Stride Ventures launches debt fund, targets ₹1,000 crore corpus

Venture debt provider Stride Ventures on Tuesday said it is launching Stride Ventures India Fund II, its second venture debt fund, with a targeted corpus of ₹1,000 crore and a greenshoe option to raise an additional ₹875 crore.

Stride said it will continue investing in early- to late-stage startups, with the ticket size from the new fund expected to go up to ₹70 crore.

The new fund will have a commitment period of four years, within which the capital will be deployed and recycled.

While Stride is a sector-agnostic investor, it will look to invest primarily in sectors such as B2B commerce and SaaS, consumer, healthtech, fintech and agritech.

“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,” said 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 consistent returns. We have seen great interest from all our existing investors and are looking at on-boarding new investors as well for Fund II. With these considerations in mind, we are looking at the first close of our second fund in 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.