone Foundation.
• Ran NextGen through incubation at NSRCEL, the entrepreneurship centre at IIM Bangalore, and at the Technology Business Incubator at BITS Pilani.

Professional Journey

Humbad started young. He co-founded NextGen with Richa Bajpai at the age of 21, at a point when corporate social responsibility in India was moving from discretionary philanthropy toward something companies had to report on and, after the 2013 Companies Act, spend on. NextGen built “p3”, described as the country’s first cloud- and mobile-based platform for managing CSR and sustainability programmes — the unglamorous but necessary infrastructure of tracking what was spent, on what, and to what effect. It picked up Fortune 500 clients across sixteen sectors, among them Bharat Petroleum, HDFC Bank and the Vodafone Foundation, and was incubated first at the Technology Business Incubator at BITS Pilani and then at NSRCEL, the entrepreneurship centre at IIM Bangalore, raising an early round led by Mumbai Angels.

Goodera grew out of that work, and the shift it represents is a shift in who the customer is. CSR reporting is a compliance function bought by a compliance buyer. Employee volunteering is bought by HR, people operations and employee resource groups, and it is judged on whether employees enjoyed it — the company reports satisfaction ratings consistently above 80%. That is a harder product to build and a much larger market, because it touches every employee rather than a reporting team.

The volunteering product launched as a pilot in 2020 — timing that turned out to matter, since a workforce that had just gone remote created sudden demand for team experiences that did not require a room. Humbad described the aim as making social impact accessible across organisations worldwide, and the growth that followed as “explosive growth underlaid with strong foundations.”

Writing to mark a $10 million round backed by Zoom Ventures, Elevation Capital, Xto10X, Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network India, he set out three directions: expanding the global team, strengthening the technical infrastructure behind hybrid, remote and in-person experiences, and pushing volunteering into occasions it had not previously served — employee onboarding, holiday celebrations, team-building. That last point is the strategic one. It reframes volunteering from an annual CSR obligation into a recurring format for the moments when a company wants its people together, which is a considerably larger and more frequent purchase. The company has raised more than $25 million in total and counts Ursula Burns, formerly chief executive of Xerox, and Binny Bansal among its advisers.

Education

No education record could be established. Two institutions previously recorded here as awarding him degrees — the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and BITS Pilani — are in fact documented as having incubated his first company, NextGen, through NSRCEL and the Technology Business Incubator respectively. An incubator is not a degree, and both entries have been removed. Claims that he also studied at these institutions circulate in aggregated profiles but could not be verified against any reachable source, so nothing is asserted here.