Venture debt firm Stride Ventures raises USD 200 mn for onlending to startups

Mumbai: Stride Ventures on Wednesday announced that it has raised USD 200 million (about Rs 1,588 crore) for onlending to startups.

The USD 200 million commitments for the final closure of the 'Stride Ventures India Fund II' came from banks, family offices, corporate treasuries, sovereign funds, private equity funds, insurance firms, and high networth individuals, as per a statement.

The company had in August 2021 announced the first closure of the fund at Rs 550 crore of the targeted corpus of Rs 1,000 crore which could go up by Rs 875 crore through a greenshoe option.

The close comes during what is being called a 'funding winter' in the startup world, and also at a time when the interest in non-dilution of equity among founders is gaining ground, making venture debt more attractive as compared to venture capital where equity holdings need to be diluted.

"The current economic environment has made growing businesses more amenable to debt transactions than ever before, giving India's venture lending industry a chance to grow and evolve," Stride Ventures' Partner Apoorva Sharma said.

"The growing investor trust in the Indian start-up ecosystem provided us with a great opportunity to develop a strong pipeline of deployments that we have utilized across various sectors," its founder and Managing Partner Ishpreet Singh Gandhi said.

Gandhi said Stride has already committed a large portion of the fund in industry leading startups and its goal is to continue being a preferred lender while developing innovative alternate financing solutions for founders.

It follows an agnostic approach and has been lending to companies in segments like consumer, fintech, agri-tech, B2B commerce, health-tech, B2B software as a service (SaaS), mobility and energy solutions (including electric vehicles).

In August last year, it had said disbursals in 2021 are supposed to cross Rs 400 crore and the average ticket size for new deployments is going up to Rs 75 crore.