Mission
Make responsible-business evidence understandable and useful to the public.
Founder & Executive Director
Daksh Shetty
Leadership
Research should make accountability accessible.
Impact500 exists to turn fragmented corporate disclosure into evidence people can understand, compare, and use.
Daksh Shetty founded Impact500 at the intersection of business, public policy, sustainability, and financial literacy. He directs the institute’s research strategy, evaluation framework, publication program, and long-term platform development.
Contact the instituteResearch interests
Corporate responsibility, public policy, governance, sustainability, and economic development.
Education
An interdisciplinary student researcher pursuing business and public-policy leadership.
Long-term goal
Build a trusted, publicly accessible institution for comparative corporate research.
Research philosophy
Evidence before claims.
Responsible business research should be rigorous without becoming inaccessible. Impact500 evaluates every company through the same framework, preserves the source trail, and distinguishes verified findings from modeled or pending research.
The institute’s vision is not simply to publish rankings. It is to create a durable public research infrastructure that helps students, journalists, researchers, executives, and policymakers ask better questions.
Development timeline
Building the institution.
- 2023
The question
Began exploring why corporate responsibility disclosures remained difficult for students and the public to compare.
- 2024
The framework
Developed a four-pillar model connecting environmental, financial, philanthropic, and ethical performance.
- 2025
Impact500 launches
Published the first company research, methodology, and annual assessment.
- 2026
A national platform
Expanded coverage to the complete Fortune 500 research universe and introduced interactive intelligence tools.