NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, April 24, 2017

Sunil Kant Munjal, the Hero Enterprises, has invested Rs 100 crore in impact investment in firm Aavishkaar’s new fund, Aavishkaar Bharat Fund. The investment, made in Munjal’s personal capacity, is part of the Rs 2,000-crore corpus that the social venture capital firm is targeting for its new investment vehicle. In an interview with ET’s Taslima Khan, Munjal talks about his investment in Aavishkaar and why this is the right time for the group to get into organised impact investing. Edited excerpts:

Economic Times (ET): What sort of investments have you made in startups and what sort of portfolio have you built?

Sunil Munjal (SM): The group’s philosophy has never been to announce investments in startups. The announcement in an impact investment fund is just one-off, because it plays a very important role in working in areas that have not developed well, both geographically as well as in people development. The reality is that people in India don’t invest in such funds and they end up getting most of the capital from overseas investors.

We get a lot of requests from startups. We have an in-house team which looks at these opportunities. I don’t even know the exact number of investments in startups. We have invested in a very wide spectrum, all the way from agriculture to education, health, manufacturing to high-end technology.