Swet Sarika

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC is exploring exit options for a real estate investment in India it made around eight years ago, two people close to the development told VCCircle.

One of the most active investors in India’s real estate market, GIC has partnered with developers such as Nirlon Ltd, DLF Ltd, and Godrej Properties over the years.  

In recent years, however, it has also focused on exits from older investments. 

Last year, as reported by VCCircle, GIC sold its 49.9% stake in a joint venture with DLF that was set up in 2015 to develop two housing projects in Central Delhi. In 2023, it sold its 50% stake in Runwal Group's R City Mall for Rs 1,000 crore ($110 million).

In the latest planned exit, GIC is looking to sell its stake in Provenance Land, a joint venture set up in 2018 with the RK Jatia Group. The JV was formed to develop Four Seasons-branded private residences and an office tower on a 4.5-acre land parcel in Worli, Mumbai. GIC had picked up a minority stake in the venture for roughly Rs 1,300 crore.

"There have been attempts to structure a deal that will give an exit to GIC, but nothing has materialized. The joint venture first needs to refinance its existing debt and then a new equity partner can buy out the stake of GIC," one of the persons involved in the transaction said.

The second person said the exit process has been underway for some time. "We have shown the deal to quite a few investors, including some of the most active players in the real estate market, but there are challenges that need to be addressed before a deal is finalized," the person said.

Both persons said the challenges are related to debt and completion timelines. 

If the exit materializes, it will mark yet another liquidity event for GIC in India’s real estate sector.

Separate emails sent to the spokespersons of GIC and Provenance Land remained unanswered till the time of publishing this article. 

GIC's current key real estate exposure in India includes Nirlon, where it owns over 60% stake; DLF's rental arm DLF Cyber City Developers, where it owns 33% stake; an investment in Godrej Properties; a partnership with ESR Group for logistics parks; and a partnership with Brookfield to own office assets across Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, among others. 

Meanwhile, the Jatia Group has a joint venture with Japan's Sumitomo Realty & Development Co Ltd (Goisu India) to develop two Grade-A commercial projects in Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), with a total built-up area of 2 million square feet.

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC is exploring exit options for a real estate investment in India it made around......

GIC explores exit from eight-year-old India real estate bet

Infrastructure

Real Estate

Aman Malik

​Smart meter maker Genus Power Infrastructures Ltd will acquire the 86.49% stake it doesn’t already own in smaller peer Newlectric Innovation Pvt Ltd for Rs 25.23 crore ($2.7 million) in cash.

The acquisition aligns with the company’s strategic objectives as it would enable the consolidation of operations, optimize production capacity utilization, and enhance operational efficiency, Genus said in a stock-exchange filing.

The company said that, following this deal, it will be “well-positioned to scale up production capacity in response to current order book and future business growth.”

Genus Power had received a 13.51% stake in Newlectric when it demerged the electric energy meter business of unit Genus Innovation Ltd during 2024-25.

Newlectric Innovation was set up in November 2021 and makes smart electricity meters. It reported revenue of Rs 10.92 crore in 2024-25, down from Rs 43.27 crore in 2023-24 and Rs 64.24 crore in 2022-23.

Mumbai-listed Genus Power counts Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC as an investor with a 15.11% stake as of December 31. In 2023, the company formed a $2-billion platform with GIC to take up smart metering projects in India.

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Manufacturing

TEAM VCC

Canadian investor Brookfield Asset Management, which is one of the largest private equity investors in the real estate space in the country, has increased its exposure in a Mumbai office park controlled by a sovereign wealth fund.

New York-headquartered Brookfield, which manages a portfolio of over $27 billion (around Rs 2. 5 lakh crore) in India and has been especially ramping up its real estate and infrastructure businesses, has picked an additional 1.6% stake in Nirlon Ltd, a real estate company controlled by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, via an open market transaction.

The PE firm, which picked 7.7% stake in the developer in 2024, raised its holding to 10% a few months back. It shelled out another Rs 80 crore or just under $9 million to buy more in the firm, on Tuesday.

