Kotak Investment Advisors raises $380 million

Private Equity major Kotak Investment Advisors (KIAL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Bank, has raised $380 million from a clutch of global investors through a new real-estate fund. The PE firm will use the proceeds for early and late stage real-estate project investments.

The real-estate fund, which will invest only as debt, has been set up as an Alternative Investment Fund under SEBI regulations.

“Our new real-estate fund has been closed at an opportune time. We have a flexible investment mandate, enabling us to provide the much-needed capital to address the short-term financial dislocation in the real- estate financing market as well as long-term capital to address the liquidity issue,” Srini Sriniwasan, Managing Director at KIAL, said.

The fund is anchored by a clutch of leading global financial investors and is one of the largest dedicated real-estate financing funds closed in recent times in India, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. The new fund will target both early stage and late stage real-estate projects in residential, commercial, retail, warehousing and hospitality sectors, the PE firm said in a statement.

“The new fund is the 11th fund in our real-estate fund series since our first fund raised in 2005. With this fund, we cross total raise of $2.2 billion. This demonstrates strong confidence of global investors in our long-standing track record and our ability to source, underwrite and manage real-estate investments. We have a robust pipeline of transactions coming through as financing and structured credit solutions. This fund shall continue to capitalise on our resilient past experience of investing in 60 plus real-estate transactions,” Vikas Chimakurthy, CEO, Kotak Realty Fund said.