The Unlisted Intel by Oister

Higher Risk. Higher Return? Not Quite.

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 05:15:14 GMT

Dear Reader,

If I asked you to explain investing in a single sentence, chances are you’d say something remarkably close to this: Higher risk. Higher return.

It’s one of those ideas we inherit long before we think to question it. Much like the sun rising in the east, we accept it without hesitation. We repeat it in classrooms, hear it in boardrooms, and instinctively reach for it whenever someone asks why an investment promises outsized returns.

And why wouldn’t we? It underpins how portfolios are built, how institutions allocate capital, and ultimately how trillions of dollars are invested around the world. More than that, it shapes how we think about investing itself. IIt has become one of the closest things investing has to a law of nature.

Until someone decided to test the law.

In 1952, that someone was a 24-year-old doctoral student at the University of Chicago named Harry Markowitz.

The timing couldn’t have been more interesting. The Second World War had ended less than a decade earlier. Wall Street was finding its feet again. Investing was largely about finding the best securities. A good portfolio was simply assumed to be a collection of good investments. Diversification existed, of course, but more as common wisdom than as something that could be measured.

Markowitz wasn’t convinced that was enough. While everyone else was analysing the investment, he believed the thing worth analysing was the portfolio.He wasn’t trying to predict the next great company or build a fortune. He was trying to answer a question that, surprisingly, nobody had answered rigorously before.

Can a portfolio be designed to deliver better returns without proportionately taking more risk?

The question sounds almost obvious today. In 1952 it was heresy.

Markowitz distilled his thinking into a fourteen-page paper titled Portfolio Selection. When he later defended it as his doctoral thesis, Milton Friedman reportedly questioned whether it was economics at all. The work relied so heavily on mathematics that it seemed to belong in another discipline. The dissertation was eventually approved, but the scepticism captured just how radical the idea felt at the time. Modern investing dismissed the very idea that would later reshape it.

Nearly four decades later, that same idea earned Markowitz the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. It also gave the world one of the most influential charts in investing.

At first glance, the Efficient Frontier seems to reinforce the very idea we started with. Move further along the curve and expected returns rise. Higher risk. Higher return.

But that isn’t the breakthrough. Markowitz showed that risk and return are determined not just by the investments you own, but by how those investments interact inside a portfolio. The portfolio, rather than the individual investment, became the real unit of analysis.

That single insight transformed diversification. Until then, diversification was little more than common wisdom: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Markowitz turned it into something that could be measured, tested and optimised. Investors no longer had to ask, “Which investment is the best?” They could instead ask, “Which combination of investments creates the best portfolio?” It was a subtle shift in thinking, but one that fundamentally changed modern investing.

Over the years, this way of thinking became the foundation of institutional investing. Pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and family offices around the world stopped thinking in terms of individual investments and started thinking in terms of portfolios.

But when Markowitz published Portfolio Selection in 1952, the investable universe was remarkably simple. Institutional portfolios were largely built using public equities and bonds. Today, the opportunity set looks very different.

Which raises an obvious question.

If the Efficient Frontier represents the best possible portfolio using the asset classes available at that time, what happens when entirely new asset classes enter the equation?

To answer that, we need to bring the conversation a little closer to home.

For most of us, the idea of a “portfolio” came with a familiar image. We built wealth through fixed deposits, PPF, gold and perhaps a second home. Equities, for many households, came much later. Mutual funds only entered the mainstream over the past two decades, fuelled by the rise of SIPs and a generation that began thinking differently about investing.

Institutional portfolios in India have followed a similar journey. They were largely confined to traditional asset classes, shaped by regulation, limited access and a relatively young private capital ecosystem. As that ecosystem has matured, so has the opportunity within it

India’s AIF industry is only about fifteen years old, growing with a CAGR of 30% over the past 5 years. Yet in that relatively short time, stronger fund managers have emerged, successful exits have built confidence, and access to private markets has expanded significantly. What was once considered a niche allocation is increasingly becoming a part of long-term portfolios.

Which brings us back to the question we left hanging.

If the Efficient Frontier changes when the opportunity set expands, what does it look like in a world where private markets become part of the portfolio?

If private markets are increasingly becoming part of the modern Indian portfolio, what does that actually mean for portfolio construction? Does adding an entirely new asset class simply expand the menu of investments, or can it fundamentally improve the portfolio itself?

To answer that, we turn to one of the most widely referenced frameworks in institutional investing, one that builds directly on Markowitz’s original idea.

A study by Cambridge Associates ( A Classic) illustrates what happens when private markets enter the portfolio equation.

By now, this newsletter has probably started to feel a little more like a finance class than our usual editions. Bear with me for one more minute, because this is where Markowitz’s idea becomes tangible.

The chart answers a simple question: What happens when private markets become part of the portfolio?

The answer isn’t that returns magically increase, nor that portfolios simply become riskier. The opportunity set itself expands. By introducing an asset class that behaves differently from stocks and bonds, investors create more possible portfolio combinations. With more combinations comes a greater chance of building a portfolio that delivers the same expected return with less risk or a higher expected return without proportionately more risk.

The lighter curve doesn’t replace the darker one. It simply sits above it. In other words, the “best possible portfolio” changes because the building blocks have changed.

Perhaps that’s the most enduring lesson from Markowitz. The Efficient Frontier was never meant to be fixed. As the investable universe evolves, so too does the frontier. Theory, however, is only useful if it works in practice.

That brings us to one of the most influential institutional portfolios ever built.

The contrast is striking. While the average endowment continued to allocate most of its capital to public equities and fixed income, Yale made private markets and alternatives the cornerstone of its portfolio. This wasn’t simply a different asset allocation, it was a different philosophy of portfolio construction.

More importantly, Yale showed that Markowitz’s ideas could extend well beyond theory. Its success transformed institutional investing, inspiring endowments, foundations, pension funds and family offices around the world to rethink how portfolios were built and to steadily increase allocations to private markets.

Over the past three decades, institutions around the world have gradually reimagined how portfolios are built. India is now entering a similar phase. Public markets have matured, private markets have deepened, and investors have access to an opportunity set that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.

That doesn’t automatically make portfolios better. It simply makes portfolio construction more important than ever. And perhaps that’s the biggest lesson we took away while researching this piece. Harry Markowitz’s most enduring contribution was a shift in perspective. He reminded us that the portfolio, not the individual investment, is ultimately the product.

That belief shapes how we think at Oister as well. When we study global institutions, benchmark fund managers, or spend time understanding how private markets are evolving, it isn’t because we’re trying to find the next exciting asset class. It’s because we believe better portfolios are built through better research, better product design and a deeper understanding of how different investments work together over the long term.

This edition of The Unlisted Intel was a little more technical than our usual ones, so thank you for staying with us. If you enjoyed this format, we’ll continue sharing some of the research, frameworks and ideas that shape how we think about private markets and portfolio construction.

Because in the end, investors don’t experience individual investments. They experience portfolios. And that’s the product we’re all trying to build better.

Jai Hind 🇮🇳

Sources:

1. Markowitz, Harry. (1952). “Portfolio Selection.”

2. Nobelprize.org

Disclaimer

The information and materials contained in this Newsletter are collected by Oister Global Investment Platform Private Limited (“Oister Global”) for general information purposes only. They are provided for use on an “as is” and “as available” basis, without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including, without limitation, warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. The use of this Newsletter, its content and any site to which is linked shall be at the user’s own risk. Oister Global make no warranties or representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information and materials therein provided. Nothing in this report constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice or any solicitation or any offer for sale, whatsoever. Under no circumstances, including, but not limited to negligence, shall Oister Global be liable for any loss, damage, liability or expense arising from, directly or indirectly or connected to, the use of, reference to, or reliance on this Newsletter and its content, including, but not limited to, any liability arising from any intentional or negligent misuse, errors, disclosure, undue transfer, loss or destruction of data, findings, interpretations, conclusions or other information that may occur. The user specifically acknowledges and agrees that Oister Global is not liable for any conduct of any user. Unless expressly stated otherwise, the data, findings, interpretations, conclusions or other information expressed in the materials therein provided do not necessarily represent the views of Oister Global or its directors, members, employees, representatives, agents, etc. Oister Global does not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any of these data, findings, interpretations and conclusions or other information provided by any other Third Party. Reliance upon any such data, findings, interpretations, conclusions, or other information shall also be at the user’s own risk.

Drafting or Drifting?

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 11:19:03 GMT

Dear Reader,

“The light at the end of the tunnel. Out of the woods. Every cloud has a silver lining. Keep calm and carry on.”

Turns out, we have an awful lot of expressions for making it through turbulent times.

After six months of tariff headlines, geopolitical flare-ups and macro surprises, the last couple of weeks have finally felt… peaceful. Not perfect, but peaceful. A welcome sliver of normalcy. I suspect we’re all happy to take it.

And with a little calm comes a familiar sight: the newspapers are smelling like DRHPs again.

The world just witnessed its largest-ever deep-tech, space-tech listing. SpaceX has officially lifted off (pun intended), raising $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. The listing almost felt like a flare gun that finally broke the geopolitical chokehold the world has been under since March

At home, the story is similar as India prepares for some of the biggest IPOs. India’s most anticipated exchange, the NSE, finally filed its DRHP after a decade-long wait. Soon after, India’s largest telecom giant, Jio, followed suit, announcing its move from the stage of its own AGM.

Which brings me to this month’s edition.

Rather than asking who is going public, I wanted to explore why now? More specifically, the two distinct mindsets emerging behind today’s IPO decisions: companies that draft because they’re fundamentally ready, and companies that drift, waiting for the market window to feel just right.

The Landscape

But before we get into the mindset, let us set the scene.

H1 2026 was, by any measure, a year of two halves, compressed into six months. January and February held promise. A healthy pipeline of quality companies was moving through SEBI, markets were near multi-month highs, and investor appetite felt firm.

Then February 28 arrived. Conflict erupted in West Asia. Crude crossed $100. In March alone, foreign investors pulled ₹1.14 lakh crore from Indian equities. a number that still staggers when you sit with it. The Nifty fell 13% from its peak. Companies with valid SEBI approvals, bankers on retainer, and roadshow decks already printed made a collective decision: not yet.

The freeze was swift. Of 22 mainboard listings in H1 2026, 14 debuted in the red. Average listing day return: 1.64%. Only one mainboard IPO launched in April. Nearly ₹2.45 lakh crore in approved IPOs sat untouched, their observation letters ticking down toward expiry.

SEBI moved in April, extending approval windows to September 30, allowing issue sizes to flex by up to 50% without refiling. It was a pragmatic intervention, and a signal that the regulator understood what the market was going through.

Across markets, H1 2026 told a version of the same story. Globally, IPO proceeds surged 208% year-on-year, but deal count fell 8%. Fewer listings. Bigger ones. Hong Kong ran its most active primary market in five years. Europe’s defence sector produced the world’s third-largest IPO of the quarter. And in the US, SpaceX did what SpaceX does, rewrote the record books and made everything else look small by comparison.

To Draft or To Drift

Within that backdrop, two very different things were happening.

Some companies kept moving. They filed, priced, and listed into the volatility, into the uncertainty, into a primary market that was actively delivering negative returns to new entrants. The conditions were unfavourable. They proceeded regardless.

Others paused. Deliberately and strategically. DRHPs sat approved but unfiled. Roadshows were postponed. Nearly ₹2.45 lakh crore in approved IPOs remained unlaunched through the peak of the freeze. These were not companies lacking readiness, many had regulatory approvals in hand, institutional interest mapped, and the governance infrastructure of a public company already largely in place. The decision to wait was a considered one.

Same market. Same regulatory environment. Same macroeconomic shock. Two fundamentally different responses.

What makes this bifurcation worth examining is precisely that both sides had strong arguments. This was not a case of prepared companies proceeding and unprepared ones retreating. The split ran along a deeper line, a difference in how leadership on each side fundamentally understood what a public listing is for.

The data above resists easy conclusions. Companies that filed into difficult conditions and were rewarded. Companies that waited carefully for the right window and still underperformed post-listing. The most documented case of this paradox is Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later giant that spent years as Europe’s most closely watched private company, reaching a peak valuation of $45 billion in 2021 before the tech correction brought it sharply back to earth. It delayed its IPO repeatedly, each time citing conditions. When it finally listed in September 2025, the debut was strong, oversubscribed, shares up 30% on day one. Six months later, the stock was 62% below its first-day closing price.

Same company. Different time horizons. Different columns. Timing, it turns out, is not the variable that explains the divergence. Something more fundamental is.

Camp One: The Drafters

There is a certain type of founder who looks at a volatile market and sees, not a reason to wait, but a reason to move.

The drafters aren’t reckless. They operate from a conviction that over any meaningful time horizon, public markets reward quality. A business with clean unit economics, honest disclosures and tight governance will find liquidity, whether in a bull market, a bear market or somewhere in between. That chasing the perfect macro window is, itself, a form of strategic distraction.

Their belief is clear, if the business is ready, the timing is right.

This is a harder position to hold than it sounds. Filing into a weak market requires a specific kind of institutional confidence. the confidence that the business does not need the market’s enthusiasm to validate its own worth. It already knows what it is. It is inviting the public in, not seeking their approval.

The historical record offers them some support. Airbnb filed and listed in December 2020, at the height of a pandemic that had devastated its own revenues. Shares doubled on debut. The business was so fundamentally sound that the market looked past the conditions and priced the conviction. Bajaj Housing Finance listed in September 2024 into a market already showing signs of fatigue. Subscribed 67 times. Debuted at a 114% premium.

In both cases, the window wasn’t perfect. The business was.

Camp Two: The Drifters

Then there is the other kind of founder. Equally capable. Equally prepared. Just guided by a different conviction.

For the drifters, the IPO isn’t the finish line. And that intuitively makes sense. IPO is the first day of life as a public company, and first impressions matter. Their calculus is simple and rooted in fiduciary responsibility: a poor listing is never just a bad day. It becomes a permanent narrative. Once a stock earns the label of a ‘broken IPO,’ that reputation leaves a stain for years afterward

Of the mainboard listings in H1 2026, the majority struggled on debut, with March listings averaging negative returns. April saw a near-complete freeze, with the pipeline effectively standing still as approved IPOs waited out the turbulence. FII outflows of ₹1.14 lakh crore in a single month. A Nifty nearly 13% off its peak. In that environment, waiting was not hesitation, it was a considered read of the room.

The trade-off is clear. Waiting delayed liquidity. Listing too early risked something far harder to recover from: a depressed stock, weaker institutional demand and a public narrative that could outlast the market cycle itself.

So they waited, but not idly. They strengthened governance, sharpened unit economics and built businesses that could justify their valuations on fundamentals alone, not favourable market conditions.

Because markets recover. Broken IPO narratives rarely do. And a company that arrives at the public eye on its own terms, not the market’s, tends to stay there longer.

Who Wins?

The question of who wins between the drafters and the drifters is, in itself, a category error. Both camps are responding to the same structural reality, the transition from a market of noise to a market of quality.

The distinction lies in the founder’s primary objective. Does the leadership view the public market as a temporary window to exploit at a peak valuation? Or as the permanent, final home for a mature business?

One is a transaction; the other is a conviction.

The founder timing the market is optimizing for the listing. The founder building for the market is optimizing for the decade that follows it. We aren’t making a moral judgment,the market requires both the aggressive builders and the disciplined stewards. However, for an investor looking at a business through a full cycle, the reasoning behind the filing date is the most critical signal available. The filing date tells you when. The reasoning tells you who.

The era of the speculative, hyper-inflated rush has ended because the market enforced it. Bad listings are remembered. Broken IPOs scar a stock for years. A structural quality filter has taken hold, and it is arguably the most underappreciated shift in India’s private market narrative.

This shift in founder mindset is fundamentally changing how companies present themselves to the public. As a result, the document itself has evolved.

The modern DRHP is no longer a growth story being sold. It is a maturity test being submitted. Governance, cash flow reality, unit economics, no longer buried in risk factors. They are the thesis. Both drafters and drifters will face this filter equally. Timing doesn’t bypass it. Only substance does.

This shift is visible beyond the listing halls too. The VC and PE ecosystem has matured, and with it, the approach to exits has evolved. Capital is being deployed with longer conviction horizons. Businesses are increasingly built with public-market readiness baked into their core, not bolted on at listing. The IPO is no longer a destination to be rushed toward. It is an outcome to be earned.

The numbers reflect this. AIF commitments in India have grown from ₹4.51 trillion in FY21 to ₹16.94 trillion in FY26, a 3.75x expansion in five years, compounding at over 30% annually. That trajectory doesn’t emerge from an ecosystem chasing quick exits. It emerges from one that has collectively decided to build with depth, discipline, and a longer view of what value creation actually looks like.

It is a transition from a market of noise to a market of quality. And that transition, once made, tends to be permanent.

At Oister, we have skin in this conversation, even if we aren’t the ones ringing the opening bell.

We operate in the layer before the DRHP. As a private markets asset manager, we back companies in India’s secondary and private markets, some already on the public stage, others yet to see a ticker. For all of them, the eventual moment of truth is the same: the choice to draft or drift. The perpetual tension between whether the business is ready, whether the market is ready, and the realization that those two things rarely align on schedule.

