In less than 50 days, the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI)’s India Aspiration Fund has disbursed about ₹600 crore to start-ups. The fund was launched in August with a corpus of ₹2,000 crore to catalyse equity investment into start-ups. 

Chairman and Managing Director of SIDBI Kshatrapati Shivaji told BusinessLine that a venture capital investment committee has been formed by SIDBI consisting of independent experts such as Mohandas Pai, Kiran Karnik and Saurabh Srivastava to steer the entire processing of the applications for the fund.

Shivaji said that lack of capital is affecting many first generation entrepreneurs in hinterland areas, “They even manage to get debt capital but getting equity for their start-ups is a big problem. It is even a bigger hurdle for Intellectual Property (IP) centric ventures,” he said.

LIC is a partner and co-investor in the fund. “In IP driven ventures, the ideas are in the air, which has the potential to transform and disrupt entire systems in their product lines. Experience shows that getting debt capital is challenging but galvanising equity is all the more a tough climb. Therefore, we devised a product, which should give a flip to the ongoing IP-centric start-ups,” Shivaji said.

The Chairman, who is himself an alumnus of IIT, said that entrepreneurship is not just driven by graduates from IITs and IIMs, but others are also doing it.

“We do not produce inventions because we lack world-class education facilities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There is no dearth of innovation and talent. For these emerging businessmen, we have launched the fund,” Shivaji said.

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