This takes its total estimated commitment to nearly Rs 500 crore (around $55 million).

Besides its direct investments in the real assets business in India, the Canadian investor also has public listed REITs and Brookfield has been bringing more assets under its umbrella. Recently, Brookfield India Real Estate Trust, a public listed entity sponsored by its affiliate, signed a binding agreement to acquire a 100% interest in Ecoworld for Rs 13,125 crore (around $1.5 billion). 

Ecoworld, currently owned by the group firm Brookfield Asset Management, is a 7.7 million square feet office campus spread across 48 acres on Outer Ring Road (ORR), Bengaluru. 

The asset is leased to global capability centers including that of Honeywell, Morgan Stanley, State Street, Standard Chartered, Shell, KPMG, Deloitte and Cadence, among others. 

Brookfield REIT manages ten Grade A assets, which are commercial assets with high-end tenants and longer lease agreements, located in key gateway markets of India, including Delhi, Mumbai, Gurugram, Noida and Kolkata. The Brookfield India REIT portfolio consists of 29.1 million sqft of total leasable area, comprising 24.6 million sqft of operating area, 0.6 million sqft under construction area and 3.9 million sqft with future development potential. 

Recently, Brookfield said that it plans to triple India investments to $100 billion within five years as it bets on the country's strong growth prospects and rising demand in the infrastructure and clean energy sectors.

In real estate, it has a wide portfolio through a listed REIT and private funds. Last year, Brookfield, through its private real estate fund, sold 50% stake in Bluegrass Business Park to Mumbai-based to 360 One Asset for Rs 2,400 crore (around $273 million)

In 2024, the firm acquired Bharti Enterprises’ stake in four commercial properties through its Mumbai-listed Brookfield India Real Estate Trust (BIRET). The Canadian group, through its private real estate fund, had bought a 50% stake in the assets in May 2023.

Singapore’s GIC became the majority owner of Nirlon in 2015. It currently holds a 64.95% stake in the company having invested an estimated Rs 1,280 crore.

Founded in 1962, Nirlon was originally a nylon textile yarn and conveyor belt maker. It turned sick in the 1980s and began moving out of the manufacturing business, before eventually turning into a real estate owner. Its real estate assets were essentially surplus land that previously housed its manufacturing units.

Currently, the company owns the Nirlon Knowledge Park in Mumbai. The office park is spread across 3.3 million sq ft and houses international information technology and financial services companies as clients.

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Reuters

Singapore's government will assess the performance of state investors GIC and Temasek against their mandates and risk profiles and will not compare them with other funds, a minister said on Monday.

"Our focus has always been on long-term performance, rather than on short-term or year-to-year fluctuations," said Jeffrey Siow, a senior minister of state for finance.

"The government's assessment is that the returns generated by GIC and Temasek are reasonable and within expectations given their mandates and their risk profiles," he told Parliament.

Lawmakers asked about the performance of both firms after a Financial Times report in December called Singapore's sovereign wealth returns "poor."

In July last year, Temasek reported a 10-year total shareholder return of 5% for the year ended March 31, 2025, which lagged behind the MSCI ACWI's 9% and Singapore's Straits Times Index at 6%, though its 20-year return of 7% is broadly in line with both benchmarks.

Meanwhile, GIC's 20-year annualised real return came in at 3.8% for the same year, marginally below the 3.9% it posted a year earlier, its weakest performance since 2020 when returns hit 2.7%.

The 51-year-old Temasek, which managed a S$434 billion ($338.35 billion) portfolio as of March 2025, will launch a new investment structure from April 1, it said in August.

Siow said given how investment markets have been uncertain and volatile, "GIC's returns over shorter periods could be low or even negative, but the government is able to absorb these short-term market fluctuations and risks because it has a strong balance sheet."

"We will continue to review their mandates and performance regularly, in line with changes in the global economic investment landscape," Siow said.

Singapore's government will assess the performance of state investors GIC and Temasek against their mandates and ......