What we’ve learned, consistently, is this: the IPO is not the destination. It is an audit. The moment the public market holds up a mirror to everything that was built in the years before the prospectus was filed. The companies worth backing are the ones that would pass that audit on any given day, not just when conditions are kind.

We’ve always believed that the best companies don’t time the market. They outlast it.

Thank you, and see you next month.

Jai Hind 🇮🇳

TL;DR: The H1 2026 IPO market split into “Drafters” (those listing despite market volatility, betting on business fundamentals) and “Drifters” (those waiting for better timing, viewing it as a fiduciary duty to protect their stock’s reputation). Ultimately, the distinction is cosmetic; the market has shifted from rewarding growth stories to demanding maturity. Whether a founder lists now or later, only business substance, not timing determines success.

Sources:

https://www.vietnam.vn/en/spacex-cua-ty-phu-elon-musk-lam-nen-lich-su-voi-ipo-75-ty-usd

https://www.financialexpress.com/market/ipo-news-nse-ipo-5-crucial-details-revealed-in-the-long-awaited-drhp-filing-4270084/?ref=ReadNext_article_3

https://www.money9live.com/ipo/23-firms-launch-ipo-worth-rs-27000-crore-in-2026-236-proposals-remain-in-pipeline-details-here-article-106486.html

https://www.business-standard.com/amp/topic/india-ipo

https://www.thestandard.com.hk/finance/article/334930/Deloitte-maintains-full-year-forecast-of-160-new-Hong-Kong-IPO-raising-300-billion

https://www.deloitte.com/cn/en/services/audit-assurance/perspectives/1h-2026-review-and-outlook-of-the-chinese-mainland-and-hong-kong.html

https://www.livemint.com/economy/how-have-crude-oil-prices-behaved-during-the-west-asia-war/amp-11780481497551.html

https://www.cnbctv18.com/market/sebi-grants-one-time-extension-for-ipo-approvals-amid-weak-market-conditions-ws-l-19882310.htm/amp

https://www.ey.com/en_cn/newsroom/2026/06/hkex-captures-the-hard-tech-wave-as-tech-focused-reforms-take-effect

https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1859752-20260624.htm

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/fiis-sell-indian-equities-worth-rs-1-14-lakh-crore-in-march-2026-outflow-balloons-to-rs-1-27-lakh-crore/articleshow/129864121.cms?from=mdr

https://www.sebi.gov.in/statistics/1392982252002.html

Disclaimer

What Backtesting 26 Indian IPOs Taught Us

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:18:49 GMT

Dear Reader,

This newsletter is about backtesting.

If you trade public equities or run a quant fund (here’s wishing), backtesting is your bread and butter. You take a strategy, run it against decades of clean, timestamped historical data, and ask a simple question:

“If I had followed this rule in the past, would I have made money?”

In public markets, you can test a strategy over a weekend. In private markets, tracking historical data is notoriously difficult.

But at Oister, we are obsessed with borrowing discipline from the public markets. We wanted to see if the core thesis driving our late-stage investment strategy actually holds water.

We already do some of this. As you may have seen, our benchmarking work with CRISIL tracking private market Category II AIFs over the last decade shows that private funds have materially outperformed public markets. Across the last seven benchmarking cycles, equity AIFs delivered an average alpha of ~8.7% over the BSE Sensex TRI.

But we wanted to go further. At Oister, we do secondaries. We spend a lot of time looking at late-stage companies, the ones that are 18 to 36 months away from an IPO. And the core belief that drives a lot of what we do is this: if you enter these companies in that window, and hold them for at least a year post-listing, you capture superior, asymmetric returns.

So we took a shot at it.

The Dataset: What we looked at

We tracked 26 VC/PE backed companies that launched mainboard IPOs on the BSE or NSE and have at least a year of trading history. There were no sector or return filters. You will recognize pretty much every name: Zomato, Nykaa, Paytm, Swiggy, PolicyBazaar, and Mamaearth.

For each one, we mapped three specific milestones:

the valuation 2-3 years before the IPO,
the market cap at listing,
and where the stock settled one to two years later.

One honest caveat before we dive into the data: every company in this dataset successfully made it to the public markets. The dozens of companies that stalled, withdrew, or failed to list are not included here. This is the story of the 26 companies that IPOed over the last 3–4 years.

Here is what the data revealed and why it surprised us.

The Premium on Time

The high-level data completely validates the strategy.

The Return: The median Multiple on Invested Capital (MOIC) from the pre-IPO round to 1–2 years post-listing was 2.83x, translating to a 24.6% IRR.
The Benchmark: Over the same period, the Nifty 50 delivered around 14–15%. The middle-of-the-pack company in our dataset comfortably doubled the public market’s performance.

More importantly, the data completely dismantles a favorite playbook of impatient investors: buying pre-IPO, riding the listing pop, and flipping on Day 1.

If you flipped on day one, your median return dropped to 1.87x. By failing to hold, you left an entire turn of capital on the table. And here’s the nuance worth sitting with: the IRR is nearly identical, 24.8% versus 24.6%. So if you exited at IPO, you weren’t wrong on rate of return. You were just wrong on absolute wealth created. Same annual engine. The hold just kept it running longer.

In fact, 19 out of 26 companies explicitly rewarded patience.

For the vast majority, the IPO listing was barely the halfway mark where earnings maturity and market re-rating finally kicked in. And not the finish line.

The Catch: Extreme Dispersion

Hiding behind that beautiful 2.83x median is an uncomfortable truth: extreme return dispersion. Late-stage Indian tech investing is characterized by a few spectacular breakout winners, a handful of punishing casualties, and a very quiet middle.

The key learning for us has been that individual company selection at the pre-IPO stage is inherently difficult, with outcomes often driven by factors that are hard to underwrite consistently in advance. The biggest, most institutionally backed “consensus bets” frequently underperformed, while unassuming, quieter businesses blindsided the market on the upside.

If individual winners are impossible to forecast with absolute certainty, how do you capture that highly lucrative 2.83x median?

The golden rule of private markets applies here: Concentration is the enemy. Diversification is the alpha. The investors who win don’t try to guess the single winning horse; they own enough of the basket to ensure that when an outlier hits, they hold the ticket.

Here’s the Blindspot : Good Structures

Even if you get the diversification right, investors run into a structural problem the data can’t show you: forced early exits.

The data can’t show you the fund that matured in year four and was forced to sell Nykaa at ₹60 to return capital to LPs, right before the stock took off. Most investors don’t exit early because they want to; they exit because their fund structures dictate it.

When fixed fund timelines end or LPs demand distributions, perfectly good investments get crystallized at a 1.87x listing return, leaving the 2.83x post-listing compounding on the table.

This leaves late-stage investors facing two distinct roadblocks:

Concentration Risk: Not owning enough of the basket to catch the outliers.
Structural Impatience: Being forced to sell too early due to rigid fund timelines.

Secondaries as a Liquidity and Structure Valve

This is where we feel that the secondary market steps in. (Full disclosure: This is what we do at Oister, so feel free to weigh our bias accordingly).

A secondary transaction acts as a relief valve. It allows an early investor who needs liquidity to exit cleanly, while a secondary buyer enters at a price that reflects current, grounded realities rather than historical hype.

Because secondary buyers enter later in the cycle, they operate on a refreshed, cleaner timeline. They aren’t constrained by a legacy fund structure raised years prior, meaning they have the structural patience required to hold the position for the full 1 to 2 years post-listing that the data rewards.

India’s secondary landscape is growing exceptionally strong, scaling from a peripheral option into a mature, institutional liquidity channel, with average deal sizes surging 3.7x since FY20 to reach ₹8.39 billion. The acceleration is now so rapid that the H1 FY26 deal value (~₹361 billion) has already nearly matched the entirety of FY25 (~₹377 billion). Source

This volume is paving the way for institutional vehicle designs that explicitly build diversification into the strategy from day one, something UHNIs, HNIs, and family offices are actively prioritizing.

At Oister, we are already managing our third secondary fund in just two years, with over ₹1,000 crores deployed. We are seeing a fast-maturing market where domestic capital can finally access late-stage compounding systematically.

So what’s the takeaway?

The laws of market gravity remain undefeated. If you want to capture true value in late-stage tech, two non-negotiable rules apply: Diversify your exposure, and have the patience to hold.

Secondaries are fast becoming the natural entry point to execute this playbook, offering a way to acquire a diversified portfolio with the structural patience required to let the full arc of compounding do its work.

The backtest simply proved what we already believed.

Thank you, and see you next month.

Jai Hind 🇮🇳

Volatility, Vested

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:54:00 GMT

Dear Reader,

Greetings from the fag-end of April.

If 2026 had a mascot, it would be a shrug. By now, we’ve all become professional athletes in the sport of ‘Dealing with Volatility.’ Tariffs? Wars? Market swings? 40-plus degrees in April? Just another Tuesday. None of it feels normal, and yet, none of it fully stops us either.

The odd part isn’t that the world is chaotic; we’ve made our peace with that. The odd part is how quickly we’ve learned to absorb the shock, adjust the sails, and move through it as if it were practiced. I don’t mean to imply that we are becoming indifferent; it’s more that we’ve developed a committed, long-term relationship with uncertainty.

And maybe that is a good thing?

Now, before I scare you off, I don’t mean “good” in the “yay, tough times build character” way. I believe I did enough of that in the last newsletter. I mean “good” in a more specific sense. Perhaps this constant volatility is doing something to the Indian private market ecosystem that stable years simply cannot.

Here’s the theory.

The Indian AIF ecosystem is currently 14 years old, officially settling into its teenage era. Back in March 2013, the entire organized private capital (AIFs) ecosystem of the world’s tenth-largest economy (by nominal GDP) was had recorded just ₹1,437 crore in commitments, roughly $265 million at the then-prevailing exchange rate. As of December 31, 2025, SEBI data places total AIF commitments at ₹15.74 lakh crore, or roughly $175 billion using the exchange rate around that reporting date.

Source: Statista

While it is easy to view this as a growth story, it is more useful to view it as a timeline of structural maturity.

Source: SEBI

The timeline starts in 2012, when AIF regulations came into force. Until then, capital existed, but the system did not. Foreign private equity firms routed capital through Mauritius and Cayman Islands structures. Domestic pools of capital had no proper vehicle. Venture capital operated under a 1996 framework that had significant limitations. The market had activity but it did not have architecture.

The AIF structure created that architecture. And for the next decade, that architecture largely grew under supportive conditions.

The Nurturing Years: 2012 to 2020

The 2010s, in hindsight, were a very specific kind of environment. It was almost by design, a good one.

Global interest rates in developed markets sat near zero for most of the decade. Capital was cheap and abundant and looking for somewhere to go. India, with its young population, rising smartphone penetration, and endless frictions waiting to be solved, looked like a compelling answer. The India story was not yet crowded. It was fresh.

For most of that decade, things worked more often than they didn’t. Founders were solving real, local problems with the intensity of people who had no safety net. Zomato figuring out food delivery logistics in a country where the restaurant supply chain was completely fragmented. Ola building ride-sharing in a market where organized taxi culture barely existed. Paytm pushed digital payments before most Indians trusted the idea of paying through a phone.They were stories of constraint meeting opportunity. We are very familiar today with all the titans born in those times.

Capital was available, but not indiscriminate. Scale still had to be built over time, and deployment retained a degree of discipline. The ecosystem was not being tested yet. It was being allowed to grow. But obviously, you still had to build your way into scale.

Policy support also played a role. The government added fuel. Startup India launched in 2016. The Fund of Funds for Startups, with a corpus of ₹10,000 crore, began committing capital to domestic AIFs, which in turn deployed into early-stage companies. The first crop of VC/PE funds started to see great action.

That is why the numbers from that decade look the way they do. We went from 42 registered AIFs in 2013 to about 1,800 in 2026. Commitments grew at over 50% annually over the last decade. The system crossed ₹7 lakh crore in commitments in the September 2022 quarter, within a decade of the AIF framework, a milestone that took mutual funds nearly four decades to reach. It was compounding at its best. And more importantly, it was happening in a largely protected environment.

The ecosystem was growing fast, in a good home, with a good foundation. In that sense, the ecosystem’s first decade was a lot like childhood. The foundation mattered more than the outcomes. The right environment, patient scaffolding, and early institutional support gave the system room to grow before it had to prove itself under pressure.

India, for most of its first decade, did not go through a comparable test.

This stands in contrast to the US venture capital cycle. By the time the dot-com bust hit in the early 2000s, roughly $5 trillion in market value was erased and hundreds of funded companies failed in months. The funds and founders who came out the other side built differently in the decade that followed. Google, Amazon, and PayPal all navigated that bust. What they took from it were instincts about capital efficiency, business model durability, and governance discipline that their pre-2000 peers never had to develop.

Source: JP Morgan

A more recent example is China. Over the past decade, its technology and private market ecosystem expanded rapidly, supported by domestic capital and policy direction. But periodic regulatory interventions and capital tightening forced sharp resets. Entire sectors saw valuations compress, and business models were re-evaluated under new constraints. The outcome was similar. Survival required adaptation, and discipline became structural rather than cyclical.

India’s 2010s were different. The 2016 demonetisation shock was significant, but it also accelerated digital payments adoption in ways that benefited much of the ecosystem. The 2018 IL&FS crisis rattled credit markets but did not reshape how founders built or how fund managers deployed. Neither episode became a broad venture-market reset around valuations, burn, governance, and unit economics. Through most of the 2010s, India’s private market ecosystem remained broadly supported by liquidity, policy scaffolding, digital adoption, and a long runway for formalisation.

India’s private market ecosystem is now entering its own version of that transition. The environment has changed abruptly and repeatedly. The foundational years are behind us. The ecosystem has officially entered its teenage era: unpredictable, occasionally volatile, but ultimately where real character is built.

2020 Onwards: The First Real Test

If the 2010s were the nurturing years, 2021 was the ecosystem’s first unsupervised weekend. Post-COVID liquidity flooded the markets, and the Indian startup scene experienced something it had never seen before: irrational exuberance at scale.

Startups raised $38 billion in 2021, producing 44 unicorns in a single year. Rounds closed in days. Valuations were pegged to US comparables with entirely different unit economics. Disciplined investors watched peers deploy at unthinkable multiples and felt the squeeze to keep up.

For the first time, capital became impatient. And for the first time, the ecosystem responded to that impatience. Deployment cycles shortened, and expectations of growth accelerated.

The correction, when it came, was sharp. Startup funding dropped to $25 billion in 2022, then to $11 billion in 2023. Late-stage funding, the heartbeat of the “growth at all costs” era, fell by over 73% YoY in 2023.

The impact was not limited to funding volumes. The slowdown exposed structural weaknesses. Business models that depended on continued capital infusion became difficult to sustain. Governance lapses and inconsistencies in reporting came under greater scrutiny. The environment forced a reassessment of both what was being built and how it was being evaluated.

This period functioned as a filter. In 2021, conditions made a wide range of businesses appear viable. By 2023, capital required clearer evidence of durability. Companies had to justify their existence through unit economics, not just scale narratives.

Between 2023 and 2025, a large number of startups ceased operations. This was not an isolated disruption but part of a broader consolidation phase that most maturing ecosystems eventually undergo.

At the same time, the structure of capital began to shift. Domestic venture funds now account for a significantly larger share of overall funding than they did a decade ago. Public markets have also played a more active role, with a growing number of technology-led listings supported by domestic institutional and retail participation.

The ecosystem that has emerged from this period of ‘volatility’ is more measured. Capital is more selective, and expectations are more grounded in operating performance than in projected scale.

The ecosystem that has moved through the last five years is not a weakened one. It is a more aware one.

We are already seeing signs of that in how the market is behaving today. Capital has slowed, but it has not disappeared. Good businesses continue to raise, build, and, in many cases, reach the public markets. Across sectors, there is evidence of this shift. Space technology companies are moving from ambition to execution. AI-led businesses are being built with clearer use cases and monetisation pathways. Fintech, after its own reset, is seeing models that are more aligned with regulation and long-term viability.

There is a muscle being built here: the ability to operate within volatility. The fund managers who have deployed through this period have built judgement that cannot be learned in easier cycles. The founders building today are doing so under a different set of expectations. The system is no longer asking only how large something can become. It is asking why it should exist in the first place.

The first decade built the foundation. The recent years have begun to shape behaviour. At 14, the ecosystem is no longer early. It is not fully mature either. It is in that in-between phase where direction matters more than momentum.

And this is where the context of India matters. For an economy that is still expanding at this pace, building its private market ecosystem under conditions of volatility may not be a disadvantage. It may be a necessity. The demands of this market are too large to be carried by fragile businesses or undisciplined capital.

We do not know what the next decade will look like. The 2030s will likely bring their own cycles, their own excesses, and their own corrections. But if this phase does what it is supposed to do, we will enter that decade with a system that is more resilient, more selective, and more capable of carrying the weight of its own ambition.

If this phase does what it is supposed to do, the twenties should look different. Not just bigger, but steadier. By then, the ecosystem should have a better relationship with risk, a clearer sense of judgement, and less dependence on favourable conditions to feel confident. Volatility will not disappear, but it may stop feeling like an interruption. It may simply become part of the operating system.

