Family office anAmaya rejigs strategy to invest in PE, realty funds

Ahmedabad-based family office anAmaya Capital LLP, which started out with an aim to make angel and seed investments in healthcare startups, has tweaked its strategy to make Limited Partner (LP) style bets on major domestic private equity and realty firms, a top executive told VCCircle.

Prarthana Gandhi, partner at anAmaya Capital, said the family office has already signed a contract to commit Rs 2 crore in the third fund of Renuka Ramnath-led Multiples PE. “The first tranche of the funds will be released next month,” she added.

Multiples PE, which has backed companies such as PVR, RBL Bank and Arvind Fashions, is aiming to raise about Rs 6,530 crore ($900 million) for its third fund. In March, International Finance Corporation (IFC) had planned to invest a total of $70 million in the private equity firm’s fund.

Besides Multiples, anAmaya Capital last year invested around Rs 75 lakh in India Realty Excellence Fund III, which is managed by the real estate private equity arm of Motilal Oswal Group, Motilal Oswal Real Estate (MORE). Earlier this year, it invested around Rs 1 crore in MORE’s fourth fund India Realty Excellence Fund IV.

Prarthana said that the family office invested in these funds because of their previous records of exits.

Early-stage bets

anAmaya Capital was founded in June 2015 by the Gandhi family and the entire corpus is family wealth. Prarthana’s father, Mukesh Gandhi, is a co-founder and director finance at non-banking financial company MAS Financial Services Ltd.

The family office had an initial corpus of $1 million and that has now increased to $3 million. The corpus will increase annually, she reiterated.

It began by making its first seed investment in Ahmedabad-based Rich Nutrionwala Pvt. Ltd, which serves fresh packaged vegetarian diet food. In 2017, it invested in ambulance hailing platform Ambee. Uber Technologies Inc, a domestic family office and some angel investors had also invested in Ambee.

She added that the family office has also turned sector agnostic beyond just doing healthcare related deals. It will look at education, agriculture and women-centric startups for future investments.

anAmaya Capital is one of a growing number of family offices in India as new- and old-generation entrepreneurs carve out a part or all of their personal wealth into such investment vehicles with a formal fund manager. According to a study conducted by the Association of International Wealth Management of India, the country has 90 large single family offices that manage private wealth in excess of $100 billion.

Some of India’s most famous family offices are Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata’s RNT Associates, Wipro chairman Azim Premji’s PremjiInvest, Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and media entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures.