As a child in Chicago, Amir Alexander Hasson often gazed at a framed photograph of his mother shaking hands with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi—taken around 1968 when his mom went to India on an agricultural exchange program as part of the country’s “Green Revolution.”

Following in her footsteps 35 years later, Mr. Hasson went to India to help drive India’s digital revolution, setting up a branch of United Villages there.

United Villages, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, developed technology to wirelessly connect isolated villages to the Internet, using Wi-Fi in an unusual way.Using pre-paid cards, locals in remote villages write emails or record phone messages and save their words at computer kiosks installed in schools and community halls—and this is where United Villages comes in.

Using what United Villages calls DakNet, buses fitted out with short-range Wi-Fi antennas pass through villages, automatically picking up stored emails and voice messages as they go. Once a bus reaches a city with Internet connectivity, it relays the emails and messages to their appointed destinations via the web.

“We’re becoming the glue that sticks together those areas that have mobile connectivity and those that don’t,” Mr. Hasson explains. Mr. Hasson earned his master’s from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2002 and then worked briefly as business development manager for MIT Media Lab Asia before starting up First Mile Solutions (FMS), the precursor to United Villages, in 2003.

He says his company should break even if just 30 villagers use each installation monthly. Kiosks are run by local businessmen who sell the prepaid cards for a small commission. Mr. Hasson says he eventually will start similar services in Africa, Brazil, and China.

Despite its mission to help the disadvantaged, United Villages aims to make money. So far, it has won backing from Omidyar Network (of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar fame) and Philippe Villers, who backed GrameenPhone, the Bangladeshi telco that connected 40,000 villages using a similar for-profit model. Omidyar Network and Villers invested in both March 2005 and September 2006 financings.

In the digital age, doing good needn’t rule out making money.—Kalpana Shah