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Yes and Centum win big for powering youth dreams
MUMBAI: Talk about making a skill-ful impact! Yes Foundation and Centum Foundation have bagged the prestigious Mahatma Award for Partnership & Impact 2025 for their joint initiative, the Youth Empowerment for Security (YES) Programme, which is changing the lives of young Indians one skill at a time.
The initiative, focused on skilling and employability, has trained over 1,800 underserved youth across Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Telangana, and Assam, with more than 30 per cent women participants. Over 1,250 of them have already found jobs in fast-growing sectors such as retail, BFSI, healthcare, and logistics.
The programme’s success comes at a time when women’s workforce participation in India is on the rise. Government data shows the female worker population ratio jumped from 30.2 per cent in June to 32 per cent in August 2025, signalling a strong push towards inclusion.
“This partnership is helping young people gain skills, confidence, and opportunities,” said Yes Bank president, CSR and CEO of Yes Foundation Garima Dutt. “It’s not just transforming lives but building a future of economic self-reliance and inclusive growth.”
Upgrad Enterprise CEO Srikanth Iyengar, which supports Centum Foundation through scalable skilling models, added, “Social impact doesn’t happen overnight. Together, we’re bridging the gap between aspiration and opportunity, especially for women and rural youth.”
Instituted by philanthropist Amit Sachdeva and supported by the Aditya Birla Group, the Mahatma Award celebrates organisations that embody Gandhian values of truth, inclusion, and social justice. Previous winners include icons such as Ratan Tata, Sudha Murthy, and Microsoft Philanthropy.
The recognition adds to Centum Foundation’s growing list of honours, including a recent Brandon Hall Gold Award for the same initiative, proving that when partnerships work with purpose, the impact speaks louder than words.
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UK’s OnlyFans seeks US investor at $3bn valuation after owner’s death
The adult video platform is seeking stability after the death of its billionaire owner
LONDON: OnlyFans is looking for a new partner. The London-based adult video platform is in advanced talks to sell a minority stake of less than 20 per cent to Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm, in a deal that would value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).
The move is driven by an urgent need for stability. Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-American billionaire who owned OnlyFans, died of cancer last month at the age of 43, leaving the future of one of Britain’s most profitable privately held businesses suddenly uncertain.
The choice of Architect Capital is not arbitrary. The firm has deep expertise in financial services, which aligns neatly with OnlyFans’ ambitions to offer banking products to its creators, many of whom have long struggled to access basic financial services because of the nature of their work.
The numbers behind OnlyFans are, by any measure, staggering. The platform posted revenues of $1.4bn in the year to 30th November 2024, with a pre-tax profit of $684m, up four per cent on the prior year. Payments to creators totalled $7.2bn over the same period, a rise of nearly ten per cent. Radvinsky personally collected $701m in dividends from the business in 2024 alone, on top of more than $1bn in such payments he had already received. The platform, run through its parent company Felix International, hosts 4.6m creator accounts, with performers keeping 80 per cent of subscription proceeds and the platform pocketing the remaining 20 per cent. It has 377m fan accounts in total.
The current minority stake talks represent a notable scaling back of ambitions. In January, OnlyFans was reported to be in discussions with Architect about selling a majority stake of 60 per cent. Before that, the company had explored a sale to a consortium led by Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. Neither deal materialised.
OnlyFans has built an enormously lucrative business on content that mainstream finance has long refused to touch. Now, with its owner gone and a $3bn valuation on the table, it is looking for the kind of respectable institutional backing that might finally persuade the banks to take its calls.
