Alteria Capital, which received approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India to float a Rs 1,000 crore venture debt fund last October, on Wednesday announced to raise Rs 356 crore in the first round of its maiden Alteria Capital India Fund I.
The fund has received investments from institutional investors such as IndusInd Bank and from anchor investors. Besides, the fund has received commitments for another Rs 200 crore from both domestic and foreign institutional investors.
Alteria Capital is expected to close its entire corpus by the second half of 2018.
Ajay Hattangdi and Vinod Murali, former senior executives at Temasek-backed InnoVen Capital, are the promoters of India’s biggest venture debt fund.
Alteria Capital will invest between Rs 2 and 100 crore in debt financing for startups backed by venture capital players at different growth stages. The debt fund is planning to deploy Rs 300-400 crore in 2018 and will invest around Rs 2,000 crore in startups over the next four years.
The future of investments in startups looks bright. In the past one year, many venture capital and a few debt firms have launched India-focussed funds, raised thousands of crores and invested hundreds of crores in the Indian startup ecosystem.
Last year, venture debt firm InnoVen Capital India deployed $75 million in the startup ecosystem, through debt financing. Innoven Capital invested over 40 per cent of the $75 million in growth stage companies such as OYO Rooms, Swiggy, Capillary Technologies, RentoMojo and Belong.
Trifecta Capital is another debt fund which has been increasingly investing in venture debt funds. It has 13 insurance companies and several family offices as investors in its debut fund.
BigBasket is one of the many portfolio companies of the venture debt fund. It has so far raised over Rs 50 crore in the online grocery delivery startup.
Last year, the founder of UIDAI (AADHAAR) Nandan Nilekani joined hands with Helion Venture’s Sanjeev Aggarwal to launch an investment fund called Fundamentum with a corpus of $100 million to back startups looking for growth capital.
The development was first reported by ET.
