Stride Ventures launches second debt fund with target corpus of Rs 1,000 Cr

Stride Ventures, a leading venture debt fund in the country is launching its much larger second fund. Called the Stride Ventures India Fund II, it will have a targeted corpus of Rs 1,000 crore and a greenshoe option to raise an additional Rs 875 crore.

According to Stride Ventures, it will continue to invest in early to late-stage startups with ticket size from the new fund expected to go up to Rs 70 crore.

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On the new fund, Ishpreet Gandhi, Founder and Managing Partner, Stride Ventures, said, “We are extremely proud to have partnered with leading founders, and would continue to support them in every step of the way as we take a leap into the second fund. As founders become increasingly aware of debt and alternative capital for non-dilutive structures, our deployments have grown considerably as we partner with fundamentally strong companies.”

The new fund will have a commitment period of four years within which the capital will be deployed and recycled. Stride said with its ability to recycle capital, it will effectively have more than Rs 3,000 crore for funding startups through venture debt and offer multifaceted credit solutions to its portfolio companies.

Though the fund is sector agnostic, it will look to invest primarily in sectors such as B2B commerce and SaaS, consumer, healthtech, fintech, agritech, amongst others. Similar to the first fund, the second fund is expected to witness participation from large family offices, sovereign funds, PE funds, insurance firms, and HNIs across India, Singapore and GCC.

‘’Despite the pandemic, our Fund has served as a good diversification for our investors’ asset allocation, having continued to post strong and consistent returns. We have seen great interest from all our existing investors and are looking at onboarding new investors as well for Fund II,” said Ishpreet.

Founded in 2019, Stride Ventures closed its maiden fund earlier this year after overshooting its initial target corpus of Rs 350 crore. It has funded more than 20 companies from Stride Ventures India Fund I. Some of the key deals for the maiden fund have been in growth-stage startups including Pocket Aces, Miko, SUGAR Cosmetics etc, and late-stage startups like Infra.Market, Spinny, HomeLane, Zetwerk, and Bizongo.