The firm will continue investing in early to late-stage startups with ticket size from the new fund expected to go up to ₹70 crore, it said.
The new fund will have a commitment period of four years within which the capital will be deployed and recycled.
While Strides is a sector agnostic investor, it will look to invest primarily in sectors such as B2B commerce and SaaS, consumer, healthtech, fintech, agritech, amongst others.
“As founders become increasingly aware about debt and alternative capital for non-dilutive structures, our deployments have grown considerably as we partner with fundamentally strong companies. Since inception, our endeavour has been to adopt a partner-centric approach and cater to the distinctive credit requirements of new-age businesses in India,” Ishpreet Gandhi, founder and managing partner at Stride Ventures.
“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. With these considerations in mind, we are looking at the first close of our second Fund within the next three months,” he added.
Founded in 2019, Stride Ventures closed its maiden fund earlier this year after overshooting its initial target corpus of ₹350 crore. It has funded more than 20 companies from Stride Ventures India Fund I, including startups such as Pocket Aces, Miko, SUGAR Cosmetics, Infra.market, Spinny, Home Lane, Zetwerk and Bizongo.
“We constantly innovate to provide customised credit structures for our portfolio companies and help them size debt capital around predictable cash flows to minimise risk. We have built a strong risk culture across the firm by emphasis on in-depth 360 degree analysis of businesses that we invest in, robust internal processes and disciplined monthly monitoring of the portfolio. This gives us a lot of confidence as we go into a larger Fund II and remain committed to provide class-leading returns to our investors,” said Abhinav Suri, managing partner, Stride Ventures.
This article was first published on livemint.com