Faering Capital Invests $30 Mn in Vastu Housing Finance

Vastu Housing Finance Corporation Limited (“Vastu”) has closed a fundraise from Faering Capital, founded by Aditya Parekh and Sameer Shroff. The transaction is a secondary sale by funds managed by Multiples Alternate Asset Management and other shareholders of the company.

Vastu is a digitally enabled retail affordable housing finance company with a pan-India presence. With a technology-first approach and strong credit underwriting principles, Vastu has grown rapidly to an AUM of c.US$900 million, serving 15 states across India in 200+ markets.

Vastu’s award-winning proprietary technology platform, PULSE, has enabled a completely paperless digital experience and faster turnaround times for customers. Towards the goal of becoming a mortgage-led consumer lender serving the credit needs of emerging and aspiring India, Vastu has also set up a non-banking finance company (NBFC), Vastu Finserve in 2019, venturing into vehicle and MSME finance. Creating social impact lies at the core of Vastu, which focuses on lending to the low-middle income, mainly self-employed segment, and backing women borrowers.

Vastu has more than 40 lending relationships across leading public and private sector banks and leading financial institutions including National Housing Bank (NHB), State Bank of India (SBI), Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Union Bank, HSBC and others.

Vastu is among the fastest institutionally built and professionally led platforms to be rated at [ICRA] AA- and CARE AA- Stable and holds the highest rating on a short-term scale of [ICRA] A1+. Vastu’s asset quality is amongst the best in class, and it has been sustainably profitable with a PAT of over INR 285 crore in FY23. The company’s board of directors includes former RBI deputy governor Shyamala Gopinath, former global head of retail banking at Standard Chartered Bank, Viswanathan Ramachandran, former head of audit at KPMG, Natrajan Ramakrishna, former Chairman and Managing Director of Andhra Bank, R S Reddy, former Managing Director of NIIT Ltd, Vijay Kumar as Independent Directors.

Sudhir Variyar, MD and Deputy CEO of Multiples Alternate Asset Management Ltd. said, “We warmly welcome Faering Capital as shareholders of the company and look forward to working with them going forward. This marks another milestone in our partnership with Vastu, witnessing the evolution of a shared vision that has led to the establishment of an accomplished institution. Vastu's growth mirrors Multiples’ commitment to fostering a long-lasting impact and driving profits with purpose.”

Sandeep Menon, Founder, MD & CEO, Vastu said, "We are happy to have Faering Capital join us as a valued partner. Aditya, Sameer and team have great domain knowledge in our industry and have been long-term supporters of Vastu. We look forward to having them as long-term shareholders.”

Aditya Parekh, Co-founder & Managing Director of Faering Capital said, “We are excited to partner with Sandeep and team and other shareholders in the Vastu journey. Housing finance and specifically affordable housing are multidecadal opportunities in India. Having tracked Vastu’s progress over the last few years, we are confident that the company is well on its way to build a highly profitable, large and respected institutional franchise focused on affordable housing finance.”

About Vastu Housing Finance

Vastu Housing Finance Corporation Ltd (Vastu) is a technology led lending business working to enable millions of self-employed Indians to fulfill their dreams of providing their families a better life and prosperity. Built on a strong foundation of people and technology who use data science and analytics to deliver world-class and affordable products and franchise for customers. The core engine driving this balanced approach to the business is the risk management led framework at its heart. As on September 2023, Vastu has financially included over 80,000 customers having a monthly income of USD 500, most of whom who don’t have formal access to credit from financial institutions in India due to lack of documented income. The diversified liability franchise comprises of more than 40 lenders and institutional investors who continue to support Vastu, many of them since inception. Vastu is a young team of professionals serving 200+ locations in 15 states of India. For more information, visit www.vastuhfc.com

About Multiples Alternate Asset Management

Multiples is India’s leading private equity platform distinguished by its long and successful experience of partnering with Indian entrepreneurs. Multiples has backed 30 Indian companies to build aspirational, distinctive, and responsible businesses. Multiples focuses on core sectors of financial services, pharma and3 healthcare, consumer and technology. Some of Multiples’ distinctive investment partnerships include ACKO, Encube, Delhivery, Dream Sports, Licious, MoEngage, PVR, Quantiphi, Vastu Housing Finance and Zenex Animal Health. For more information, visit www.multiplesequity.com

