Aavishkaar-Intellecap group raises $25 million from European lender Triodos and Shell Foundation

Impact investment-focussed Aavishkaar-Intellecap group on Tuesday announced an equity fund raise of $25 million led by Triodos Investment Management, the investment arm of European lender Triodos Bank and Shell Foundation, an independent charity established by the oil giant, Shell Group.
 
The investment - $15 million from Triodos and $10 million from Shell - will be infused in the parent company, enabling Aavishkaar-Intellecap to expand its ecosystem, building services and businesses across the globe. "The funds will allow us to expand our investment in India and also geographically expand to Africa and Southeast Asia, our target markets,” explained the group’s founder Vineet Rai.

Aaavishkaar-Intellecap currently has $400 million in assets under management and a team of 2,500 members spread across Asia, Africa and the Americas. Founded in 2002, the group helps entrepreneurs who work to solve challenging global problems like poverty alleviation, health care, education, energy issues and the like, scale their businesses by providing equity, debt and advisory services. “Over the next 8-10 years, we want to scale from roughly half a billion dollars under assets that we manage to a billion dollars,” said Rai, pointing out that India, in particular, offered scale and impact in the right quantum. “We have no dearth of quality entrepreneurs, so with the right capital, we can create scalable businesses in challenging areas which people believe are the government’s domain.” Rai is also looking to deploy the fresh funds to hire “significant senior leadership” who will be able to manage the expanded scale of operations.

“At Triodos, we believe it is essential to drive changes in society which will help us achieve sustainable development goals. We were very happy with the fact that in Aavishkaar-Intellecap we found a partner that has a very nicely aligned vision and strategy to building an ecosystem and achieving those goals,” said Dirk Elsen, director emerging markets at Triodos Investment Management, adding that this was an extension of a partnership that started out two years ago when Triodos got involved with Aavishkaar-Intellecap’s debt business.

The group also announced a formal restructuring of its business under three lines: Equity investments under Aavishkaar, advisory services like investment banking, consulting and research under Intellecap and debt funding vehicles, such as microfinance lending, working capital and loans to SMEs as well as venture debt under Arohan, IntelleGrow and IntelleCash.