Mumbai-based BlackSoil Capital Pvt. Ltd has raised $17 million (Rs 117 crore) from existing investors in a Series C round, the non-banking financial company said in a statement.
The Series C round takes the total equity fundraise thus far to $25 million, BlackSoil said. It has also raised $27 million in debt from banks and wealthy individuals till date.
The non-bank lender is backed by the family offices of the promoters of Allcargo Logistics, Navneet Education and Mahavir Agency.
BlackSoil offers debt to real estate companies, promoters of unlisted companies as well as to investor-backed new-economy companies. Loans to the new-economy startups are sanctioned based on their cash flows as these businesses tend to be asset-light in nature.
The NBFC has deployed about Rs 700 crore across 80 transactions in less than two years of operations. Its loan book at the end of June 2018 was Rs 400 crore compared with Rs 120 crore at the end of March 2017. In the April-June quarter, the firm deployed over Rs 160 crore across 19 deals. It has so far clocked 17 complete exits from its portfolio.
“In an environment when banks are averse to direct funding to real estate and new-economy companies, NBFCs like us have a good opportunity to support such companies as long as they meet our conservative underwriting parameters, security and cash flows requirements,” said Shashi Kiran Shetty, chairman and managing director at Allcargo Logistics and one of the sponsors of the non-bank lender.
Shetty said that the Series C equity round comes at a good time to scale up assets under management in the segments where BlackSoil operates.
The NBFC recently tied up with Walton Street for an alternative investment fund with a corpus of Rs 300 crore. BlackSoil said it has already invested 30% of the fund across three deals in the past six months.
In its most recent transaction, BlackSoil provided debt funding to business-to-business marketplace Industrybuying.
It has previously funded logistics startup GoBolt, marketing automation startup WebEngage, weight management services firm Truweight, retail analytics provider Intelligence Node Consulting Pvt. Ltd and consumer product firm Chumbak Design Pvt. Ltd, among others.
