Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Mumbai-based venture debt capital firm Alteria Capital has marked the second close of its maiden fund Alteria Capital India Fund I at ₹625 crores, with a total corpus target set at ₹1,000 crores, which includes a greenshoe option of ₹200 crores.

The fund has received anchor investments from Induslnd Bank, SIDBI, and a large domestic office family fund. It also has soft commitments for another 15% of the corpus and expects to close the fund, in the coming 3-5 months.

With the second close of the Fund I, the firm has also announced an investment of around ₹8 crores in a scooter rental startup Vogo. The startup had earlier raised funds in series A round from cab-hailing company Ola, along with Hero MotoCorp chairman Pawan Munjal’s family office, Stellaris Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India, earlier in August 2018.

Vogo was founded by Anand Ayyadurai, Padmanabhan Balakrishnan and Sanchit Mittal in 2016 with its headquarter in Bengaluru. It is a dockless scooter rental service that lets customers rent scooters for a one-way journey. Vogo uses an OTP-based IoT sensor in its scooters to access the key without the need for human intervention.

“We believe that the wealth of experience Alteria’s team brings to the table and their excellent network in India and abroad will help us to grow faster and make Vogo available to more customers,” said Anand Ayyadurai, Founder and CEO of Vogo.

Other players competing with Vogo in the bike and scooter rental domain include Bounce, WheelStreet, ONN Bikes, and Rentabike, among many others.

Alteria Capital was founded by former InnoVen Capital executives Ajay Hattangdi and Vinod Murali in 2017. So far the firm has completed five deals, with another 10 deals in the final stages of closing.

“The way our fund is structured, we have a deployment capability of ₹1,800 crore over 4 years. We want to capitalise on the growing demand for alternative forms of capital across entrepreneurs where we have strong relationships, which is core to our deployment strategy,” Vinod Murali, Managing Partner at Alteria Capital.

With the maiden Fund I, Alteria Capital is looking to back startups across different sectors with high potential for growth, while not looking to change intrinsic customer behaviour and having a pan-India reach to tap into a large market opportunity.

Apart from Vogo, other investments by the venture debt firm include online cold-pressed juice brand Raw Pressery, edtech startup Toppr, Universal Sportsbiz, and ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook food brand Fingerlix.

Last month, Unicorn India Ventures roped in Federal Bank as an anchor investor for its ₹600 crore debt fund.

By Varun

Startups | Books | Ideas

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