Varhad to float funds for cheaper housing, women entrepreneurs

After getting a mandate to manage the recently floated Dalit Venture Fund, the Varhad Capital Group plans to float two more, one for funding women entrepreneurs and another for affordable housing. Each of these is to have a corpus of $100 million.

The focus of the Varhad Group is on the impact investment segment. The ambit also covers professional advisory to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) wishing to access growth capital and expand business. It has three entities - Varhad Investment Managers, Varhad Capital and Varhad Financial Consultancy Services. Of the two new funds, Prasad Dahapute, founder and managing director of Varhad Capital, said: "The group is planning to float both in the next 24 months, for which ground work is underway. We will approach overseas funds to seek investments into the corpus."

The affordable housing fund will invest in developers and companies that build houses valued up to Rs 25 lakh each. It might also invest in non-banking finance companies giving loans to people to buy such homes.

On funding businesses by women, he said such outlets always find adequate financial support a challenge.

These two funds will do selection of prospective investment targets, based on in-house research on growth prospects, profile and management capabilities.

The Dalit Venture Fund, initiated by the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry, was launched by Union finance minister P Chidambaram here last week. It got an initial contribution of Rs 10 crore by the Small Industries Development Bank of India. The Varhad group has also invested Rs 5 crore in this fund. 'The fund managers have skin in the game," noted Dahapute.

The fund aims to raise Rs 500 crore over 10 years and finance Dalit entrepreneurs to set up their businesses. The vision is to make 1,000 "SMEites" rupee billionaires by 2023.