So when the ground moves, the shrug remains. More as a signal than indifference. The ecosystem is still adjusting, still learning, still growing into itself. But it is no longer surprised by the volatility around it.

And that, perhaps, is what coming of age looks like.

See you in May.

Jai Hind 🇮🇳

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Sources:

https://www.niftyindices.com/docs/default-source/aif/nse-indices---aif-primer---march-2024.pdf

https://www.statista.com/chart/34540/rank-of-indias-nominal-current-gdp/

https://www.sebi.gov.in/statistics/1392982252002.html

https://www.sidbivcf.in/en/funds/ffs

https://treelife.in/finance/alternative-investment-funds-in-india/

https://cafemutual.com/news/cafe-alt/34142-what-could-revolutionize-the-aif-space-in-india

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/economics/dot-com-bubble

https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=170378&

https://entrackr.com/2022/01/indian-startups-raised-38-billion-in-2021-entrackr-report/

https://entrackr.com/2023/01/indian-startups-raised-over-25-bn-in-2022-entrackr-report/

https://entrackr.com/2023/12/indian-startups-raised-funding-more-than-11-bn-in-2023-report/

https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-the-day/india-tech-startup-funding-in-2023-takeaways-from-a-fiveyear-low/90409/1

Disclaimer

Staying The Course: Private Markets Edition

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:40:06 GMT

We all know the drill.

Stay the course. Good assets recover. Volatility, in time, fades into entry points.

But the more interesting question is how far that logic travels?

Periods of uncertainty tend to produce two things at once: more noise, and a greater need for perspective. Public markets usually offer plenty of both.

Investments are visible as they happen, recoveries can be tracked just as quickly, and over time these cycles have built a familiar playbook for how stressed periods tend to shape returns. They often create better entry points into strong assets. There is enough evidence behind it that the conviction feels earned.

Now, if staying the course is such a well-understood idea in public markets, how does that same idea actually play out in private markets?

For readers of Unlisted Intel, many contours of this will already be familiar. Fundamentally, the logic is the same. What differs in private markets is the way periods of stress are felt and expressed.

Private markets do not lack information, but the nature of the asset class means that information is more dispersed, less immediate, and less broadly circulated. That can make periods of stress harder to interpret from the outside, even when the underlying dynamics are fairly straightforward.

So here is how the pattern usually unfolds in private markets.

Liquidity becomes more valuable. The gap between investors who need to transact and those who can afford to wait starts to widen. As that happens, opportunity is shaped less by valuation alone and more by access, negotiation, and patience.

Such periods of dislocation are often fertile for disciplined capital. Illiquidity, uncertainty, and complexity tend to reduce competition, but they also create room for stronger underwriting, better structuring, and more selective entry. Over time, those advantages can translate into more than resilience.In private markets, that is often when better opportunities begin to emerge. They can create additional alpha.

Source: Moonfare

Public markets absorb fear immediately. Private markets register it more slowly, through exits, liquidity, financing conditions, and valuation resets. This is what creates room for disciplined capital to act. The vintage data makes that point clearly. Some of the strongest outcomes have come from the years investors found hardest to commit to.

The current moment is uncomfortable by any measure. But discomfort has a track record in private markets. It tends to age well.

To take that question further, we went back through the major shocks of the last two decades and looked at what stress actually did inside private markets. That feels like a more useful way to think about what staying the course means from here.

A Brief History of Stress: How Private Markets Actually Behaved

McKinsey’s latest work with IVCA on LP sentiment makes this visible in real time. India still screens as highly attractive, with 31% of surveyed LPs ranking it as their top private-markets destination in Asia-Pacific and 76% placing it in their top three. But the report also shows that enthusiasm is no longer broad or unqualified. The most committed allocators are focused on deployment opportunities, risk-adjusted returns, and manager quality, while others are paying closer attention to exit records, governance, disclosures, and cost discipline.

That feels true more broadly. After repeated shocks, capital does not usually leave the system; it becomes more selective. In India, the six largest GPs took 64% of fundraising in 2022–24, up from 59% in 2016–18. In US ventures, 33% of all investment in 2025 went to the top 1% of companies by valuation. The pattern is clear enough: after volatility, investors stop rewarding the broad story and start rewarding evidence.

What makes this shift more relevant now is who the investor base increasingly is. Domestic capital, particularly family offices and HNIs now accounts for a meaningful and growing share of AIF commitments. For many of them, private markets are a deliberate part of portfolio construction in pursuit of higher, differentiated returns. As that capital deepens, the need to understand how private markets behave across cycles becomes more important. Not just where to allocate, but when, and with whom.

1. Dot-Com Bust (2000–2002)

What Happened

Through the late 1990s, abundant capital flooded into internet companies, many of them unprofitable. The NASDAQ peaked in March 2000 at 5,048, then lost 78% of its value by October 2002. The S&P 500 fell 49%. The "growth at any cost" era ended brutally, compounded by 9/11 in 2001.

What It Did to Private Markets

The venture market, which had funded much of the bubble, was hit hard. U.S. venture investment fell from $93.8 billion in 2000 to $34.6 billion in 2001, $19.4 billion in 2002, and $16.9 billion in 2003. Private equity proved more resilient in the years that followed. The 2001 private equity vintage went on to generate a 2.11x TVPI seven years into fund life, while the U.S. buyout market declined by less than 13% during the downturn, far less than public markets. Firms that kept deploying capital into undervalued businesses captured the best deals of the decade. Most didn’t, they froze, and missed the vintage of a generation.

The lesson: in private markets, the instinct to step back after a shock is understandable, but it is often the vintages raised and deployed in those periods that go on to be the strongest.

The vintage-year data suggests a familiar cycle in private markets: returns tend to be weaker for vintages raised at the top of a cycle and stronger for those deploying after valuations have reset. The 2001 vintage is a striking example.

The same pattern is visible at the index level. Private equity did not avoid the dot-com downturn, but it moved through it with far less visible volatility than public markets. It shows that public markets reprice immediately. Private markets absorb pressure more gradually, through slower valuation resets, tighter exits, and a more selective flow of capital.

Source: https://www.moonfare.com/blog/private-equity-strength-recession

TL;DR: The dot-com bust wiped out excess, especially in venture, but it also set up one of the strongest PE vintages in the years that followed. The lesson was clear: the periods that feel hardest to commit to often turn out to be the ones most worth staying invested through.

2. Global Financial Crisis (2008–2009)

What Happened

Subprime mortgage stress cascaded into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, short-term funding markets were severely disrupted, and the S&P 500 fell 57% from its October 2007 peak to its March 2009 trough. Global output contracted in 2009 for the first time in the postwar period.

What It Did to Private Markets

The leveraged buyout market running at record volumes through 2006–07 stopped cold. The 2006 and 2007 vintages, loaded with highly leveraged deals at peak valuations, were badly exposed. Fundraising fell. Exits collapsed. LPs who needed liquidity had nowhere to go.

Firms that held their nerve told a different story. The 2008 vintage generated a 1.51x TVPI. McKinsey’s research across 120 of the largest PE firms explains the gap: firms with dedicated value-creation teams returned 23% net IRR during the crisis, five percentage points ahead of those without. More starkly, firms without operating teams saw fund sizes fall 82%. Those with them fell only 19%. The difference wasn’t just in returns. It was in survival.

Sector-level data adds another layer to the story. Even in 2009, median deal-level returns were positive across most sectors, with especially strong outcomes in business services, media and telecom, technology, and financial services. The GFC was brutal for leverage-heavy deals struck at the top of the cycle, but once pricing reset, the opportunity set improved quickly for capital that was still willing to deploy.

Source: https://www.moonfare.com/blog/private-equity-strength-recession

The lesson: in a crisis, operational depth protects you on the way down. Conviction is what builds returns on the way back up.

TL;DR: The GFC froze private markets, but only for managers without the infrastructure to withstand it. Firms with operational depth and the discipline to keep deploying came out ahead. The 2008 vintage outperformed the two before it. As in 2001, the crisis itself wasn’t the problem. Being unprepared for it was.

3. The Eurozone Crisis (2010–2012)

What Happened

Just as the world was recovering from the GFC, Europe descended into a sovereign debt crisis. Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy faced unsustainable borrowing costs. The euro itself came under existential threat. It took Mario Draghi's now-famous pledge to do "whatever it takes" in July 2012 to finally stabilize markets, but not before two years of deep uncertainty had rattled European economies and investors alike.

What It Did to Private Markets

This crisis was more geographically contained than the GFC, but it still tightened financing conditions, widened risk spreads, and weakened the economic outlook across much of Europe. Yet private equity proved unusually resilient. From March 2010 to March 2012, global private equity returned 16% annualised, outperforming the MSCI ACWI Gross Index by 9 percentage points. Even more strikingly, European private equity delivered 15% annualised returns during a period in which the EURO STOXX 50 Total Return index fell 4%. Unlike most other crises in the past 25 years, this was one period in which private-equity performance held up consistently across strategies and regions, including Europe itself.

Public markets in Europe suffered a sharp drawdown, but private equity followed a different path. The takeaway is that private equity was still able to produce positive outcomes across segments even while public markets and sovereign credit were under severe pressure.

Hamilton Lane’s longer-horizon view of European private equity reaches a similar conclusion: the region has continued to justify its place as a core private-markets exposure, even through inflation, rate rises, war on European soil, and the aftereffects of Brexit.

The lesson: the Eurozone crisis showed that private-market resilience is not always about avoiding stress. Sometimes it is about preserving enough stability for capital to keep compounding while public markets remain trapped in volatility.

TL;DR: The Eurozone crisis hit European PE deal flow hard but private markets still outperformed public markets through the worst of it. The managers who stayed in Europe emerged stronger than those who pulled back.

4. COVID-19 (2020)

What Happened

The COVID shock produced the fastest bear market in history. The S&P 500 fell 34% in 33 days as lockdowns brought large parts of the global economy to a sudden stop. Entire sectors such as travel, hospitality, live events, and offline retail saw revenues collapse almost overnight. Governments responded with extraordinary fiscal and monetary stimulus, and by August 2020, markets had returned to record highs.

What It Did to Private Markets

The initial shock to private markets was real. Deal activity paused abruptly in the second quarter of 2020 as firms turned inward, focused on portfolio support, liquidity preservation, and operational triage. Bain’s review of the year describes private equity as taking a sharp second-quarter hit before recovering with surprising speed as 2020 progressed.

The chart captures why this cycle looked so different from earlier crises. The drawdown in private equity lasted only one quarter, and from December 2019 to September 2020 the Global Private Equity Index returned 18% annualised, versus 2% for MSCI ACWI Gross. VC/growth was especially strong at 31% globally, while Asia/Rest of World lagged because of China-specific domestic pressures. In other words, COVID was a violent shock, but not a prolonged one for private markets. Once liquidity returned and stimulus took hold, the rebound came quickly.

The nuance matters though. The macro forces this time were very different from 2008. Investments post-GFC benefited from record-low rates, rising multiples, and steady GDP growth. COVID’s recovery, by contrast, eventually triggered inflation and rising interest rates, putting upward pressure on borrowing costs and making the road back considerably harder for leveraged strategies. The extraordinary 2020 performance triggered a flood of capital in 2021 and those who deployed at the top of that wave set up the next correction.

Bain & Company’s piece on COVID’s impact on PE is worth reading in full. Written at the height of the crisis, it’s a striking document, making the case for PE’s resilience while being honest about the unknowns. It reads differently with hindsight, and that’s precisely what makes it valuable.

The lesson: COVID showed that private markets can absorb even a sudden-stop shock when capital, policy support, and operating flexibility arrive quickly enough. The managers who moved fast to stabilise portfolios were the ones best positioned to benefit from the rebound that followed.

TL;DR: COVID delivered a sudden-stop shock to private markets, followed by one of the fastest recoveries in recent memory. Managers who moved quickly came out ahead, but the strength of that rebound also fed into the inflation and rate cycle of 2022–23, which made the next chapter much harder.

5. Inflation & Rate Shock + Russia–Ukraine War (2022–2023)

What Happened

After a decade of near-zero rates, inflation surged to multi-decade highs. Central banks responded with the fastest tightening cycle in a generation, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine deepened the energy shock, keeping inflation elevated for longer than many investors expected. The result was a market environment defined by higher financing costs, weaker growth expectations, and a much less forgiving backdrop for risk assets.

What It Did to Private Markets

This was the first difficult period in years that private markets could not simply outrun. Rising rates hit from every direction. Financing became more expensive, entry and exit multiples reset lower, and the old tailwinds of cheap leverage and multiple expansion faded quickly. McKinsey report noted that two-thirds of buyout returns on deals entered in 2010 or later and exited by 2021 had come from market multiple expansion and leverage. By 2023, that engine was no longer working the same way.

The strain showed up most clearly in fundraising and liquidity. Global private-markets fundraising fell 22% in 2023 to just over $1 trillion, the lowest level since 2017. Managers held onto assets rather than sell into a lower-multiple environment, which left LPs starved of distributions and less able to recommit. The exit backlog became the defining problem: global PE exits by count fell 23%, dollar-volume exits fell to $840 billion, and average holding periods rose to a record 6.8 years.

The chart captures the internal split this cycle created. Buyout was bruised, but venture and growth were hit much harder by the valuation reset. From December 2021 to December 2022, the Global Private Equity Index fell 8% annualised, versus an 18% decline for MSCI ACWI Gross and a 32% drop for the Nasdaq. But within private equity, outcomes diverged sharply: small and mid buyouts still delivered +6% globally, while VC/growth fell 20%. This was less a broad private-markets crash than a repricing of duration, leverage, and growth expectations.

Scale mattered too. The 25 largest fundraisers collected 41% of all commitments to closed-end funds, while smaller and newer managers struggled badly. Fewer than 1,700 sub-$1 billion funds closed in 2023, half as many as in 2022, and new manager formation fell to its lowest level since 2012. Private debt stood out as one of the more resilient areas of private markets in a higher-rate world, even if it was not immune.

The lesson: this cycle did not reward speed. It rewarded patience, scale, and realistic underwriting. In a slower, higher-rate world, private-market resilience depended less on outrunning the downturn and more on surviving the liquidity squeeze without forcing bad decisions.

TL;DR The rate shock did not break private markets overnight but it did wear them down. The private markets were forced into patience mode. In this cycle, resilience came less from boldness than from scale, discipline, and the ability to wait.

6. Current Geopolitical Volatility (February 2026 – Present)

What’s happening now

The current Iran conflict is still unfolding, which makes this different from the earlier episodes in this piece. Since late February, markets have had to absorb a renewed geopolitical shock layered on top of an already fragile macro backdrop. Oil has swung sharply as fighting has continued and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz has raised the risk of a more persistent energy shock. Brent has recently traded back above $100 after sharp moves in both directions, a sign that markets are still struggling to price the duration and severity of the conflict.

What it could mean for private markets

Private markets were already in the process of normalizing before the conflict, with exits and distributions recovering gradually. This shock adds another layer of uncertainty to that backdrop. In that environment, secondary markets naturally become more relevant, because they remain one of the few channels through which liquidity can still move when traditional exits stall. Crucially, that is happening against a backdrop of substantial dry powder, which should continue to support stronger assets even as volatility rises. The result is a market more likely to reprice selectively than seize up altogether.

Franklin Templeton’s highest-conviction call within private markets is also secondaries. The structural need for liquidity only intensifies in a prolonged conflict, creating a durable advantage for secondary strategies that can step in and provide that liquidity.

Source: Franklin Templeton

What to watch

It is too early to draw conclusions about vintage outcomes. The more useful question for now is where the strain shows up first. The key watchpoints are oil, inflation expectations, the pace of exit recovery, and whether liquidity pressure pushes more investors toward secondaries. With the situation still unfolding, this remains an active test of how private markets respond to renewed geopolitical volatility.

The pattern across every major crisis of the modern era stands out clearly. Quality in private markets is counter-cyclical, and high-quality private market opportunities tend to perform even better in periods of uncertainty.

The managers who came out ahead were the ones who had the operational infrastructure to protect value on the way down, the discipline not to overpay on the way up, and the conviction to keep deploying when everything around them said stop.

History suggests private markets do recover. The last 25 years of data point in the same direction that private markets have outperformed listed markets through five major crises- the difference, in practice, comes down to staying committed.

Jai Hind

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Sources:

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/indias-private-markets-the-global-limited-partner-view

https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/2000-dot-com-bubble

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2025100682/why-your-sp-500-index-fund-might-be-more-risky-than-the-internet-bubble

https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/insights/publications/2002-venture-capital-market-review-february-2003
Moonfare — Private Equity During the Dot-Com Crash

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-of-200709

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/lessons-for-private-equity-from-the-last-downturn

https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/eur/en/insights/markets-and-investing/how-do-geopolitical-shocks-impact-markets

https://www.hamiltonlane.com/en-us/insight/european-private-equity-growth

https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/institutional/insights/private-equity-s-resilience-during-major-crises-a-25-year-analysis/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/sp-500-closes-at-a-record-erasing-last-of-pandemic-losses

https://www.bain.com/insights/the-private-equity-market-in-2020/

https://www.bain.com/insights/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-private-equity/

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/global-private-markets-report-2024#/

https://www.economicsobservatory.com/how-are-geopolitical-risks-affecting-the-world-economy

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-war-us-israel-news-updates-2026/card/oil-prices-edge-back-over-100-as-fighting-continues-LZM1Gcmf9lElZC0ITxNh

https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/articles/2025/12/private-equity-dry-powder-recedes-from-all-time-highs-amid-slow-fundraising-96015525

Disclaimer

Built. Backed. Now Returning

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 03:45:44 GMT

Dear Reader,

The first edition asked whether India’s private markets could deliver. The second asked whether that delivery could hold across cycles.

