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Avendus Future Leaders Fund will fully invest the remaining portion of its ₹ 1,500-crore second series fund (FLF-II) by December, Ritesh Chandra, Managing Partner, has said.
So far, as much as 83 percent of $200 million FLF-II has been deployed across ten investments. “The remaining 17 per cent corpus will be deployed by December”, Chandra told businessline in an interview.
FLF-II, which was launched in 2021, is now eyeing investments into sectors such as healthcare and manufacture, which hold lots of promise for good investment returns, Chandra said. FLF-II has so far not invested in either healthcare or manufacturing, Chandra noted.
“I am open to healthcare. I am very bullish on manufacturing sector. We are very keen on speciality hospitals. We are very keen on multi-hospital chains. We are also looking at health tech businesses apart from traditional ones.
In manufacturing, we are very keen on high-end design—companies that do stuff for aerospace”, he said.
India has lot of roadmap for manufacturing as lot of stuff is moving out of China, he added.
Chandra also highlighted that he was not a control investor, but can only go in for minority stakes. A lot of deals in healthcare sector in last two years have been control transactions.
The existing portfolio companies of FLF-II include SBI General Insurance, Licious, Zeta, Lenskart, Xpressbees, NSE, Indegene, Veritas Finance and FirstCry.
Focus area
Avendus Future Leaders Fund is focused on investing in ‘best of breed’ market leaders/ emerging leaders with the objective of mid-long term value creation.
The Fund leverages the strengths of the Avendus ecosystem – its network, relationships and industry insights and invests minority stakes in late stage companies.
Core sectors of focus for the Fund are digital technologies, consumption and financial services. Chandra said that he is very bullish on financial services and highlighted that credit demand in the system was 15-16 per cent. “Financial services is largest part of our portfolio,” he said.
The first series of the Fund (FLF-I) was launched in 2019 and had raised ₹375 crore. It has made ten investments to date – Bikaji Foods, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Lenskart Solutions, National Stock Exchange, Delhivery, VerSe Innovation (Dailyhunt), SBI General Insurance, Licious, Juspay and Xpressbees.
Asked if Avendus as an Alternate Investment Fund had any presence in GIFT City, he replied in the negative. “We don’t have any presence now. We will do it at some point in time and do it gradually. GIFT City is no longer an option one can ignore. It has to be a strategic call,” he said.
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