Old Bridge Capital Management, the portfolio management services firm founded by former IDFC Asset Management Co. chief investment officer Kenneth Andrade, has again increased the target corpus for its public markets fund.
The firm had floated the Vantage Equity Fund late last year. It had originally aimed to raise up to Rs 400 crore, including Rs 300 crore in the greenshoe option.
However, the fund has already raised about Rs 750 crore ($115 million) and is now looking to raise an additional Rs 300 crore ($46 million), it said in a statement.
Vantage Equity is a registered as a Category III alternative investment fund (AIF) with the capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India. Category III includes hedge funds and public market-focussed PIPE funds, or those that make private investments in public equities.
The fund has so far attracted roughly 700 investors. It is now seeking additional 300 investors to a max permissible limit of 1,000 investors, as per SEBI’s AIF Regulations, 2012.
An AIF is not allowed to receive an investment of less than Rs 1 crore from an investor. Also, the fund or any scheme of the fund is not allowed to have more than 1,000 investors, according to SEBI rules.
The three-year close-ended fund is an extension of Old Bridge’s previous offerings. While the fund’s investment strategy will be similar to that of the firm’s earlier offerings, the AIF structure will allow more operating ease, besides being scalable, Andrade had told Mint newspaper in November last year.
Andrade had left IDFC AMC in 2015. He founded his asset management firm in 2016 and now manages $200 million in assets and about 700 clients.
Vantage Equity Fund, which has a portfolio of 25 companies, looks to invest in companies and sectors seeing poor performance and depressed valuations, Andrade had told Mint. The new fund will also look at mid-cap and rural businesses but will stay away from firms with high debt. It will primarily focus on manufacturing, engineering and agriculture sectors.
Andrade’s fund is among a growing list of AIF funds that have already been floated or are on the verge of being floated.
Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund recently appointed Naganath Sundaresan, former chief investment officer at DSP BlackRock Mutual Fund, as India head of its AIF division with an aim to introduce and grow the alternatives space in India.
VCCircle reported in September how a growing number of wealthy investors were investing in diverse AIFs, indicating deepening of public markets in India.
SEBI had introduced its AIF regulations in 2012 to supervise the unregulated fund market in India comprising private equity funds, real estate funds and hedge funds, besides encouraging new capital formation and protecting investors. Since then, more than 300 AIFs have registered with SEBI.