The third moves beyond the question. It shows.

And then it asks what comes next.

Every year, Oister and Crisil come together to benchmark how India’s AIF ecosystem is performing beyond the narrative. No Ifs About AIFs was built to bring transparency and trust to private markets through rigorous, comparable performance measurement.

Over the last two editions, many of you helped make this report part of the ecosystem itself. You shared it, debated it, and in some cases used it to ask harder questions of the funds you back. That engagement is a big reason No Ifs About AIFs has grown into a seminal industry benchmark, and a reference point that keeps showing up in allocator conversations.

India now stands at a consequential moment. A defining decade of growth is unfolding in a more demanding global environment, and private markets will be judged increasingly on outcomes.

As we built this third edition, it became clear that benchmarking alone was no longer enough. Performance still matters. Discipline still drives alpha. But as the ecosystem scales, liquidity becomes central. Outcomes now depend on how capital exits, recycles, and compounds.

This edition reflects that. It continues to benchmark performance, and it also examines liquidity, secondaries, realisation multiples, and the persistence of returns with a sharper lens.

We know the full report takes time, and we hope you will read it end to end when you can. In the meantime, we have curated the parts we would send a friend first: the charts that clarify what is working, what is changing, and what is starting to matter more. The full report is here when you are ready.

This Is What Critical Mass Looks Like

India built a ₹15 lakh crore private capital engine (AIFs) in under a decade
And the commitments have compounded at ~30.7% CAGR
Category I and II alone have grown at ~27.9% CAGR, reflecting allocator preference for equity and growth strategies.

The Usual Suspects Have New Company

Over the past decade, India’s private markets have meaningfully diversified. The top five sectors’ share of deal value fell from 85.83% in FY15 to 66.31% in FY25 . Consumer and related tech dropped from 58% to ~25%, while financial services and fintech doubled from 7% to 14%.

The Exception Has Become Routine

₹500mn+ deals aren’t the exception, now they make up 30% of observed deal flow

The share of deals above ₹500mn rose from ~18% (91 deals) in FY15 to 30% (185 deals) in FY25; these large deals made up ~90% of total deal value in FY25.

Persistent Outperformance

Across cycles, private market equity funds have consistently outperformed public benchmarks. The aggregated benchmark delivered an average alpha of ~8.69% over the BSE Sensex TRI across the last seven benchmarking cycles.

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Gets Going

Returns are not evenly distributed. The right managers materially outperform.

While the overall AIF benchmark delivered ~8.7% alpha over public markets, the top half of managers generated 13.6% alpha, a very different outcome.

And when it comes to real money back, top-quartile funds that fully returned capital delivered an average 3.49x DPI, versus ~2.03x at the aggregate level.

It’s Coming Back

Over 80% of the equity AIF schemes we benchmarked have now made distributions. Even better? More than 25% have already hit a DPI of 1.0x or higher.

Yeh Dil Maange More

AIF capital pool is now majority-Domestic

Domestic participation in Category I & II AIFs rose from 50.3% (Mar ’24) to 55.3% (Sep ’25), with ₹1.14 lakh crore of incremental domestic inflows.

No Second Thoughts About Secondaries

Over the past five years, the average secondary deal size in India has increased from ₹2.28 billion to ₹8.39 billion, a 3.7x rise that signals a clear shift toward institutional-scale transactions.

Secondary deal value reached approximately ₹377 billion in FY25, and the first half of FY26 alone has already recorded around ₹361 billion in secondary transactions.

The Secondary Opportunity Set Is Thickening

Half of Tracked Funded Startups Are Entering Liquidity Windows.
201 startups have moved from early-stage to growth in just 2–5 years.

That pace points to $26–$52B of secondary supply potentially ripening over 3–4 years.

We recently had the privilege of presenting this report to India’s Honourable Finance Minister, Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman. We see that moment as a reflection of how far India’s private markets have progressed. The conversation around private capital is now central to the country’s economic development, and we are grateful to contribute to it through this work.

The evidence points in one direction. India has the institutional foundation, the policy alignment, and the domestic savings base to deepen private markets at scale. What comes next is execution and the headroom to do more is real.

Trust follows transparency.

That is why this report exists, and why we will keep doing it.

To everyone in the Unlisted Intel community, who reads carefully, shares generously, and pushes back when the data deserves harder questions, thank you. You are what keeps this report honest.

We would love to hear your thoughts, as always.

Download the full report here

See you in March!
Jai Hind

Sources:

Crisil and Oister Global. No ifs about AIFs 3.0

Disclaimer

The Comfort of an Exit

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 05:10:38 GMT

This month’s edition is by Rohit Bhayana, Co-Founder & CEO, Oister Global

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2026. By now, resolutions have met reality. Friends have supplied the “2016 vs 2026” evidence. Geopolitics hasn’t given us one boring moment. And all that glitters is “silver.” January has done what it always does: stretched itself into a year.

January also brought a certain Goldilocks framing back to the economy: not too hot, not too cold—just right. The IMF, for one, has raised India’s GDP growth forecast to 7.3% for FY26, and India is on track to enter the upper-middle-income bracket by 2030. With Republic Day around the corner, it’s worth saying plainly: we’re building from a position of underlying strength. (There’s plenty left to fix, but the base matters.)

As we enter the second half of this decade, resilience has become muscle memory. The last five years trained it into us. The question now is more deliberate: how do we engineer forward?

In private markets, engineering can mean many things. Better underwriting. Better governance. Better alignment. Better access. But one constraint sits upstream of all of it: investability.

India’s wealth is deepening. But our allocation stack still isn’t. AIF commitments are roughly ₹15T, still a small share of household financial assets even as India’s liquid wealth continues to accelerate. Which brings us to private markets: the next leg of India’s capital formation story.

The case for private markets themselves is already settled. Across cycles, private capital has consistently outperformed public equivalents, delivering excess returns in the range of 5.3% to 9.5%. Beyond performance, the impact is structural. Public markets recycle ownership of existing assets. Private capital is often growth capital; it funds capacity, technology adoption, and company-building. This is where strategic IP is built, where technology compounds, and where the real economy of the next decade takes shape.

Performance, then, is not the constraint.

The real barrier to allocation is more psychological than financial: the anxiety of the exit. The discomfort of being locked in for long periods in a world trained on immediacy.

This is often framed as a liquidity problem. That framing is misleading.

Private markets are not meant to behave like public markets. Their strength lies precisely in giving founders time, reducing noise, and allowing patient capital to compound alpha. Compressing build cycles or forcing premature exits would erode the very return engine investors seek to protect.

Today, private markets are still structured as a single arc journey: enter, hold, and then hope for a clean ending, whether that is an IPO window, a strategic buyer, or an opportunistic secondary. When those windows are scarce or mistimed, value remains trapped on paper even as businesses continue to compound underneath.

As the market scales and domestic capital becomes the anchor, this structure must evolve. The next phase is not about accelerating exits, but about decoupling capital return from company timelines. Markets must graduate from merely marking value to creating multiple pathways to realise it.

The Lesson from Public Markets

If this sounds abstract, public markets offer the clearest blueprint.

Over two decades, India has engineered a market system strong enough to earn household trust. Millions of investors commit capital to a volatile asset class, live through drawdowns, and still show up every month with discipline. The scale of that trust is visible in the numbers: SIP AUM has grown from ₹6.8 lakh crore in FY23 to ₹16.5 lakh crore by November 2025.

It is tempting to attribute this to transparency alone. But trust was not accidental. It was engineered, slowly and deliberately, layer by layer.

That engineering was tested in 2025 (and before). Foreign investors were on course for one of their largest net exits from Indian equities, even as domestic flows kept the market functioning. As foreign selling intensified, domestic institutional buying stepped in at record levels. The system did not freeze. The market held because domestic depth had grown strong enough to absorb the shock.

Source: Mint

The deeper insight here is about agency. Investors participate with confidence because they know they can leave. Liquidity is not a property of being listed. It is the outcome of engineering.

Engineering the Bridge

This is where the next phase of private markets must focus.

The objective is not to import public market behaviour into private assets, nor to compromise the patience required to build great companies. Alpha still needs discretion, control, and time.

The work instead lies at the platform level. Engineering capital circulation around assets without disturbing how those assets are built. This is where secondary markets, portfolio level liquidity planning, and staggered realisation pathways become critical.

The task ahead is unglamorous. Borrowing the hard earned disciplines public markets developed over decades. Standardised information, counterparty discipline, repeatable processes, and transaction readiness built well in advance.

Private markets will never, and should never, offer public market liquidity. But a more stable exit environment across cycles can be created if capital return is treated as a system level responsibility rather than a single terminal event.

The comfort of an exit is what turns patience into confidence. And repeat participation is what makes a market durable. And it is the comfort of an exit that creates the courage for the entry.

As always, thank you for reading, and for shaping how we think. If you have a view on what makes exits feel credible in India, I’d genuinely love to hear it.

Happy Republic Day, and see you next month.

The Unlisted Intel

Sources:

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/imf-raises-india-fy26-growth-forecast-73-sees-slower-pace-next-two-years-2026-01-19/

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/india-on-track-to-join-china-in-an-elite-club-by-the-end-of-the-decade-sbi/articleshow/126669755.cms?from=mdr

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/mf/analysis/monthly-sip-inflows-double-in-three-years-as-equity-valuations-stay-elevated/articleshow/126363398.cms?from=mdr

https://www.sebi.gov.in/statistics/1392982252002.html

Crisil and Oister Global. No ifs about AIFs 2.0.

Disclaimer

Thanks, it’s Vintage!

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:20:04 GMT

In the early 2000s, a soft-spoken Indonesian collector named Rudy Kurniawan became the most powerful man in fine wine.

He bought aggressively at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, hosted lavish tastings in Los Angeles, and uncorked bottles most collectors would never see in a lifetime. Burgundy dominated his table ~ Domaine Ponsot, Romanée-Conti ~ the most revered names in the world, often from legendary years.

The vintages did the heavy lifting. Once a date like 1945 or 1947 was read aloud, the room leaned in. A great year explained everything.

The first cracks appeared when Domaine Ponsot stated publicly that bottles attributed to the estate from 1945 and 1947 had never existed. The Domaine had been closed during the war. No wine was produced in those years. Soon after, collectors noticed Rudy was offering Romanée-Conti in quantities exceeding the total historical production of certain vintages. The math didn’t work. The histories didn’t line up.

Yet for years, the market had accepted the bottles without protest because the years printed on the labels were among the most revered in wine history.

When the scheme finally unravelled, the mechanics were almost banal. Wines blended in a kitchen. Artificial ageing. Perfectly printed labels. Carefully chosen vintages. Tens of millions of dollars had already changed hands. Auctions were voided. Lawsuits followed. Tastings were replayed in memory, now with disbelief.

What endured was the realisation that value had organised itself almost entirely around the vintage.

The wine didn’t have to be great.The vintage did.

That distinction is important because it reveals how markets often price time before substance, narrative before verification, and reputation before outcomes.

What the Kurniawan episode revealed wasn’t just fraud, but how much weight markets place on time itself. Once a year acquired a reputation, it began to carry meaning, confidence, and price long before the substance was examined.

TL;DR: A guy sold fake legendary wines, and the market bought the story because the vintage on the label sounded priceless. The parallel in private markets is that “vintage” becomes a powerful shorthand in hindsight, because the year you deploy shapes pricing, competition, and the opportunity set.

Yes, the wine detour is deliberate. It’s our way of setting the mood for the year-end. As the wrap-ups roll in (and 2025 already looks like one for the books), it felt like the right moment, in Unlisted Intel, to use vintage as a lens for understanding why certain years end up carrying far more weight than others.

Before going any further, it’s worth confronting a deceptively simple question:

Do vintages really matter in private markets?

Not as folklore or shorthand, but in outcomes. How much of long-term performance is genuinely explained by the year capital is invested in? And how much is driven by everything that follows?

The answer isn’t a single insight, but a set of patterns that repeat across cycles. Four, in particular, stand out.

80% of Venture Returns Came from Just 5–7 Vintages (2000–2022)

Vintage effects are most visible where return dispersion is extreme. In venture capital, outcomes follow a clear power law. Analysis by StepStone Group shows that roughly 80% of aggregate VC performance between 2000 and 2022 came from just 5–7 vintages out of 23.

A small handful of years end up doing most of the work for the asset class.

This does not mean every fund in those years performed well; only that the opportunity set widened dramatically in those vintages, allowing a few outcomes to dominate aggregate returns.

Miss them (or back the wrong managers in those years) and long-term outcomes may look materially different. The challenge, of course, is that these “golden” vintages are rarely obvious while they are forming.

Source: StepStone Analysis

Recession-Year Vintages Have Historically Outperformed Pre-Crash Years

When vintages cluster around economic downturns, a counterintuitive pattern appears. Research shows that recession-year vintages, particularly those raised in 2001 and during the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis, have historically produced higher net multiples than funds raised in the years leading up to those downturns.

These were not years investors rushed toward. Capital was scarce, financing constrained, and uncertainty was high. Yet those same conditions created lower entry prices and enforced discipline, which proved advantageous over long horizons.

In other words, the environment penalised comfort and rewarded restraint.

Source: CAIS

Even Perfect Vintage Timing Barely Moves the Needle

Recognising these patterns does not mean they are easy, or even particularly valuable, to exploit.

Commonfund’s analysis shows that even with perfect hindsight, the benefits of avoiding “bad” years are surprisingly small. An allocator who somehow skipped the three worst vintages between 2000 and 2020 would have improved total value only marginally, from roughly a 1.70x multiple to about 1.74x.

By contrast, consistent access to top-quartile managers lifted outcomes far more meaningfully.

This resolves the apparent contradiction: vintages shape the range of possible outcomes, but managers determine whether any of that dispersion is actually captured.

Vintages describe the environment; managers determine the result.

Source: commonfund

Staying Invested Matters More Than Getting the Year Right

Over long horizons, behaviour tends to matter more than foresight.

Commonfund’s work on endowments shows that institutions with sustained allocations to private investments (typically above 20%) outperformed peers by around 70 basis points per year over a 25-year period.

The advantage did not come from clever timing, but from staying invested through difficult periods and maintaining pacing discipline.

Attempts to skip vintages often resulted in persistent under-allocation. Gaps of 2-4% that could last five years or more, even after efforts to catch up.

Vintage effects are real but they are blunt instruments. They describe conditions, not guarantees.

Within any given year, dispersion remains wide, driven by manager quality, sector exposure, and how capital is actually deployed.

The story of great and not-so-great years

Our work on vintages led us to a paradox.

The years that felt great while we were living through them - full of capital, optimism, and slick pitch decks - are rarely the years you’d pick if you could go back and buy the whole vintage. And the years everyone cursed on IC calls often turn out to be the ones that carry the portfolio.

To understand why, you have to look at the plumbing: how much capital was raised, how much was invested and at what valuations, and what was the market’s mood.

Globally. And in India.

The “great” years

In global buyouts, 2006–07 was the classic “great” stretch. Private equity fundraising finally pushed past the half-trillion mark. Leverage was cheap. Mega-deals set the tone. Entry multiples marched higher as everyone ran the same trade: financial engineering on top of a world of permanently low rates.

Venture got its own high-water mark in 2021. US VC funds raised around $168 billion, almost 1.9x 2020 and more than 2.5x the prior five-year average. Early-stage valuations jumped ~64% in a year while late-stage jumped ~93%. A hot IPO and SPAC window made those marks look sensible, until it didn’t.

India traced the same arc in fast-forward.

2019: PE deal value hit roughly $45 billion, ~70% higher than 2018 and more than 110% above the prior five-year average. India briefly became the second-largest PE deal market in APAC.

2021: total private-capital deal value reached about $53 billion, up 71% year-on-year across 1,100+ deals. VC alone was ~$38.5 billion (3.8x 2020) and, for the first time, more than half of all private capital. 44 unicorns were minted, more than China.

Everything that is supposed to be cyclical went vertical at the same time: fundraising, round sizes, unicorn count, exit value.

These years feel decisive. They dominate annual letters and conference panels. The instinct is to assume they are also the years that will carry the portfolio.

But look at what those inputs do to the starting point for returns:

Record fundraising means brutal competition for deals
Stretched entry valuations leave little room for multiple expansion
Hot exit markets nudge investors toward momentum over fundamentals

None of that guarantees weak outcomes.

But structurally, these are difficult starting points. The very conditions that made the year feel powerful at the time are often the ones that compress future returns.