Temasek, GIC returns to be measured against mandate, not funds, says Singapore minister

Finance

Nitesh Kumar

Early- to mid-stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures has consistently picked a thesis and stayed with it long enough for the market to test it. Nowhere is this more evident than in fintech, where the firm has backed around 30 companies riding India’s digital finance transformation.

The headline numbers, however, tell only part of the story. Of more than 20 active bets, over 10 portfolio companies have filed their FY25 financials. While a healthy number are growing, roughly a third are showing early signs of stress. As these are mostly vintage bets, five to 10 years old, their performance offers a clearer view of how Blume’s long‑term fintech thesis has played out. 

The firm currently lists about 28 startups in its fintech portfolio, of which it has exited six. Four exits came through acquisitions, while two happened quietly without making it to the headlines.

Emails sent to the VC firm remained unanswered till the time of publishing this article.

A three-phase thesis

Blume's fintech journey can be divided into three distinct phases, each tracking a broader inflection point in India's digital finance evolution.

The first phase, roughly pre-2015, was focused on infrastructure. IDfy, an identity verification firm, from which Blume is now in talks to exit via a secondary route, best represents this. At the time, fraud detection and KYC infrastructure were invisible layers, and backing them early was a contrarian call.

The second phase, from 2015 to 2019, was distribution. UPI had launched and Jio had made data free. Demonetization had its impact on businesses and fintechs were no exception. The consumption wave was real and Blume rode it by backing Slice (youth credit), Turtlemint (insurance distribution), Smallcase (retail investing), Servify (device finance), Kaleidofin and Jai Kisan (financial inclusion). Multiple follow-on rounds in the same companies signalled high conviction.

The third phase started from 2019 and sharpened after COVID. The NBFC crisis had shown that distribution without underwriting is a liability masquerading as an asset. During this time, Blume backed Bureau (fraud analytics), BlueCopa and Aerem (cashflow-based lending), and DPDZero (delinquency management). 

Notably, these were not consumer playbooks. They were bets on the infrastructure of risk itself. 

Blume’s more recent bets, including Mysa, Opticap, PowerUp Money, and Zoven, extend this logic into structured credit models and AI-led risk layers.



The distress cluster maps largely to consumer‑facing, distribution‑heavy bets made during the high‑growth years. 

Of the roughly 13 fintech companies that have filed FY25 numbers, Zopper, Stellapps, Jai Kisan and DPDZero appear to be entering a test of time. VCCircle also dug deeper to assess the firm’s underwater bets, including Finvolve and Instamojo, which it recently exited without public disclosure.

Zopper is the most alarming on paper. The insurance and retail brokerage group, which has raised $125 million (Rs 1,136 crore) to date, including a $75 million round in 2022, saw its finances hit by a GST investigation spanning December 2023 to February 2025.

The probe alleged ineligible input tax credits claimed on marketing services from vendors with inactive registrations. A mid-year shift to a new SAP system was done without switching on a feature that tracks changes in the database, which concerned auditors. The company eventually reversed the tax credits and paid roughly Rs 24 crore in taxes and penalties, VCCircle has learnt. 

Zopper’s consolidated revenue fell 18.6% to Rs 357 crore, while net losses nearly doubled to Rs 203 crore. Its subsidiary Blink Fix’s standalone revenue also collapsed from Rs 289 crore in FY24 to Rs 67 crore in FY25, as per the annual statement. Zopper Insurance Brokers’ standalone revenue dropped from Rs 396 crore in FY24 to Rs 275 crore in FY25, according to VCCEdge, the data and research platform of VCCircle.

The prolonged investigative overhang has materially damaged the company’s core business.


Stellapps also faces questions. The dairy-tech and farm digitization platform saw service exports, which had contributed over Rs 12 crore in FY24, fall to near zero in FY25.

Consolidated revenue dropped from Rs 357 crore to Rs 206 crore, though net losses narrowed to Rs 55.45 crore from Rs 70.61 crore. A Rs 121 crore ($13.3 million) fundraise during the year provides a cash buffer, but does not fully explain the disappearance of what had looked like a foundational revenue stream. 

