Stoicap Ventures ₹750 crore education infra fund raise
Stoicap Ventures plans to raise a ₹750 crore fund to acquire rent-generating K-12 schools and student-housing assets in India. This is Stoicap’s maiden fund.
The Stoicap-NDR Edu-Infra Rental Yield Fund (EDIYF) will have a base corpus of ₹500 crore and a ₹250 crore green-shoe option. Chennai-based warehousing and logistics company NDR Group is the co-sponsor and anchor investor. The Category-1 Alternative Investment Fund received mandatory approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in June and has an investment profile similar to an InvIT, which owns assets and earns rental income.
The fund will follow a sale-and-leaseback strategy. It will acquire infrastructure, including land and assets, from a trust or founder and lease it back to the operating trust or society for a long-term rental tenure of 25–30 years. The assets would be backed by stable rents and contracted escalations. The fund will offer regular quarterly distributions plus capital appreciation.
Stoicap has signed a term sheet with a global institutional investor to acquire a portfolio of seven K-12 schools and around 2,000 student-housing beds across cities, for around ₹500 crore in equity value plus leverage. This portfolio would function as the seed portfolio for the fund. The remaining ₹250 crore of the targeted corpus will be deployed to buy new education infrastructure assets. The first close of the fund is expected to happen over the next couple of months within this year.
An asset-light strategy for education infrastructure
Stoicap Ventures was set up in 2024 by Ritesh Vohra, former head of real estate funds at Investcorp, and Kunal Sabharwal, former senior general manager-investments at ESR India, an industrial and logistics property developer and fund manager in India.
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The firm focuses on differentiated sectors from a real assets and infrastructure perspective, such as education, healthcare and senior living. Its investment strategy is to acquire and own mature, operational assets that generate healthy rental revenue and capital appreciation from these highly resilient sectors.
India’s K-12 school sector is expected to reach a market size of $100 billion by 2030, from $66 billion in 2026. Stoicap estimates the addressable K-12 market size suitable for the fund at $37 billion, and the market for higher education and student housing at around $12 billion. India’s higher-education sector is emerging as one of the world’s largest institutional real estate opportunities, according to an Anarock Capital report. Nearly 30,000 acres of new campus land and approximately 2.7 billion sq ft of academic infrastructure are set to be developed to meet surging student demand.
“Our investment strategy is to acquire and own mature, operational assets that generate healthy rental revenue and capital appreciation from these highly resilient sectors,” said Ritesh Vohra, managing partner, Stoicap.
“These are rather essential social infra sectors that are growing in lock-step with India's societal and economic evolution. We feel there is a need for focused capital pools to come in towards creating the physical infrastructure that operators can then lease and operate,” Vohra added.
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