Shah Gupta Family Foundation

Shah Gupta Family Foundation (EIN 93-4580960, Vienna, VA) is an extremely young, closely-held private family foundation — it received its IRS ruling in May 2024 and has no paid staff. Its two officers, Amee K. Shah (President/CEO) and Rohit Gupta (Vice President), both serve without compensation, and its own database record lists no mission statement, no defined programs, and 'application_instructions: none.' The foundation's website, shahgupta.org, is a parked 'Launching Soon' placeholder with only a generic contact form — there is no LOI process, no portal, and no published funding priorities anywhere online. This is the profile of a first-generation family giving vehicle, likely seeded by a single liquidity event (a $2,000,000 lump-sum contribution in its first fiscal year, 2023), set up primarily to formalize the family's personal charitable giving rather than to run a public competitive grants program. For grant seekers, the practical implication is important: this is not a 'submit a strong proposal' funder at this stage — it is a 'be known to the family' funder. The realistic path to funding runs through a warm, personal connection to Amee Shah or Rohit Gupta — professional networks, community ties in the Vienna/DC/Virginia/Maryland corridor, or existing nonprofit relationships — rather than a cold LOI. First-time applicants should not expect a formal review cycle, site visit process, or published deadline, because none of those structures have been built yet. Given the foundation has only made 10-12 grants per year in its first two active years, capacity is also genuinely limited: this is not a foundation that can fund large, multi-year institutional partnerships. Organizations with an existing relationship to the founders, or that operate in human services or health care in the DC/VA/MD area, are the best fit. Everyone else should treat this as a foundation to monitor rather than actively court until it publishes real program information — the 2026-dated website rebuild suggests that may happen, but hasn't yet.

The foundation's three years of filed financials show a clear arc from asset accumulation to active granting. FY2023: a single $2,000,000 contribution funded the entire corpus; no grants were paid and no expenses were reported. FY2024: revenue was $737,079 (all contributions), expenses were $104,921, and $100,140 (95.4% of expenses) went out as grants, leaving net assets of $2,726,647. FY2025: revenue fell to $105,297 — critically, 96.2% of that was dividend/investment income rather than new family contributions, signaling the founders have stopped adding fresh capital. Expenses of $137,867 produced a net operating loss of $32,570, but grants paid rose to roughly $130,030 across 10 awards (94.3% of expenses), with net assets still growing modestly to $2,957,446 on investment gains. Award size has stayed narrow and small: individual grants have ranged from $1,030 to $50,000, with an average around $10,500-$13,000 per award — consistent with a foundation writing a fixed roster of modest checks each year rather than making a few large, transformational gifts. Year-over-year total giving grew about 30% ($100,140 to $130,030), and the payout rate in FY2025 (~4.4% of year-end assets) sits close to the IRS-mandated 5% minimum distribution for private foundations, suggesting the family is granting near the statutory floor rather than being an unusually generous payer relative to its asset base. No grantee-level breakdown by program area or geography is available in our data or in public 990 aggregators, and the foundation's own record lists no defined focus area — its NTEE code (T20, Philanthropy & Grantmaking) is a generic classification for the foundation vehicle itself, not a statement of grantmaking priorities. Third-party 990 aggregators tag it broadly across philanthropy, human services, and health care with a geographic concentration in DC, Virginia, and Maryland, which tracks with the family's Vienna, VA base, but these tags are inferred from filing data rather than a published strategy.

Our database groups Shah Gupta Family Foundation with five other small, similarly-sized private foundations under the Philanthropy & Grantmaking NTEE category, all clustered in the same roughly $2.47-2.48M asset band as this foundation's IRS Business Master File figure (its most current 990 shows assets have since grown to ~$2.96M).

What stands out is that none of these peer foundations — nor Shah Gupta Family Foundation until very recently — maintain a public website with grant information; Shah Gupta is actually ahead of this peer set in that it at least has a domain under active construction (shahgupta.org). This confirms the pattern that sub-$3M single-family foundations in this category are almost universally closed, relationship-driven vehicles rather than open grantmakers, and grant seekers should expect the same informal, network-based access model across this entire peer group rather than treating Shah Gupta as an outlier.

The most concrete recent activity is financial rather than editorial: the foundation's FY2025 Form 990-PF (filed 2026-07-08) shows its second consecutive year of active grantmaking, with $130,030 distributed across 10 awards — a roughly 30% increase over the $100,140 distributed in FY2024 (filed 2025-11-18), which was itself the foundation's first year of any granting after a 2023 startup year with zero grants paid. Net assets have grown steadily through this period, from $2,000,000 at the 2023 filing to $2,726,647 in 2024 and $2,957,446 in 2025, even though FY2025 posted an operating loss ($105,297 in revenue against $137,867 in expenses), meaning growth came from investment gains rather than new contributions or spending discipline. No leadership changes have occurred — Amee K. Shah (President/CEO) and Rohit Gupta (Vice President) have held their uncompensated officer roles across all three filed years. We found no press coverage, press releases, or public announcements referencing the foundation by name; searches for 'Shah Gupta Family Foundation' news surface only tax-filing aggregators (ProPublica, Instrumentl, Cause IQ) and unrelated organizations that happen to share the 'Gupta Family Foundation' name in other states. The one visible sign of forward motion is the foundation's own website, shahgupta.org, which displays a 'Launching Soon' placeholder carrying a 2026 copyright — indicating the family is likely in the process of building a real public-facing presence, though nothing about programs, priorities, or an application process has gone live as of this research.

Because Shah Gupta Family Foundation has not published any application process, the most useful advice for grant seekers is about how to approach a pre-formal, closed family foundation rather than generic proposal-writing tips. First, do not submit a cold LOI or proposal through shahgupta.org — its only functioning feature is a generic 'Drop us a line' contact form with name/email fields, not a grants intake system, and there is no evidence submissions there are reviewed as funding requests. Second, treat this as a relationship-first funder: with only 10 grants made in FY2025 and 12 or fewer likely in FY2024, the foundation is funding a small, probably pre-identified roster of organizations connected to Amee K. Shah and Rohit Gupta rather than running an open competition. The highest-value action for an applicant is finding a genuine personal or professional connection to the founders — through Vienna/DC-area civic or nonprofit circles, entrepreneurial and startup networks (Amee Shah's public profile identifies her as an entrepreneur and strategic adviser), or Indian-American community and philanthropic organizations — rather than spending time perfecting a written proposal. Third, calibrate any eventual ask to what the foundation has actually funded: individual grants have run from $1,030 to $50,000 with most clustering around $10,000-$13,000, so a request for a modest, defined project or program — not a large multi-year capacity grant — fits its demonstrated capacity. Fourth, keep pitches broad rather than narrowly specialized; the foundation carries no published focus statement, and third-party trackers tag it loosely across philanthropy, human services, and health care, so framing a request around general community impact in the DC/Virginia/Maryland region is more defensible than assuming a specific program area. Finally, the most common mistake would be treating this like an established, staffed foundation with a review calendar — there is no evidence of a site-visit process, LOI-to-full-proposal progression, or fixed deadline, so organizations should watch for the website to launch a real program before investing serious proposal-development time, and in the meantime focus entirely on relationship-building.