Meanwhile, Vipatra Technologies-operated DPDZero reported zero employees, zero physical assets, and eliminated all rent, power, and utility expenses in FY25, VCCircle has learnt.

The company’s revenue fell 34% to Rs 5.2 crore and total expenses declined to roughly Rs 5 crore, yielding a Rs 29 lakh profit before tax. It is, on one reading, a successful pivot to an asset-light outsourcing model. However, the company had raised $7 million last year in a Series A round to develop its multilingual AI collection agent and fuel the launch of a network of professional field collection agents.

Among other struggling bets, Jai Kisan stands out, having already made a strategic pivot that could become a model for portfolio companies still trying to sail through the maze.


Jai Kisan’s FY25 numbers look weak in isolation, with standalone operating revenue falling sharply from Rs 39 crore to Rs 9 crore, and technology fee income collapsing from Rs 12.6 crore to Rs 1.8 crore. 

However, it is important to note that in June 2024, the company acquired a 73.11% stake in NBFC Kushal Finnovation Capital, fundamentally altering its business. Jai Kisan is no longer a tech‑enabled distribution facilitator for third‑party lenders, but a full‑stack financing group with its own balance sheet. 

While consolidated revenue still declined year-on-year, the shift reflects a broader industry logic: distribution-only fintechs are being squeezed by rising acquisition costs, shrinking fee pools, and compliance burden of working with regulated lending partners. Owning or controlling the NBFC layer internalizes margins and builds defensibility. 

Underwater bets

Instamojo underscores the risks of regulatory‑dependent business models. The digital payments firm had been posting operating losses since years before reporting about Rs 16 crore in standalone revenue in FY24. However, when the RBI returned its payment aggregator/payment gateway licence application, the business unravelled. VCCircle reported in 2023 that Instamojo was seeking to raise fresh funding to give an exit to early backers.

Instamojo’s standalone revenue collapsed 84% to Rs 2.5 crore. A Rs 14.4 crore write‑off followed after the company had spent heavily on building a new platform tied to the licence it ultimately never received. All the work and investment that went into the platform became stranded assets that had to be written off the books, VCCircle has learnt.

Regulatory filings show the company’s going‑concern status now depends on support from its US parent Instamojo Inc.

Finvolve also appears to be in survival mode. Revenue dipped from Rs 21 crore to Rs 19 crore, but the company narrowed its losses by cutting employee expenses by 25%, indicating it likely reduced headcount. 

The cost‑cutting, combined with declining revenue, points to early signs of distress. Blume converted its CCPS into equity shares during FY25, but no new investors came  on board. On its website, Blume has recently marked the company as an exit, even though it first invested in 2013, indicating the firm may have written off its position.

Against these red flags, Blume has two cleaner exits in sight. IDfy, which it backed in the early years, is in secondary-route discussions, while insurtech firm Turtlemint is gearing up for an IPO. Both are businesses with structural moats, IDfy in KYC infrastructure and Turtlemint in insurance distribution, that were less exposed to the unit economics churn that hurt several consumer fintech bets.

Blume Ventures got the macro call right. India's digital finance transformation has been large and fast. What proved harder to forecast was which layers of that transformation would generate durable returns. Infrastructure and selective distribution held up; growth-first consumer fintechs, regulatory-dependent models and international revenue assumptions were put to the test. 

Whether Blume’s newer bets, focused on risk intelligence and structured credit, reflect lessons learnt from earlier investments, a thesis evolution, or simply the fashions of the post‑2021 funding market is something that will take another three-five years to determine.

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Spotlight: How Blume Ventures\' fintech portfolio is faring

Malvika Maloo

Jada Fund of Funds, an investment vehicle created by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund Public Investment Fund (PIF), has joined as a limited partner for the first time in a fund managed by an India-headquartered firm by betting on venture debt firm Stride Ventures. 

The Riyadh-based investor has made a commitment to Stride’s Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) fund. The firm, which specialises in providing venture debt, is planning to deploy $200 million (around Rs 1,821 crore) in Saudi Arabia’s entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem over the next two years. 