The “not-so-great” years

Now flip the lens to the years no one wanted to talk about.

Globally, 2001 and 2008–09 are the obvious markers. In both, public markets had just crashed and banks were shrinking balance sheets. LPs did what they always do: cut commitments and “wait for clarity”.

Preqin’s long-run data shows the 2001 PE vintage ended up as one of the strongest in more than two decades. CAIS’s analysis of the GFC period finds that funds raised in 2008–09 produced higher net multiples across buyout, venture, and real estate than the three vintages immediately before.

Fundraising was miserable. Deals were smaller, slower, and negotiated from a position of fear. Valuations and leverage terms reset.

If you were designing an environment purely for long-run IRR, it would look uncomfortably like that.

India’s “not-so-great” regimes follow the same script, with the caveat that India’s private-market history is shorter, and outcomes are still maturing.

Post dot-com and Ketan Parekh, capital became fearful and scarce. During 2008–09, deals slowed and exits were painful. Capital that did go to work bought roads, power, lenders and early consumer businesses at prices that look implausible today.

The most recent cycle makes the contrast explicit.

After the 2021 peak:

Indian tech funding fell from ~$42B in 2021 to ~$25B in 2022
VC deal value dropped ~33%
In 2023, funding collapsed another 60–70%

From an allocator’s lens, 2022–23 were textbook “not-so-great” years.

ICs were tired. GPs were fighting over terms. Founders were dragged back toward profitability.

By 2024, the market began to heal. Capital deployed went into cleaner cap tables, reasonable valuations, and thinner competition.

Those are precisely the conditions that tend to define strong vintages in hindsight because they compound well.

2025: what kind of vintage are we minting?

By late 2025, the label is printed, but the bottle is still young.

In India, the setup is constructive. PE–VC investments rebounded about 9% in 2024 to $43 billion. Exits hit a record $33 billion. In 2025, exit momentum has continued in a steadier, less theatrical way.

That sequencing matters. Capital returning before a fundraising surge tends to restore discipline rather than excess.

Globally, fundraising remains constrained. Commitments are still ~40% below the 2021 peak. But deal activity and exits have recovered enough to recycle capital without reigniting euphoria.

What could break this vintage is not obvious exuberance but interruption: a closed exit window, a sharp public-market derating, or a prolonged fundraising drought that starves deployment mid-cycle.

Absent that, the starting conditions look sound.

Seen through the lens of vintages, this is often how good years begin. The wine is being made in the cellar, not rushed to auction.

It doesn’t guarantee that 2025 will age well.

But stripped of mood and narrative, it looks far closer to the silent years that compound than the loud ones we spend a decade explaining.

With that, we’re at the final Unlisted Intel of 2025.

The dictionary word of the year was “rage bait”, and the year certainly wasn’t a quiet one. There wasn’t a single boring moment.

With time, 2025 may come to be seen as a strong vintage - one that set better foundations and left the ecosystem better prepared for what followed.

Thank you to everyone who read, shared, and engaged with Unlisted Intel this year.

We end 2025 sharper, more calibrated, and better positioned for the vintages ahead.

Here’s to an even better 2026.

Jai Hind 🇮🇳

The Unlisted Intel

Sources:

https://www.stepstonegroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/VC-vintage-year-power-law.pdf

https://www.caisgroup.com/articles/the-importance-of-entry-point-for-private-equity-vintage-performance

https://www.commonfund.org/hubfs/00-Commonfund.org/03%20Research%20Center/Articles/2025-0813-Minding-The-Gap/Mind-the-Gap-The-Strategic-Risk.pdf

https://www.caisgroup.com/articles/when-might-golden-vintages-appear-in-private-markets
https://www.buyoutsinsider.com/2006-year-of-the-mega-buyout/

https://docs.preqin.com/reports/Report_2008_Fundraising_Review.pdf

https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/dealmaking-rebound-sees-private-equity-recovery-taking-shape-bain-global-private-equity-report/

Bain India Private Equity Report 2020

Bain India Venture Capital Report 2022

https://www.globalprivatecapital.org/app/uploads/2022/03/2022-India-Data-Insight.pdf

Bain India Private Equity Report 2025

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/funding/indian-startups-raised-42-billion-in-2021-report/articleshow/88875670.cms

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/startups/startup-funding-falls-35-in-2022-says-tracxn-report/printarticle/96064417.cms

https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2023/2022-vc-investment-value-in-india-softened-significantly-however-deal-volume-continued-to-retain-pace-with-2021-led-by-early-stage-deal-making/

https://www.ft.com/content/6c792aeb-03e5-48ca-917c-81d278f90185

Disclaimer

Are We Already Playing in a Higher League?

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 04:30:49 GMT

Dear Reader,

I want to start this month’s newsletter with two images.

First is this tweet by Rajan Anandan.

Screenshot of public tweet by @RajanAnandan on X

Second is this clip from this Monday’s Economic Times.

Source: Economic Times, 2025

The tweet captures the sentiment pulsing through India’s VC/PE ecosystem right now. And the clipping shows the scale of what’s actually happening. And yes, we’ve all become somewhat numb to big numbers, but even then, this one is big: the 2025 startup IPO rush (Ather, BlueStone, Lenskart, Urban Company, Groww, Pine Labs) has already delivered about $1.6 billion of cash exits to VCs through OFS. That’s staggering by any standard.

What’s even more interesting is what sits beyond the cash. Investors still hold over $8 billion in mark-to-market value across these companies, powered by strong post-listing performance. That tells a deeper story.

By now, you’ve probably read enough debriefs and deal-room takes on what’s happening in India’s VC/PE ecosystem. But I keep coming back to that tweet, and it raises a simpler, more fundamental question: how mature are we, really?

I’ve been racking my brain about this for a while now speaking to founders, investors, LPs, absorbing the noise and the nuance, and trying to make sense of what this moment actually means. And the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that “maturity” is not so simple. It’s layered.

If the global VC/PE universe were a three-hour film, India is well past the opening credits. The pioneer years are behind us; the early chaos has thinned; we’re somewhere around minute 45 now, the part where the story settles, the characters sharpen, and the stakes start to become real.

Or here’s another comparison: if India’s private markets were human, they’d be in their mid-20s. Very energetic, self-aware, still learning, and finally beginning to show real, repeatable promise.

But metaphors aside, here’s the hypothesis that emerged from all that thinking:

A mature VC/PE market is one where capital is abundant, exits are predictable, governance is institutional, and outcomes repeat across cycles.

That’s the lens we used when we went back to the numbers. And here’s what they revealed.

The data reflects exactly this point in the script. India’s private capital market crossed roughly $43 billion in PE–VC deal value in 2024, a 9% recovery from the previous year. Over 1,600 transactions were recorded, placing India solidly as the second-largest PE–VC destination in Asia-Pacific, ahead of every market except China. This is not the statistical profile of a young market. It’s the signature of an ecosystem that has built muscle memory.

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Where Do We Stand Today?

Size Of Market : The AUM of Indian alternative industry is expected to reach $238 bn by the year 2028 from $131 bn in 2022. Between 2024 and 2028, the industry is expected to record a CAGR of around 13-15%.

Source: CareEdge. (2024, December). ‘Industry Research Report on Alternatives’

Exits: India’s share of exit value rose sharply in 2024. India was Asia Pacific’s largest exit market in 2024 in terms of value and count.

Source: Bain ‘Asia-Pacific Private Equity Report 2025’

Domestic Capital Rising: As per data from SEBI, as of September 2024, domestic investors accounted for ~51% of gross funds raised across Category I and II AIFs.

Source: CRISIL and Oister Global Report, ‘No ifs about AIFs 2.0’

Better Segmentation: At the same time, the market has segmented. We now have:

Global-scale buyout platforms
Domestic and regional mid-market specialists
Sector-focused funds in consumer, healthcare, financials, and infrastructure
A VC stack running from seed to late-stage

In 2024, India deployed across distinct strategies – $16.8 billion in buyouts, $13.4 billion in growth, $10.8 billion in private credit, $10 billion in start-ups, and $5 billion in PIPE.

In terms of sectoral allocation, infrastructure, financial services, real estate, e-commerce, technology, and life science, recorded more than 100 deals each in 2024 (compared to just two sectors reaching this milestone in 2023) and collectively accounted for 80% of total investments by value and 66% by deal volume. This opens up the opportunity for sector-focused managers rather than generic growth funds.

How Do We Compare Globally?

Not US/China Yet

In 2024, global PE-VC investment grew ~40% from about $1.06 trillion to $1.46 trillion, led by the US and the UK, while Asia-Pacific as a whole grew a more modest ~1.1x. India tracked that regional pattern: PE-VC investments rose ~9% from $39B to $43B, slower than the global rebound, but enough to firmly hold its position as Asia-Pacific’s second-largest destination after China.

Source: Bain ‘India Private Equity Report 2025’

But Far Ahead Of Many Other Markets

Within Asia-Pacific, India has pulled away from the rest of the pack. Over the last decade, its share of regional PE deal value has steadily increased, even as Greater China’s has slipped, and by 2024 India clearly stands as the second-biggest market in the region, well ahead of Japan, South Korea, and Australia–New Zealand.

Source: Bain ‘Asia-Pacific Private Equity Report 2025’

India Is Young By Years, Mature By Outcomes

India was the only market in Asia-Pacific to post double-digit growth in both PE deal value and deal count in 2024: investments climbed from $30 billion in 2023 to $38 billion in 2024, even as Greater China, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia all sat below or around their 2019–23 averages.

At the same time, leading global GPs are concentrating their big cheques in India: $100m+ deals in India rose from an average of 8 (2014–18) to 15 in 2024, while comparable deals in Greater China dropped from 11 to just 3, and stayed flat or barely up in the rest of the region.

Source: Bain ‘Asia-Pacific Private Equity Report 2025’

Where The Headroom Lies..

No ecosystem matures without its own set of gaps. The presence of these gaps precisely tells you there’s meaningful headroom ahead. India’s no different. Three areas stand out.

Exits Work, But The Mix Needs To Widen.

IPOs have delivered, no question. But beyond public markets, the exit toolkit is still shallow. Secondary sales, GP-leds, and sponsor-to-sponsor exits haven’t scaled to where they should be in a $4+ trillion economy.

Early-Stage Density Outside The Top Corridors

VC recovery has been healthy in the aggregate, but deal flow is still heavily skewed towards certain sectors and metros. Beyond consumer tech, SaaS, and fintech, the pipeline in climate, deep tech, manufacturing, and frontier sectors remains thinner than it should be for a $4+ trillion economy.

Long GP Track Records

Many of India’s GPs have not yet seen three or four full cycles through from entry to exit. First- and second-time funds still make up a meaningful share of the landscape, which means track-record depth is a work in progress.

Based on data from CRISIL and Oister Global’s report No ifs about AIFs 2.0, a sample of 279 Category I and II funds shows that about 56% are managed by first-time investment managers, 20% by second-time managers, and only 24% by managers that have launched three or more funds. Even in the last three vintages alone, roughly 44% of all managers coming to market were first-time GPs – evidence of strong entrepreneurial energy, but also a reminder of how early we still are in building long, multi-cycle GP track records.

What Does This Mean For The Next Decade?

So what does all this mean for investors sizing up the next decade? India’s trajectory is its own, so here’s our humble take, and it tends to fall into four clear buckets.

What Strengthens: India’s domestic capital pools are only getting deeper with mutual funds, insurers, pensions, and soon alternatives, while control deals, cleaner governance, and real sector depth in financials, healthcare, consumer, and infra start to show up with scale.

What Still Needs Time: dependable exits beyond IPOs, truly deep early-stage ecosystems outside the usual hubs, and GP franchises that mature into real institutions with multi-cycle credibility and succession.

What Will Differentiate India: a rare blend of growth, scale, and improving governance, a domestic bid that can actually underwrite exits, and a buyout/secondaries opportunity set shaped by decades of founder-led, under-institutionalised businesses finally reaching transition points.

And Why This Moment Matters: because the next decade is about proving India can compound consistently, across vintages and cycles. That’s what entering the compounding phase really means.

So where do we actually land on the maturity spectrum when we stack ourselves against other winners? Not the US. Not China. Somewhere distinctly India.

India is moving along a maturity curve of its own, shaped by two forces that make this moment fundamentally different.

First: The Domestic Bid Arrived Early.

In most markets, deep domestic public-equity pools and broad retail participation come long before private markets and venture-backed IPOs really scale. In India, that gap has been unusually narrow. By the time this startup IPO wave arrived, mutual funds, SIP culture, and direct retail participation were already a meaningful share of secondary-market demand.

Second: Policy Has Acted As Invisible Scaffolding.

India’s regulatory ecosystem gets plenty of criticism for being conservative and process-heavy. Some of that is deserved. But it has also built a fairly strong spine: disclosure-heavy listing rules, tighter related-party scrutiny, greater expectations from auditors and independent directors, and a regulator that is increasingly willing to intervene. All this has forced private markets to professionalise faster than many peers. Our curve is hence defined by a rising floor. Better governance, better quality, better repeatability.

Put simply: India is no longer a market defined by possibility alone. We’re entering a phase where outcomes are becoming repeatable, where capital cycles feel familiar, and where governance is becoming a norm, not an aspiration. We’re not fully mature, not yet, but we’re well past the introductions. If the last decade proved we could build, the next will prove we can sustain, exit, and repeat across vintages, sectors, and cycles.

India’s private markets are stepping into their adult years. And like adulthood, it brings stronger confidence, clearer expectations, and a better understanding of what really matters. We may still be at minute 45 of the three-hour film, but the plot is now in motion, the characters are defined, and the direction is unmistakable.

Jai Hind

The Unlisted Intel

Sources:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/busy-startup-ipo-season-gives-risk-investors-rs-15000-crore-in-cash-exits/articleshow/125369810.cms?from=mdr

https://www.eaaa.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Industry_Research_Report_on_Alernatives.pdf

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/finance/india-pe-vc-market-rebounds-in-2024-to-43-bn-vc-growth-investment-spur-momentum/articleshow/120964552.cms?from=mdr

https://www.ey.com/content/dam/ey-unified-site/ey-com/en-in/insights/private-equity/documents/ey-private-equity-and-venture-capital-trendbook-2025-v1.pdf

https://oisterglobal.com/report-assets/Crisil_Oister_Report_Jan13_2025.pdf

https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2025/bain_report_india_private_equity_2025.pdf

https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2025/bain_report_asia_pacific_private_equity_report_2025.pdf

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List Of 9 Things We Read Or Watched Recently That Survived Our ‘Close Tab’ Reflex.

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 05:31:38 GMT

Here is a list of 9 things we read or watched recently that survived our ‘close tab’ reflex :

1. How India’s Family Offices Qualify Products Before They Allocate Capital
Send this to anyone who still thinks allocations are about ‘returns’ alone.

2. How Shiprocket Runs Indian E-Commerce
In a world where delivery boys show up more than friends, Jivraj and Shiprocket’s Sahil Goel talk through a business heading for the public markets.

3. The Exit Paradox
Amid an IPO-heavy November and the predictable wave of frenzy content, this piece offered a grounded look at the exit dilemma.

4. You Can Just Read 25 Books
a16z pulled together founders’ and GPs’ top reads of 2025, and we’re here for it.

5. The Psychology of Compounding: How to Lose Less and Earn More
Compounding ft. Sundaram. Shrishti’s deep dives never miss.

6. Observations on People, the World, and Everything Else
A collection of musings, a set of opinions, a list of miscellaneous observations. Pure gold.

7. The Less We Need, The More The World Wants To Give
Sorry for the shameless plug, but this is easily the most-loved piece we’ve ever done at Unlisted Intel.

8. Gaurav Kushwaha on BlueStone pitch deck, cracking a trust-first category & turning design into moat
BTS behind Bluestone: a true demi-fine jewellery giant. #CannotMiss

9. The World Is Wrong About Your Attention
Locked in right up. Pls read this, you won’t regret it.

The Next Act of Indian Capital

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 05:33:36 GMT

Hello from Q4 of a year that’s trained us to take whatever comes.

We know we’re sending this just as the country starts to shift gears with inboxes slowing down, calendars breathing again, and that unmistakable scent of kaju katli drifting through the season.

Still, we’re taking a small gamble that a few of you will read this before the cards come out and the Wi-Fi starts to fade somewhere between your parents’ living room and the guest bedroom.

Because this one’s for the regulars. The private-market nerds. The ones who still open Unlisted Intel while half the country debates which mithai box offers the best ROI.

In this edition, we wanted to poke at a question that’s been sitting at the back of our heads for a while: what’s the next act of Indian capital?

Don’t get us wrong, this isn’t that kind of newsletter. We’re not about to tell you where to invest. And no, this isn’t one of those “here’s every asset class you could possibly touch” explainers either. Remember NFTs? Exactly.

Mutual funds have done their job brilliantly. They turned participation into discipline and made markets feel like home for millions. But that chapter’s written. What’s the next system that can shape how India saves, invests, and believes? And can something of that scale happen again, not replacing but a engine in parallel?

