Venture debt firm Alteria Capital Advisors LLP has raised Rs100 crore from Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) for its Rs1,000-crore debt fund, a senior executive said.
The fund, set up by Ajay Hattangadi and Vinod Murli, former executives of Temasek-backed Innoven Capital, started operations in October. Alteria Capital is targeting a total corpus of Rs800 crore with a green shoe option of another Rs200 crore. It expects to raise the entire sum by the second half of this year.
The venture debt fund announced a first close of Rs365 crore in March.
“We had strong tailwinds since getting the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) approval in November, which allowed us to do our first close in 100 days. We recently received a sanction of Rs100 crore from SIDBI’s fund of funds scheme and we are currently in talks with other domestic foundations, family offices, ultra HNIs and institutions to invest in Alteria,” said Murli, co-founder and managing partner at Alteria Capital.
The initial commitments for the fund came from domestic and overseas family-owned business groups, as well as from institutional investors.
“We have also received our approvals for the offshore feeder entity in Mauritius in March, which now allows us to kick-start our fund-raising discussions offshore, formally,” said Hattangdi, co-founder and managing partner at Alteria Capital.
Alteria Capital has so far invested in a fashion start-up Universal Sportsbiz Pvt. Ltd and food start-up Fingerlix.
The fund aims to invest in start-ups across early and growth stages in consumer services, technology, healthcare, education and logistics.
“We will definitely be doing a lot of work in healthcare and education sectors which are also considered to be impact investments. We are sector agnostic but focus will be on technology, consumer and healthcare. The companies we fund have to be high growth business typically and our return expectation will be similar across every situation given our obligation to our investors,” said Hattangadi.
The fund can invest in ticket sizes starting from Rs2 crore and going up to Rs100 crore.
“We are possibly the only active venture debt player in India who can write cheques of more than Rs60 crore for Indian companies. We will end up deploying more than Rs1,000 crore over a span of four years. We will draw capital over three years and since we can recycle the principal amount, we will end up deploying almost Rs2,000 crore over four years, unlike an equity investor where they cannot recycle capital,” said Murli.
Alteria Capital is the newest player in the venture debt market and competes with Temasek-backed InnoVen Capital, Trifecta Capital and IntelleGrow, among others.
Source: Mint