About Faering Capital

Faering Capital is a leading Indian private equity firm founded by Aditya Parekh and Sameer Shroff. The firm has raised over USD 720 million of capital across three funds and has partnered with 29 companies. This is Faering Capital’s third investment from its $346 million Fund 3 which had a final close in November 2022. Faering Capital adopts a disciplined sector-focused investment approach and partners with exceptional companies in their growth journey. Notable examples include Go Digit General Insurance, Niva Bupa Health Insurance, CAMS, National Stock Exchange (NSE), Finova Capital, Nykaa, and Pureplay Skin Sciences (Plum). For more information, visit www.faeringcapital.com

KOOH Sports Gets $2.2M from HDFC, Faering Capital and Elevate Sports

KOOH Sports, Indian health and fitness company which uses sports as a primary vehicle for transformation at the grass root level has recently closed a fresh follow-on round of $2.2 million. Existing investors such as HDFC, Faering Capital, Elevate Sports and the company's Founders have participated in this round. The fresh funds will be used to pursue international markets expansion, taking new product innovations to market and also to enhance working capital to meet high growth needs. KOOH sports is currently operating in 180 schools across 50 cities, 80 multi-sport academies in 25 cities with a staff of strength of about 400 people which is expected to grow in the next 6-9 months to about 200-220 schools, 100 academies supported by and 500 plus people.

With the new fund raise; KOOH Sports also wants to reinforce the senior management team. Recently they have inducted John Gloster (ex-physiotherapist of Indian Cricket Team and Rajasthan Royals and is also a leading Health and Fitness expert) in a full time capacity as The Chief Quality Officer and Advisor to the Board of KOOH Sports. Similarly, they are looking to broaden the senior management team with operational and technical capabilities.

Announcing the fund raise, Chirag Patel, CEO, KOOH Sports, said “As we are scaling up, we need to offer better set of holistic sports education services and sports training solutions that underpins the KOOH Sports platform. Specifically for the India platform we now need two things. First, to have greater access to highly skilled and elite level sports coaches and technical staff. Whilst we already have a number of elite coaches in India both homegrown and international, we feel that in some sports particularly like swimming, football and tennis we need greater access to international staff so that we can start offering more services like high performance learning centres. Second, is to gain greater access to world-class facilities and programmes in developed markets like UK, Australia and Dubai in a way that is cost effective from an Indian market perspective. We are currently evaluating to buy one or more assets from a carefully curated list of assets in geographies like UK, Australia and Middle East and are also pursing international partnerships particularly in UK and Australia. Armed with new funding our ability to execute and quickly reinforce the India platform becomes that much easier.”

Susir Kumar, Founder, KOOH Sports, said, “Our existing shareholders have continued to show faith in the founders, the management team and the model and they continue to be excited with the new opportunities that we are presenting. There is a possibility that we may raise significant capital next year to further scale up through international expansion, add new sports specific capabilities and reinforce the product portfolio. If we have to transform sports outcomes then KOOH Sports is the right engine to drive the health and fitness outcomes first for our children. Training coaches and facilitating employment by introducing innovative solutions to cater to the demand gap, we are addressing the fundamental issues of scaling up and are confident of our growth strategy in the Indian and international market.”

Over the years, the company has built a robust training curriculum, trained over 400 sports coaches and every sports coach and physical education teacher that they hire goes through a rigorous internal training programme called KITES (KOOH Sports Institute of Training and Excellence for Sports Skills). The multi-level KITES training programme has been built by their expert curriculum team supported by their technical experts and consultants is the first such innovation. The company has got an accreditation from National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to set up a vocational training institute across the country.

SportsNaukri.in – a specific sports portal for the potential employers like schools, universities, clubs, communities and leagues is the second innovative initiative that the company has launched. SportsNaukri.in caters to the larger community of sports coaches and physical education teachers who are looking for job placements across the country and it is open to various other job categories like Sports Marketing Professionals, Sports Facility Manager, Sports Managers, Sports Event Management, Sports Science and Technology Professionals, Sports Medicine and many more.

The company strongly believes that technology is a great enabler for sports and the third such innovation is the mobile app ERP solution called Excalibur. Prabhu Srinivasan, Co-Founder, KOOH Sports said that we recognized early-on that with so many schools and academies tie-ups, it would get difficult to manage day to day operations and hence the need to embrace technology was conceived last year to remove potential barriers of scaling-up. The ERP solution gives them us opportunity to offer a third party solution packaged with curriculum and content to schools allowing us to gain an even wider access to more and more schools and academies at the grass-root level.