Before we answer that, it’s worth seeing the size of the capital (and opportunity) we’re talking about. According to a recent Bernstein report, just the top 1% of Indian households hold about $2.7 trillion in liquid financial assets. This pool is expected to triple to $9 trillion by 2035, growing at roughly 13% a year.

That concentration of wealth is also what’s putting India firmly on the global wealth map. India now ranks 3rd worldwide in the number of billionaires (more than 200 individuals worth over $1 billion) and 4th in high-net-worth individuals, with about 85.7k people holding at least $10 million in assets, per the 2025 Knight Frank Wealth Report.

That’s the canvas.

So when we ask “What’s the next act?,” we’re not asking for a product; we’re asking about the next system that can absorb India’s growing capital and turn a nation of savers into stewards.

And it is already taking shape - Enter, Alternative Asset Managers.

The Unlisted Intel

Alternative asset managers are, at their core, institutions built to manage patient capital that doesn’t chase daily prices, but commits for years to create and compound.

Of course, you’re familiar with the names such as Blackstone, KKR, Brookfield, and Hamilton Lane, the global pioneers of private investments that turned them into an organized industry. More important than the scale they have reached today, what they really built was the structure: systems that could deploy, manage, and recycle capital across strategies, asset classes, and cycles.

They began as specialists in buyouts, credit, or real estate, and evolved into multi-strategy giants managing everything from infrastructure and private equity to private credit and secondaries. What separates them from mutual fund AMCs isn’t just the asset class; it’s the horizon and the conviction. Alternative managers design structures, blending private equity, venture capital, private credit, venture debt, real assets, REITs, InvITs, and fund-of-funds into long-term portfolios.

In India, this industry is still taking shape, but the outlines are unmistakable. Kotak Alternate Asset Managers, Edelweiss Alternatives, True North, Multiples, and 360 ONE are all building different limbs of the same organism, bringing structure and institutional depth to what was once a fragmented, relationship-driven market.

As you feel the ambition everywhere, you can also see the fragmentation.

Brilliant funds, credible founders, serious LPs, they are all moving in parallel, not yet in sync. That’s why specialisation matters. Because right now, capital still meets the market one conversation at a time.

HNIs and family offices still find founders through friends. They choose opportunities fund by fund, round by round, product by product. Success depends a little on what you happen to see early, or who happens to send you the deck and not yet on a shared architecture that lets belief scale safely.

So far, wealth managers have been the front door to this world, widening access, curating products, and building early trust. They taught a generation of investors to look beyond listed equities. But access is not architecture. Their job was to open the gate; the next belongs to those building the house.

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Behind the polish, the plumbing is still catching up. And all the while, demand is outrunning design. Family offices want exposure without stitching it together piece by piece. Institutions want multi-year programs that can hold venture, growth, buyout, credit, and secondaries within a single philosophy. Founders want partners who can stay through stages, not restart the relationship every round.

India’s alternatives industry may not be where the Western counterparts are, but it is very much alive with energy, ambition, and genuine intent. The next step is to work on the architectural strength.

It’s worth remembering that we’ve seen the playbook before.
The mutual fund industry did for India’s public markets what alternatives are poised to do for its private ones. By creating regulated, transparent vehicles, mutual fund AMCs turned participation into a habit and in doing so, gave Indian equities a dependable base of domestic stability.

That foundation has only deepened. Domestic mutual funds own more than 10% of the total listed universe in FY25, at an all-time high. This ownership is a stabiliser. It has helped in price discovery, reduced volatility, and kept foreign flows from swinging the market’s mood. Mutual funds built the connective tissue between household savings and the country’s growth story; they made capital formation a collective act.

Private markets are now standing on the same threshold.
As alternative asset managers scale, they’ll serve a parallel function, bringing stability, continuity, and structure to what has so far been a patchwork of ambition.

They’ll do for India’s private markets what mutual funds did for the public ones: turn episodic investing into a system, convert intent into action, and give long-term capital a home.

To get there, India needs more full‑stack alternative managers, the private‑market equivalent of an AMC. One roof, multiple strategies and vehicles; one risk spine, many vintages; one liquidity design, many exit lanes.

The system already has energy. What it needs now is endurance.
That’s the next phase: turning an active market into an organised one.
And with the rise of India’s alternative asset managers, that coherence is finally beginning to take form.

The AIF industry now manages over ₹14 lakh crore in commitments (as of June 30, 2025), a ~36x jump from March 2016, with capital deployed across venture, growth, credit, and real assets. The alternative asset managers behind this growth engine are building systems that can hold conviction across cycles, across asset classes, and across time, turning what used to be a collection of products into an ecosystem. At Oister, we see ourselves as part of that same evolution

If there’s one thing worth paying attention to, it’s how structure will play a vital role. The next chapter of India’s private markets will see capital start to connect: venture flowing into growth, growth feeding credit, and secondaries recycling conviction back into the system.

The firms that endure will be the ones designing for continuity, able to carry relationships, insight, and liquidity across vintages and vehicles. In that sense, the real innovation is architectural. What’s emerging is a market that’s learning to behave like an ecosystem, where exits become reinvestments, investors become partners, and cycles begin to compound on themselves. That’s how scale starts to mean something deeper than size and how private capital starts to feel permanent.

The truth is, this moment couldn’t have arrived any earlier.

A decade ago, the pieces simply weren’t ready. Founders were still finding their feet with governance. Exits were unpredictable. Regulation was cautious. Domestic LPs were curious but hesitant. Much of India’s wealth was still first-generation which means it was impatient, instinctive, and learning how to trust time. The ambition was there, but the architecture wasn’t.

That’s changing fast.

Today, we’re seeing companies that hold their own on global metrics in sectors such as SaaS, climate tech, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing. Founders think longer, regulators move quicker, and domestic capital is beginning to trust its own judgement.

Family offices that once sent money overseas are now anchoring Indian AIFs. Pension and insurance pools are edging toward private credit. Even treasury capital, once the most cautious, is warming to patient structures.

For the first time, both sides of the table feel ready: the people building, and the people backing them. The trust that mutual funds built in public markets is now being rewritten in private ones.

So what comes after mutual funds? Not another product or category. But something deeper and more deliberate.

Mutual funds taught India how to save; alternative asset managers will teach it how to hold. They’ll give form to the country’s growing wealth, build systems around its ambition, and create the architecture that lets capital stay home and still scale.

The work ahead won’t be glamorous with continuous strides needed towards governance, reporting, research depth, and patience. But that’s what permanence needs. It asks us to think like custodians, not campaign managers.

So maybe that’s our answer.

What comes after is not a product. It’s a system; an institutional architecture of full-stack alternative asset managers that turns savers into stewards and anchors private markets as a core part of India’s wealth portfolio.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably one of us, the kind of person who still cares about how systems are built, how trust compounds, and how markets find their rhythm. You see the poetry in process and the beauty in patience.

So thank you for staying with us, for thinking this through, and for believing that capital can be both intelligent and humane.

Happy Diwali, from all of us at Oister and here’s to the builders of whatever comes next.

The Unlisted Intel

Sources:

Bernstein Report, July 2025

https://content.knightfrank.com/resources/knightfrank.com/wealthreport/the-wealth-report-2025.pdf

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/mf/mf-news/ownership-of-domestic-mutual-funds-in-all-listed-universe-scale-record-high-to-over-10-in-fy25-nse-pulse-report/articleshow/121515371.cms?from=mdr

https://www.business-standard.com/finance/news/aif-commitments-surge-to-rs-14-trillion-funds-raised-cross-rs-5-trillion-125082501217_1.html

https://www.sebi.gov.in/statistics/1392982252002.html

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All Good Things Come To Those Who…Exit?

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 07:03:17 GMT

Welcome, dear reader.

This edition of The Unlisted Intel is about Patience.

Patience is supposed to be a virtue. And if you’re anything like me, you can already think of a few places where you wish you had more of it.

This is the world we live in: we cancel an Uber if it’s running five minutes late and feel cheated if our groceries don’t show up in under fifteen. We won’t sit through a 30-second ad, even though not long ago we’d watch a song buffer line-by-line on a computer screen. We refresh tracking links every hour, swipe away movies after ten minutes if they don’t grip us, and tap furiously when the Wi-Fi lags for two seconds. We used to wait weeks for letters in the post, today we’re offended if a WhatsApp text takes more than five seconds to get a blue tick.

And yet, for all our day-to-day impatience, we’ve built our wealth on waiting. Fixed deposits have been our heroes, compounding for decades. Across the country, there’s over ₹100 trillion parked in FDs. Then came the PPF, with its 15-year lock-in, usually the first thing your parents nudged you to open. Gold and land were never investments to be traded; they were heirlooms polished, prayed over, and passed down. The earliest Reliance shareholders held tiny allotments through volatile decades, watching them turn into dynastic wealth. Families with LIC policies in the 70s and 80s treated them as time capsules that matured just in time for a child’s wedding or business.

Patience, in short, has been the operating system of Indian wealth.

By now, you’ve probably connected the dots. Which brings me to the point. If there’s one asset class that should feel second nature to us, it’s private markets: the world of unlisted startups and businesses. They’ve always been about giving businesses the time to stumble, steady themselves, and eventually scale. In many ways, the entire premise of the asset class is summed up in that old line: all good things come to those who wait.

But here’s the twist: in today’s world, that kind of patience is wearing thin.

Indian investors, including institutions, family offices, HNIs, already understand the power of this asset class. Research we do with Crisil annually shows that AIFs in India have historically delivered alpha ranging from 5% to nearly 20% over multiple benchmarking cycles compared to public markets equivalents. Appetite is no longer in question; if anything, it’s stronger than ever.

Source: Ares Wealth Management Solutions

For investors used to liquidity on tap…mutual funds you can exit overnight, stocks you can sell in seconds, savings apps that move money with a swipe, the long lockups of private markets feel like another world. A decade may pass easily for a global pension fund. For an Indian HNI, it feels more like a test of conviction: a structure that demands trust, patience, and a different rhythm than what they see in the public markets.

And to be clear, this isn’t about naïve impatience. LPs today are far smarter and more deliberate than a decade ago. Funding winters have sharpened perspectives, and conversations today are far more sophisticated. The sharper questions aren’t why private markets, but how. How soon to liquidity? How much visibility along the way? Can capital be recycled without losing exposure? These signal a maturing market with participation not just deeper, but more discerning.

That scrutiny is right on cue. The very nature of timelines has shifted. Across the globe, the traditional 10+2 year VC/PE model is under pressure. The average holding period for buyouts in the US and Canada spiked to 7.1 years in 2023, the longest in over two decades. As per SVB’s State of the Markets H1 2025 report, top-quartile funds now often take 16–20 years to fully return capital. Unicorns like Zomato, Nykaa, and Paytm went public 9–13 years after founding. High IPO activity that we have witnessed in India recently doesn’t mean shorter timelines; companies are still taking longer to scale before they list, as they should.

Source: PrivateCircle Research

Seen in this light, extended holds aren’t failures, but rather deliberate execution taking cycles of evolution. Building global-scale companies takes time. Top Indian funds often hold flagship assets 8–10 years before seeking liquidity. Exits are scrutinised more, DPI valued above paper mark-ups, and managers are building with more rigor. For an economy like ours, that discipline is healthy.

But discipline alone isn’t enough. Patience, on its own, eventually runs into limits. And this is where the real unlock lies.

Innovation has become the hero, doing what patience alone could not: bringing more people comfortably into the fold. And at the center of that innovation is one structure above all: secondaries.

The Unlisted intel

Secondaries aren’t new. Decades ago, they were little more than an escape hatch for an LP who couldn’t wait out a cycle and was looking to sell to someone who could. What’s innovative today is their reinvention. From distressed trades on the margins, they’ve become front-line tools of portfolio strategy: deliberately structured, GP-led, and scaled into a $160 billion global market. That reinvention is innovation. Secondaries no longer just transfer ownership; they reshape the rhythm of patience in private markets.

In 2024, global secondary volumes jumped 45% to $162 billion. The first half of 2025 has already crossed $103 billion. The real shift isn’t just in size but in shape: GP-led deals, once rare, now make up nearly half the market. Managers themselves are using secondaries to hold their best companies longer, while still giving LPs the option of liquidity.

Source: Jefferies H1 2025 Global Secondary Market Review

Continuation funds share the same logic. First conceived to extend the life of strong assets when the clock ran out, they’re now part of the mainstream playbook, sometimes even extending into “continuations of continuations.”

India is firmly part of this evolution. Annual secondary deal activity here is projected around $20 billion. In the first half of 2024, more than a third of $50–500 million transactions were secondaries, which was unthinkable just a few years ago. Liquidity is clearly not just an afterthought anymore.

The number of players has grown sharply. Just last month, IVCA hosted a full-day conference on secondaries, and the turnout was proof of how quickly depth is forming. What was once niche is becoming mainstream, with both domestic and global houses putting serious weight behind the market. At Oister, secondaries remain a core, though not the only, strategy, and the momentum around us makes it clear: India is building real depth in this space.

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For Indian HNIs and family offices, this shift is significant. But while secondaries bring enormous power, they aren’t without their gaps. For them to truly fulfil their promise, investors need visibility. The real innovation lies in going well beyond the sparse disclosures of a new fund, including naming companies, sharing performance, and mapping growth trajectories upfront. At Oister, that’s something we’ve been working toward in our own funds, and we’ve seen how much more confidence investors have when they can see what they’re stepping into. Over time, this kind of transparency will become as valuable as the liquidity secondaries provide and it’s what will draw more domestic investors into private markets.

The effect goes beyond investors. When LPs get liquidity, GPs can show DPI earlier, and founders see fresh capital flow in, the entire ecosystem gains confidence.

Porter’s recent round underscored how secondaries let early investors exit cleanly and make room for the next set of backers without slowing the company’s trajectory. Last year’s secondary transactions in Swiggy ahead of its IPO showed a different use case: long-held stakes changing hands to lock in decade-old gains, while new investors step in with conviction and large shareholders adjust positions for regulatory reasons. Together, these deals underscore that secondaries are instruments of liquidity, price discovery, and capital circulation that keep companies moving forward.

Part of why secondary activity is surging in India is that these are also conviction trades. The fundamentals of India’s new economy companies are solid. Even in public markets, listed startups command premium multiples, backed by higher revenue growth than mid-cap peers and large caps. These are businesses scaling faster, with deeper moats, which is why capital is flowing into them through both primary and secondary rounds.

Source: TRMG RainGauge Index Report Q3FY25

Let’s pause on that. India’s leading startups are proving their fundamentals, and secondaries have become a way for investors to access them early, long before they hit public markets. These deals offer liquidity for some and opportunity for others, but more importantly, they bring visibility: what’s being held, how it’s compounding, and when liquidity windows may open. When investors can see the journey, they’re far more willing to stay on it.

In the end, patience will always be the cornerstone. Good businesses don’t get built in quarters; they take years of compounding, pivots, and steady hands.

The scale of what’s possible is clear. In the US, private equity contributed nearly $2 trillion to GDP in 2024, making up ~7% of the total US GDP. India’s private markets likely account for only 1–2% of its GDP today. Yet even a modest step-change to 5–6% over the next decade would mean billions in patient capital funding jobs, infrastructure, and innovation before public markets ever touch them. It would also signal a cultural shift: domestic wealth behaving less like restless cash and more like long-term capital.

For that to happen, we’ll need both discipline and imagination. Discipline, to let time do its work. Imagination, to keep innovating with structures that give investors the visibility and trust they need. That’s how domestic capital will step in with conviction, and why the ecosystem will flourish stronger than ever. In the end, this market will be defined not by speed, but by staying power.

And in private markets, as in life, all good things still come to those who wait.

Thank you and see you in October.

The Unlisted Intel

Sources:

https://www.business-standard.com/finance/personal-finance/how-much-do-indians-save-in-fds-all-india-average-is-rs-42-573-123070700236_1.html

Oister Global & Crisil. No Ifs About AIFs 2.0. https://oisterglobal.com/report-assets/Crisil_Oister_Report_Jan13_2025.pdf

https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/articles/2023/11/private-equity-buyout-funds-show-longest-holding-periods-in-2-decades-79033309

https://www.svb.com/globalassets/library/uploadedfiles/reports/state-of-the-markets-h1-2025.pdf

https://www.mvp.vc/research-industry-sector-report/pre-and-post-ipo-returns-analysis

https://www.jefferies.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2025/08/Jefferies-Global-Secondary-Market-Review-July-2025.pdf

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/indias-20-bn-deals-pipeline-lures-secondary-investors-to-grab-a-piece-of-the-pie/articleshow/114005160.cms

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/funding/pe-vc-funding-slows-in-first-half-of-2024-secondary-deals-become-prominent/articleshow/111495240.cms

https://infra.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/logistics/logistics-firm-porter-joins-unicorn-club-with-200-million-funding-led-by-kedaara-wellington/121018730

https://www.moneycontrol.com/technology/swiggy-shares-on-the-menu-secondary-transactions-gain-steam-ahead-of-ipo-article-12764808.html

https://www.investmentcouncil.org/new-ey-report-shows-private-equity-strengthens-u-s-economy-with-more-jobs-higher-pay-and-increased-investment/

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The Less We Need, The More The World Wants To Give

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 03:30:13 GMT

There’s an old story about a town whose lifeblood was a single well, sunk deep into the earth by a trader from a far-off city.