“The partnership with PIF’s Jada Fund of Funds adds to a series of strategic sovereign and global investor relationships supporting the broader Stride platform,” Stride said in a statement. 

The deal is Jada’s third investment in the private debt space, as it doubles down on the fast-growing asset class in the GCC region. 

In 2024, it backed California-based global private credit firm Partners for Growth that offers specialised debt solutions for entrepreneurs in the tech and innovation space, investing in the $500 million fund. Only a year before, in 2023, had Jada ventured into the private credit space with its commitment to Abu Dhabi-based Ruya Partners' $250-million Private Credit Fund I. Ruya, the region’s first partner-owned private credit firm, offers capital solutions in the form of private debt to small and medium enterprises in the region.

Jada Fund of Funds was set up in 2018 with $1 billion in capital from PIF to support the development of Saudi Arabia's private capital ecosystem. The platform invests across venture capital, private equity and increasingly private credit. Since inception, it has deployed close to $600 million across nearly 50 funds. 

The firm has since invested in Iliad Tech Ventures Fund I, Investcorp’s Saudi Pre-IPO Growth Fund,  Aliph Capital Fund I, OB - iMENA Rua Growth Fund I, Beco Capital, Global Ventures, Shorooq Partners, Nuwa Ventures, Hala Capital, and 500 Falcons. 

Meanwhile, Stride, founded in 2019, has expanded from a domestic debt player to an international financial platform and has on-ground presence across India, GCC and UK/ Europe. It had enabled $1.6 billion in credit across nearly 200 portfolio companies, including 20 unicorns. 

Jada Fund of Funds, an investment vehicle created by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund Public Investment Fund (PIF......

Saudi PIF-backed Jada places its first LP bet on an India-based fund manager

Prithvi Durai

Chennai-headquartered radiology and pathology diagnostics chain Aarthi Scans Pvt Ltd is set to onboard a domestic private equity investor to its cap table as its fundraising discussions enter the final stage, several people familiar with the development told VCCircle. 

The company, which operates under the Aarthi Scans and Labs brand, started its first lab in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, more than two decades ago. It currently runs over 200 branches across 10 states. Founded by first-generation entrepreneur V Govindarajan, the business is now supported by second-generation family members and radiologists Prasanna Vignesh, Arunkumar Govindarajan and Aarthi Prasanna.

In 2022, media reports suggested that a PE fund managed by Tata Capital had explored an investment in the company for a minority stake, but the deal reportedly fell through. In 2024, VCCircle reported that Aarthi Scans was looking to raise Rs 250-300 crore ($27-33 million) to fuel expansion.

Now, ICICI Venture is among the contenders in advanced talks to acquire a minority stake in Aarthi Scans, one of the persons cited above said. 

Another person said the company is seeking a valuation of around Rs 2,000 crore and is also open to strategic takeover options.

Mid-market investment bank Veda Corporate Advisors is advising the firm on the deal, the second person added. 

Email queries sent to Aarthi Scans, ICICI Venture, and Veda Corporate remained unanswered till the time of publishing this article.

The fundraising comes amid reports that Aarthi Scans plans to invest more than Rs 300 crore to expand its footprint in Mumbai, Lucknow, and northern India.

In FY24, the company’s revenue rose 21% to around Rs 264.4 crore, while EBITDA increased 24% to about Rs 71.7 crore, according to VCCEdge, the data and research platform of VCCircle. Its financial information for FY25 wasn't available.

Investor interest in the diagnostics space has increased in recent years, driven by a rise in chronic ailments, growing awareness of preventive healthcare and higher disposable incomes.

Earlier this month, VCCircle reported that Morgan Stanley-backed Sterling Accuris Wellness Pvt Ltd was looking to raise a fresh round of equity capital. Further, north India-focussed House of Diagnostics Healthcare Pvt Ltd raised funding from 360 ONE Asset last month, while private equity firm Vixar, earlier known as Arpwood Partners, acquired a majority stake in Bengaluru-based dAIgnostiX Services Pvt Ltd, VCCircle reported in December. 

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Healthcare

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