The water was clear, and for years the price was modest. Life revolved around its steady flow, festivals, markets, marriages, all watered by that distant man’s generosity.

Then one summer, the rains failed. The trader, facing shortages of his own, raised his rates overnight. The town could pay or go thirsty. Many argued it was cheaper to endure than to toil; after all, digging a new well meant months of sweat, uncertainty, and the risk of finding nothing.

But a small group of farmers, masons, and a widow who had seen too many dry seasons, began to dig. Day after day, calloused hands cut into the stubborn earth. The work was slow, the setbacks frequent. Weeks turned into months. And then, in the heat of late summer, the ground softened, and water rose to meet them.

The new well did more than quench thirst. It shifted the town’s spine. They still drew from the trader’s well when it made sense, for special occasions, but they no longer feared the tightening of a distant fist. The choice, and the water, were theirs. And in that choice lay a kind of wealth that silver could never buy.

In capital, as in water, the wells you dig yourself change more than your supply, they change your spine. The well is only a story, but in truth we’ve lived it before – in our farms, our factories, our markets, moments when we dug for ourselves and found the reserves to carry us further than trade alone ever could.

And this August, as India marks its 79th Independence Day, that truth feels more real than ever. We have learned to trade with the world, to absorb its science, to ride its capital flows. But 2025 has reminded us, in tariffs, in technology bans, in the sheer volatility of global money – that the most enduring independence is the kind you fund yourself.

Which is why the announcement on the eve of Independence Day matters so much. For the first time in eighteen years, S&P upgraded India’s sovereign credit rating from BBB- to BBB. The last time we moved up a notch was in 2007.

Back then, GDP was $1.2 trillion. Foreign Exchange Reserves were $199.2 billion. Mutual fund AUM barely ₹5.2 trillion (~$110 billion). Today, GDP is nearing $4.2 trillion, reserves are $688 billion, and mutual fund AUM is over ₹75 trillion (~$860 billion).

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The 2007 upgrade was an invitation to borrow from the world; the 2025 upgrade is recognition that the world wants to lend to us.

Sovereign ratings are like a country’s credit score , they decide who will lend to us, on what terms, and in what size. Moving from BBB- to BBB means more global pension funds, insurers, and bond indices can hold our debt. It means cheaper borrowing for infrastructure, industry, and innovation.

This rating is the byproduct of a deeper flywheel:

When we grow our own capital pools, we reduce dependence on external borrowing. When we depend less on external borrowing, our sovereign profile strengthens. When our profile strengthens, our ratings rise. Higher ratings lower the cost of capital. Cheaper capital fuels more growth at home. And that growth expands the depth of our own capital pools.

The more we have, the less we need from the world. The less we need, the more we get and on better terms.

India’s climb from BBB- to BBB has been unusually long with eighteen years on the bottom rung of investment grade. But time has worked in our favour. Those years weren’t idle; they were years spent building deeper reserves, a broader investor base, and the beginnings of a domestic capital market that can fund growth on its own terms.

India took its time. The growth wasn’t lacking, our GDP outpaced most peers, but only now do we have the balance sheet and the capital ecosystem to sustain it. While others raced upward on foreign inflows, India’s climb is increasingly powered by capital dug from its own well.

In the days before Independence Day, some of India’s most recognisable business voices: Harsh Goenka, Deepinder Goyal, struck the same note: it is time to build in India, for India.

The Prime Minister’s speech carried the same charge. For those of us in private markets, that call is not abstract. We are the builders of capital itself. We decide whether the next cycle of India’s growth is financed from Mumbai or Manhattan. The onus is ours, because the option is gone.

For most of India’s unicorn era, the fuel was overwhelmingly foreign. Global giants like Sequoia, Tiger Global, and SoftBank dominated the cap tables, shaping the ownership of household names from Flipkart and Paytm to Ola, Swiggy, and Zomato. This was not a failure. At the time, India simply did not have the deep domestic VC pools to match the ambition of its founders. But it also meant that when these companies exited, the majority of wealth was repatriated abroad.

Which means that for most of our unicorn era, every big exit sent more money back to foreign lands than it kept in Indian hands.

Note: The figures above are directional estimates, assembled from publicly available industry commentary and are not precise or audited datapoints. They represent a broad trend: domestic LP share in India’s PE/VC has risen over the last two decades, but still trails institutional global capital.

Local capital doesn’t demand currency hedges. It doesn’t flinch at every emerging-market headline. It doesn’t need a roadshow to believe in the India story. And when global liquidity tightens, the capital that stays is the capital you’ve grown yourself.

That tide is finally turning. According to Bain India Venture Capital Report , over 90% of new venture fundraising in India in 2023 came from domestic funds, a reversal as sharp as the one already seen in public markets, where domestic investors now drive the majority of daily trading volumes, a complete inversion from two decades ago.

Family offices and HNIs have stepped up as anchor LPs in mid-market funds. Large domestic institutions are beginning to enter selectively, supported by gradual regulatory changes. Government-backed fund-of-funds through SIDBI and NIIF have played a catalytic role in seeding Indian venture funds over the past two decades.

But the big pools, pensions and insurers remain largely untapped. Unlocking them could double domestic LP share within a decade. Indian capital funding Indian innovation. Indian innovation creating Indian wealth. Indian wealth reinvested in the next cycle.

At Oister, as one of India’s premier alternative assets managers, we’ve tried to walk this talk from day one. In just over two years, every fund we’ve launched has carried the same throughline: deepen the domestic LP base so Indian companies are powered by Indian capital. We know we are one of many players in a vast $4.2 trillion economy. But we believe our work is part of the long game, where every rupee raised at home strengthens the sovereign balance sheet, reduces dependence on foreign capital, and compounds into a more resilient Bharat.

If you’re reading this, you already care about India’s private markets as a force shaping our economic destiny. In 2024, India’s PE/VC market closed $43 billion in deals, second only to China in Asia. We now have more than 120 unicorns. Private-capital-backed companies have become a meaningful part of India’s economy, contributing materially to growth and employment. This asset class is now one of the engines driving India forward. And yet, a significant part of the capital fuelling it still comes from overseas LPs. With each passing day, the urge to build in India and keep the wealth it creates at home grows stronger. India needs to build India.

The Unlisted Intel

Last year, we wrote about how the world had underestimated India, and why that was a mistake. This year, the proof came stamped in our sovereign upgrade. By the time we meet for our 80th Independence Day, I hope we will see a nation that dug deeper wells, kept more of its wealth at home, and proved that the more we have, the less we need.

Thank you and Jai Hind!

Sources:

1. https://databank.worldbank.org/country/IND/556d8fa6/Popular_countries

2. https://rbi.org.in/scripts/PublicationsView.aspx?id=9432

3. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/MFs-richer-by-Rs-2-trillion-in-2007/articleshow/2669831.cms

4. https://www.livemint.com/economy/india-surpasses-japan-to-become-4th-largest-economy-at-4-trillion-to-overtake-germany-soon-niti-aayog-ceo-11748145853542.html

5. https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_PressReleaseDisplay.aspx?prid=60368

6. https://www.livemint.com/market/stock-market-news/mutual-funds-aum-surges-over-rs-10-lakh-crore-since-last-independence-day-on-robust-equity-inflows-11755239925050.html

7. https://www.cnbctv18.com/economy/timeline-sp-global-lifts-india-rating-to-bbb-first-upgrade-since-2007-ws-l-19654132.htm

8. https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/credit-ratings/about/understanding-credit-ratings

9. https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/type/HTML/id/3325468

10. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/finance/india-pe-vc-market-rebounds-in-2024-to-43-bn-vc-growth-investment-spur-momentum/articleshow/120964552.cms?from=mdr

11. https://inc42.com/resources/how-domestic-capital-is-booming-indias-vc-space/

12. https://www.bain.com/insights/india-venture-capital-report-2024/

13. https://www.bfp.vc/venture-capital-in-india-landscape-overview-part-2/

Disclaimer

Forget DPI or IRR—Here’s What Really Matters

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 05:44:44 GMT

We live in a world obsessed with binaries, where we’re often made to pick sides. We love to pit two forces against each other as if there can only be one winner. It’s either this or that, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. The debate feels like a relentless tug-of-war.

In a world that glorifies extremes, we often overlook the truth: most metrics in life, business, and investing aren’t enemies; they’re dance partners. What appears contradictory at first glance often works better in tandem. Understanding this harmony doesn’t just make for smarter living; it makes for smarter investing too.

Let’s unpack this, shall we?

Being a private market newsletter bullish on the practice of investing, let’s address the core binary right off the bat: Risk vs. Reward. We love to think these two are at odds with each other like you can’t chase one without compromising the other. But in reality, risk and reward are intrinsically linked. No risk, no reward. Too much risk and you lose everything. The goal isn’t to minimize risk but to optimize it. Every savvy investor knows that taking calculated risks—those that balance downside protection with upside potential—is the name of the game.

You’d think binaries are exclusive to investments, but this habit of choosing a side has paved its way in all areas of life. Dieters love to obsess over one thing: calorie count. The logic? Fewer calories, better life. Wrong. You could eat 1,500 calories of potato chips or lean proteins — but only one fuels long-term health. Calories give you quantity, nutrition gives you quality. Ditching one for the other? Like driving with three tyres — works for a bit, but you’ll wreck the whole thing eventually.

And while we’re at it, let’s talk about BMI vs. VO2 max. BMI gives you a basic number, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. VO2 max, on the other hand, tells you how well your body uses oxygen—critical for endurance and overall fitness. One is just a snapshot, the other is an X-ray. Focusing on BMI without understanding VO2 max is like measuring success by calories alone—short-sighted and incomplete.

Same with cost vs. benefit; It’s easy to think lower cost means higher profit, but short-term savings often lead to long-term regrets. That slightly pricier laptop? Lasts years longer. Skimping on quality simply costs you more in the long run.

Then there’s growth vs. stability: people think you have to choose. No. Growth without stability is like building a skyscraper on quicksand. Innovation thrives on a solid foundation. And while we are at it, let’s nip the “routine equals productivity” myth in the bud, please? Routines are all hunky-dory until life throws you a curveball. Flexibility without discipline leads to chaos, and discipline without flexibility? You’ll stagnate. The most productive people know that success comes from mastering both. Flexibility is your safety net, discipline is your ladder.

In life, business, and investing, it’s never about one metric. It’s about balance.

The people and companies who win? They’ve stopped choosing sides and started mastering the art of “both.”

The same principle applies across asset classes, and in no place is this more evident than in the worlds of listed and unlisted Indian markets.

Metrics Complement, Not Compete

In Indian public markets, investors love to play metrics off each other. Valuation vs. profitability. Growth stocks vs. dividend stocks. Liquidity vs. long-term value. Here’s the problem: this mindset puts artificial barriers where there should be none. Valuation isn’t at odds with profitability, just as liquidity doesn’t have to fight long-term value.

A classic example? Many Indian investors lean heavily on the price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) as a standalone metric. But P/E, in isolation, is like judging a person’s intelligence by their SAT score. Useful? Sure. Complete? Not at all. To get a fuller picture, you need to balance it with other metrics—like Return on Equity (ROE) and Debt-to-Equity Ratio (D/E). The smart play is combining these metrics for a healthier portfolio, rather than focusing on one while dismissing the other.

DPI vs. IRR: The Tug-of-War That Shouldn’t Be

Switch gears to private markets, and you’ll find a different pair of metrics at odds—DPI (Distribution to Paid-In Capital) vs. IRR (Internal Rate of Return). Ask ten people which is the better measure of success, and you’ll get ten different answers. Spoiler alert: both metrics are necessary.

DPI tells us how much actual cash has been returned to investors. It’s simple. Tangible. A number you can relate directly with respect to your investments. Investors love it because it’s real, unlike those theoretical paper gains.

But DPI doesn’t tell the whole story. Enter IRR—the rate at which investments grow over time, reflecting the impact of compounding returns. IRR is more time-sensitive, capturing not just what you’ve earned, but at what pace you’re earning it. If DPI tells you how much cash you’ve gotten back, IRR tells you how efficiently your capital has been growing along the way.

The eternal debate comes down to this: should investors focus on what they’ve already received (DPI), or how optimally their investments are growing (IRR)? The truth is you can’t make a smart decision without both. A fund that looks great on DPI but has a low IRR might not be as healthy as it seems. Conversely, a high IRR with poor DPI suggests paper returns that haven’t materialized into real cash yet.

In bullish markets, GPs tend to hold onto investments too long, watching IRR balloon while DPI lags. Greed kicks in. In bearish markets, fear pushes GPs to exit early, reducing IRR but locking in decent DPI. Smart investors and fund managers know when to play both metrics off each other to win.

Public vs. Private Markets: A Portfolio Power Couple

And, and, and…

If you thought DPI vs. IRR was complicated, welcome to the broader battle: Public Markets vs. Private Markets. The debate is everywhere— in exclusive HNI groups, at family office conventions, among advisors at cocktail parties—everyone wants to know which is better for your portfolio. The truth? You need both. They’re not competitors; they’re complementary sides of the same wealth-building coin.

Public markets give you liquidity, transparency, and the ability to shift quickly. Stocks can be bought and sold at a moment’s notice. It’s your safety net, providing immediate access to cash, crucial for flexibility in fast-moving markets. But this isn’t the whole picture.

Private markets? They’re your long game. They offer higher potential returns, exclusive investment opportunities, and the freedom to ride out market cycles without the volatility that rattles public markets. Private markets allow for patience, letting companies mature and compound value, far from the public eye. They’re not bound to quarterly earnings or stockholder panic, giving them space to grow big returns over time.

In India, these two asset classes are often treated like rivals fighting for a spot in your portfolio. Wrong move. The smart money doesn’t pick sides—it builds a portfolio that uses both. Public markets are your liquid foundation, private markets are your growth engine. When combined, they create a robust strategy that can weather slumps on both sides of the coin.

Moral of the Story? Balance Beats Extremes Every Time

Whether it’s calories and nutrition, cost and benefit, or DPI and IRR, life and investing aren’t about picking one metric over another. Balance is the secret weapon. In public markets, private markets, and every aspect of your portfolio, the right combination of opposites isn’t a contradiction. It’s the smartest move you can make.

Stop thinking in either/or. Start thinking in both/and.

The greatest wins come from balance, not extremes.

Disclaimer

Second Thoughts ft. Kuku FM | A Series on Secondaries | EP2

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 06:20:08 GMT

Did you know the average Indian now spends over 4 hours a day on their phone, and increasingly on microdramas?

Welcome to mobile-native storytelling: 3-minute episodes, endless scroll, and content built for the vertical screen.

In China, microdrama platforms like Hongo now make more than the entire film industry. In Korea, webtoons evolved into billion-dollar drama IPs. In Japan, bite-sized anime and serialized storytelling shaped global formats.

Now, it’s India’s turn, and Kuku FM is scripting the playbook.They are leading the charge, dropping 220 shows a month, on track to spend ₹100 crore monthly, and already outpacing OTT platforms in sheer velocity

We sat down with Vinod Kumar Meena (yes, the Vinod) to decode the empire Kuku’s quietly building from audio roots to mobile domination, and why this sector could be India’s Hongo moment.

It’s got numbers, nuance, and a backstage pass to all the power this category holds. And of course secondaries!

This is NOT what a private market investor looks like

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:06:18 GMT

Picture a person of quiet authority. Dressed in a bespoke suit, the fabric crisp and impeccably tailored, they sit behind a massive oak desk – eyes scanning the financial reports strewn across its surface. In the heart of a bustling metropolis, in a glass-and-steel skyscraper dominating the skyline, their office was home to fine art, leather-bound books, and a panoramic view of the city below. Their days were filled with meetings, negotiations, and endless analysis of financial data. They were a strategist, a dealmaker, a master of calculating the risks and rewards of every decision.

For the longest time, this is what we thought wealth looks like.

When terms like High Net-worth Individuals (HNIs) were used, our minds concocted a picture not far off from this imagery.

But times have changed drastically.

Investment patterns too.

Today, your friendly neighbourhood HNI can look like a young entrepreneur working out of his home office in Gurugram, his wall adorned with a massive video game collection. An HNI could look like a homemaker in Jaipur with a sprawling jewellery business, exclusively exporting to US clients. An HNI could be an old army retired couple living in a 2 bedroom bungalow in Dehradun, with a portfolio of strategic investments in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, and private markets.

Today, a private market investor need not dress, act, or invest a certain way to look the part.

Today, investment patterns and stories are becoming as diverse as the very people who invest.

One such story belongs to Sandeepa Vig, Chief Business Officer – International, Oister – back when she was an alternative asset investing ingenue:

“I started my journey of investing with short-term trading in public markets. As I delved deeper into the study of trading and investing, I soon realized the power of long-term investing – more importantly, making your money work hard for you rather than the other way around. Not only does short-term investing need tremendous effort with active monitoring on a day-to-day basis, but most short-term investments are not tax efficient, making it a double whammy. To top it off, one has to keep finding good ideas continuously.

After having beginner’s luck with some trading gains in the big tech bull run of ‘98, I realized I should take some risk off the table and diversify away from public market euphoria. A contrarian by nature, I sought deep value in my next investment. The only two alternate assets then were real estate and gold (fortunately, a lot has changed since then in the asset class). Since liquidity was not a constraint as I was earning a decent salary, I delved deeper into the real estate space. I realized that the real estate sector in India then was in a protracted bear market, and after some study, it made sense to buy a property in such a market that would diversify risk and provide some hedge against inflation in the long run.

And so came the year 1999, and I was the proud owner of a 2-bedroom sea-facing apartment in a prime location in Bandra (Bandstand), Mumbai – even though it meant I had to stretch outside my comfort zone and my budget.

The reason for the stretch, you might ask? Similar to public markets, cheap stocks that seemingly have the best value are not necessarily the best investments in the long run if they don’t have a good growth potential in the business. Similarly, location and timing are key in real estate investing and an investor must find the right fit after a deep analysis.

Fast forward to the year 2007-2008 – this investment is now worth ~10x which translates to ~26% compounded return over 8-9 years! That was the first time I experienced the true power of 1) diversification to alternative assets and 2) long-term compounding, and since then I have been a deep believer in both, in order to create generational wealth that withstands the vicissitudes of time.

Did I have to check the value of this investment periodically? No

Did I have to work hard every day to make this investment grow? No

Was the initial time taken to do the analysis and then do a long search for the right apartment worth it? A resounding YES!

If an investment takes 10 years to grow to 10x, how much time would it take for it to be 100x? The answer is – another 10 years! That is the true power of long-term compounding investment especially in an alternative illiquid asset class. If it continues to compound at the same rate, imagine what could happen after another 10 years? If you mull over this for some more time, the true power of compounding starts to truly sink in.

The problem is that most investors don’t think about how much that money compounds if held for a long period of time. The lure of instant gratification kicks in. But the numbers don’t lie.

Does that mean, all long-term investing is good and all short-term investing is bad? The answer always lies in a deeper analysis of various factors to ensure the right mix and fit. Those factors could be:

Looking back at my investment, this seems too good to be true. This may well have gone in a completely different direction as it has in a few of my investments that didn’t do so well. That is the power of hindsight – it gives you a 20/20 vision.

Back in 1999, I took profits off the table. But when the tech bubble burst in 2000 and some of my equity investments saw deep drawdowns, I was grateful that not only did I take the profits off the table but diversified into an alternative asset class that was not correlated with public markets and that gave stability to the overall portfolio.”

With the advent of many more sophisticated alternative assets, and the wealth creation taking place in the venture capital and private equity ecosystem, Indian HNIs today have greater opportunities to create a well-diversified portfolio and let their money work for them.

So where’s the holdup?

As Kunal Bahl (Co-Founder – Snapdeal, Titan Capital), penned in a recent article for The Economic Times, the Indian PE-VC ecosystem has witnessed a remarkable influx of capital, exceeding $100 billion in the span of 2019-23. However, this success is overshadowed by the low participation of domestic capital, constituting less than 15% of the total investments in 2023. This over-reliance on foreign capital is a concern for letting go of what can be a fantastic opportunity for our domestic investors. Domestic capital offers greater stability, rooted in deeper local understanding and a longer-term commitment. Encouragingly, recent years have witnessed a surge in domestic investor participation, including Indian HNIs, family offices, and public-market investors, in funding rounds, pre-IPO secondary markets, and IPOs of Indian startups. Nevertheless, there is ample room for further growth in domestic capital participation to strengthen the resilience and sustainability of the Indian startup ecosystem. This can only be achieved by nurturing the long-term vision and harnessing all avenues of investing to see wealth grow with time, in time.

As Charlie Munger famously said,

“Waiting helps you as an investor and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.”

Disclaimer

“No Thanks, I’m Good.” … But Are You?

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 04:42:19 GMT

Life, in all its astonishing variety, had to start somewhere.

It all started more than 4 billion years ago, when the primordial soup on our nascent Earth gave birth to a single-celled organism, fondly named LUCA: Last Universal Common Ancestor.

LUCA, in the palm of its non-existent hands, held the spark that would ignite the epic story of life on Earth. Within its microscopic form resided the potential for the staggering diversity we witness today – the towering redwoods, the flitting butterflies, and yes, even ourselves, the humble Homo sapiens.

But life on earth did not flourish smoothly. Our planet has experienced five mass extinction events. Each one of them wiped out 75-85% of all life on earth. In its wake, the extinction left the planet in the hands of those species that had the adaptability to survive it. In simple words, life survived through genetic diversity.

About now, you might be wondering: Where are they even going with this?

Granted they are no mass extinctions, but economic collapses throughout human history have left many feeling that way. Whether it was the financial crises 33 CE in the Roman Empire, Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Great Depression (1929–1939) that followed, Indian economic crisis of 1991, the Dot-com bubble (2000–2002), or Global Financial Crisis (2007-08), each downturn resulted in tens of millions of investors losing their hard-earned money.

The only way to counter the ill effects of financial crises?
Having alternative form of investments to rely upon.

The moral of the story is: Diversity isn’t just the consequence of evolution; it’s the very crucible within which life is created and tested. Even within our own species, Homo sapiens, we carry the faint silhouettes of multiple human lineages that once walked the Earth – Homo erectus, Homo habilis, all ghosts in the evolutionary machine.

We may be the sole human species remaining, but our journey, from humble hunter-gatherers to world conquerors, is a story of diversity in adversity.

Case in point: The story of how Indians invest

In the ancient ages, the concept of investing for future generations was through buying gold or buying a piece of land to build their home. This investment was a safety net – a tangible rainy-day fund or a legacy to pass on to their heirs. As income grew, people started buying more gold and more real estate as veritable investment options. During the colonial era, the British introduced new financial instruments like government bonds. Around the same time, when modern banking was introduced, Fixed Deposits (FDs) emerged as an option to deposit savings and gain a percentage of return. Post-Independence, the Government of India constituted the National Savings Organization in 1948. This started a wave of investment instruments being introduced such as Post Office Savings, Government Savings Certificate, Public Provident Fund, et cetera. India witnessed the rise of the nation’s first mutual fund establishment in 1963. Since then, Mutual Funds (MFs) have grown to become increasingly investor-friendly. So much so that by 2017, MFs saw an influx of more than INR 5,000 Crores/month into public funds through systematic investment plans (SIPs).

Naturally, the investment options expanded, and investors forayed through angel investing, seedfunding, and high-value equity investing in private markets.

Ask yourself: If land and gold could suffice all the needs of the future generation, then why the need for other forms of investment? These other forms came into the picture because different needs are emerging, and the very assets that were once considered generational are also changing. The investment evolution has been afoot for a while, and the next asset class for the future is here – private markets.

The ascent of private market investing in India does not mean the descent of public markets. Private markets were never in competition with public markets to begin with, exactly the way public markets were never in competition with traditional investments such as gold or real estate. In fact, this diversity in investment avenues elevates the wealth generation capabilities of an individual.

Humans, by their innate nature, are compelled to seek variety in everything we do. Prosperity, to us, lies in the diversity of possibilities.

How do we know this?
Because our history tells us so.

Take our species for example. Early Homo sapiens were masters of survival. They were the “wise humans” of their time, foraging for plants and hunting or scavenging food, evolving behaviors to face the challenges of a volatile environment. From basic stone implements, they crafted a diverse arsenal of smaller, intricate tools – fishhooks, bows and arrows, even sewing needles! Tools advanced from stone to bronze to iron, to make hunting, making, and storing food easier.

For hundreds of thousands of years, this relentless search for food defined the human experience. And then, within a mere blink of the evolutionary eye, our species discovered agriculture, the ability to control the growth and breeding of plants and animals.

This discovery, born from the need to diversify our food sources, completely transformed Earth’s natural landscapes. From local patches of cultivated land, agriculture spread globally, altering ecosystems forever. It also allowed humans to settle down, as food production became a central focus. Villages sprung up, becoming towns, and eventually, cities.

In our modern world, the need to diversify has transcended the realm of basic survival. We diversify our ideas, our economies, and our cultures. We explore different approaches to science, art, philosophy, and investments. This relentless exploration, fueled by the same drive for variation that propelled our ancestors, is the engine of human progress.

Little did our single-celled, venerable ancestor know life would evolve to become so complex and diverse. Whether it’s the act of living or investing, true stability is not found in familiarity, but in the dynamism of diversity. Perhaps the illusion of stability lies in clinging to what is known, to the tried and tested. But nature doesn’t cling to a single, safe option. It doesn’t favor uniformity. Instead, it thrives on experimentation, on a million different ways of being.

Diversity is not just a quirk of nature; it’s the very essence of existence.

After all, isn’t this what LUCA did 4 billion years ago?
Then why shouldn’t you?

Disclaimer

Welcome back to the year 2014

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 12:28:22 GMT

Welcome back to the year 2014.

FIFA World Cup has the Indian football fans in a chokehold, while movie fans throng to the silver screens all year to watch the best Hindi films of the year: Queen, Mary Kom, PK, and more. The tech fans are counting down the days to the much-anticipated iPhone 6 launch in India. Apple’s AI assistant Siri is the most advanced artificial technology and users feel it possibly cannot get any better than this.

But,

Was it possible to order sushi online?
No.

Or an iPhone delivered to your doorstep in 10 minutes?
No.

Step out of your home without credit cards or cash?
No.

Pay zero brokerage fee on online stock trading?
No.

Stream any movie or TV show you want online?
No.

Engage in a back-and-forth voice communication with AI?
No.

All of this felt too good to be true, until Zomato, BlinkIt, UPI, Zerodha, Netflix and OpenAI made it happen in just a decade.

Back then, the future we live in today seemed unimaginable.

Back then, asking your phone to write an email or personalize a resume seemed like science fiction. Fast forward to today, and OpenAI, founded just a year after 2014, has become a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

OpenAI’s technology is now woven into the fabric of our daily lives in ways we might not even realize. It helps us write more compelling emails, explain complex topics, and even give movie recommendations! These are just a few regular examples – OpenAI’s reach extends to content creation, code generation, and even artistic endeavors. Sora, OpenAI’s pathbreaking generative artificial intelligence model, specializes in text-to-video generation of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes and complex camera motion. And with the latest GPT-4o, GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, the true impact of OpenAI’s vision is yet to be witnessed.

And remember those rare nights when ordering food online felt like a special treat? It was a decision reserved for special occasions, a break from the usual routine of home-cooked meals. Imagine tired parents, longing for a night off from cooking, or families celebrating a special occasion. Zomato saw the potential to make this a more accessible and diversified option, not just for special occasions, but for busy weekdays too. In 2015, Zomato ventured into food delivery, forever changing the game.

Who could have predicted that a service like Zomato would become so ingrained in our daily lives, that one could order Mughlai and Japanese, two extremely different cuisines from one refined app? Today, it’s an expected service. This convenience, once unimaginable, is now an essential need for modern India, making weeknight meals, last-minute gatherings, and even just a break from the kitchen routine a breeze.

The entertainment world too has seen its share of long-term plays. Take Sony’s Playstation 4. Believe it or not, the development of this beloved console began in 2008, a full six years before it hit store shelves. Gamers patiently awaited its release, knowing that Sony was crafting something special. The wait was undoubtedly worth it. The PS4 exploded in popularity, offering stunning visuals, immersive gameplay, and a treasure trove of unforgettable titles. A decade later, the arrival of the PS5 felt like the culmination of that long journey, further revolutionizing the gaming experience.

The story doesn’t end there! Gamers around the world are now eagerly awaiting the release of Grand Theft Auto VI. Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2014 for the PS4, remains a cultural phenomenon. Even a decade later, players are engrossed in the sprawling world of Los Santos, a testament to the enduring quality of Rockstar Games’ work. The wait for GTA VI may feel agonizing, but for those familiar with Rockstar’s commitment to excellence, the anticipation only heightens the excitement.

Even in the realm of scientific exploration, patience has yielded extraordinary results. Let’s take a moment to celebrate the incredible journey of our nation’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Back in 2008, Chandrayaan-1 dared to dream, making us the fifth country to touch the lunar surface, the first to reach the moon’s south pole, and prove the existence of water on the Moon – all in one go. While the landing wasn’t soft, it was a giant leap for India, putting us on the world map of lunar exploration. This wasn’t the end of the story, but the beginning of an even more inspiring chapter.

For over a decade, ISRO persevered, meticulously planning and building on the knowledge gained from Chandrayaan-1. Fast forward to 2023, and Chandrayaan-3 etched its name in history. Vikram, the lander, successfully performed a soft landing in the lunar south pole region, a feat that took over 15 years of relentless work by countless ISRO scientists and engineers.

A feat that scratch that
A feat that humanity has never achieved before.

This wasn’t just a scientific triumph; it was a moment of immense national pride for every Indian.

We tell these stories to drive a crucial point: the most rewarding visions often take a longer time to mature. The initial spark of an idea may seem far-fetched, but with sustained effort and long-term vision, it can blossom into something truly groundbreaking.

What if you had a time machine, one that whisks you back to 2014? You’d excitedly explore avenues to invest in a promising startup called Zomato, wouldn’t you? But there’s a catch: you can’t sell your stake for, say, a night out with friends fueled by their delicious food deliveries (which wouldn’t exist yet!). Sounds crazy, right?

Welcome to the world of private markets. Here, investments can feel like putting your money in a time-locked vault – you know it’s in there, but you can’t readily access it. It’s the illiquidity factor, often seen as a drawback.

But what if we look at it from a different angle?

Think back to the groundbreaking PlayStation 4. Its development wouldn’t have been possible without the time Sony took to meticulously craft a gaming masterpiece. This journey from good to great often requires a significant investment of time and resources – something readily available in the private markets.

This extended investment horizon can be daunting for some investors accustomed to the quicker pace of public markets. However, this very illiquidity – the inability to easily buy or sell your investment – presents a unique set of advantages for those willing to play the long game.

Catch Lightning in a Bottle
For starters, private markets give you a chance to invest in companies with the potential for explosive growth. These ventures often operate in disruptive sectors with the ability to revolutionize entire industries. Institutional investors, the primary players in private markets, expertly identify and diversify their investments across high-performing funds. This strategy aligns the interests of investors with the funds they invest in. Companies in the private space can boldly prioritize long-term value creation.
Marathon, not a Sprint
Public markets involve a single upfront investment, while private markets function through staged commitments. In private markets, you invest capital over a set period (drawdown period) followed by a longer period where you receive returns. This creates a multi-year investment cycle compared to the two-transaction model of public markets.
Locked In, Leveled Up
Furthermore, illiquidity often translates to an illiquidity premium. Since investors are committing their capital for a longer period, they get to navigate through cycles of the market, typically compensated with potentially higher returns and opportunities for outsized gains when these companies eventually exit the private market through an IPO or acquisition at multifold valuations.

Put simply, yes, private markets are not for everyone. The longer investment horizon and illiquid nature require patience and a tolerance for risk. However, for those who understand the potential benefits, private markets can be a powerful tool for building long-term generational wealth.

If you think about it, investing is pretty much like gardening. You either have the chance to buy a blossoming flower, beautiful but with limited growth potential, or buy the seed and with a pinch of patience, enjoy an overflowing orchard in due time.

After all,
All good things come to those who wait.

Disclaimer

The Anatomy Of A Good Private Market Fund

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 04:00:23 GMT

Bullish on Monday, cautious by Thursday. By the weekend, we’re somewhere between AI euphoria, IPO fever, and trade paranoia. Bulls and bears are swapping jerseys and capital doesn’t seem to care.

We don’t talk enough about how much we’ve adapted. In just five years, we’ve normalized things that once felt unthinkable. AI writes our emails. “World War 3” trends weekly. Trade policy is dinner-table conversation.

In that time, a decade’s worth of market drama has been crammed into one relentless cycle: whiplash interest rates, tech bubbles and bursts, rules rewritten mid-game.

But through it all, one thing has held steady: investor appetite.

And increasingly, that appetite is steering toward one destination: private markets.

The numbers speak for themselves. Global private market AUM has grown from $10.2 trillion in 2020 to $14.6 trillion as of mid-2024, and is projected to hit $18 trillion by 2028. That’s a compound surge in just eight years and yet, it still represents just a third of the S&P 500’s market cap (as of December 2024). Which means: for all its scale, this asset class is still early in its mainstream adoption curve and has significant headroom for further growth.

Global private markets assets under management ($ trillion) | Source: UBS Private Markets Extended 2Q25

India tells a similar story. In the first five months of 2025 alone, PE-VC investments totaled approximately $22 billion, putting the country on track to surpass 2024’s total of $43 billion by year-end.

Monthly PE/VC Investments in India in 2025 ($ billion) | Source: IVCA EY Monthly PEVC Roundup May 2025

More tellingly, even traditionally public-markets focused institutions are making moves. Earlier this month, Vanguard announced its intention to offer private market access through its products, an unprecedented shift in tone from a firm built on passive public index funds. When a $10 trillion manager wants in, the writing is on the wall.

In a world moving this fast, smart capital has become smarter, sharper and hungrier.

But as flows rise, so does the need for discernment. Private markets are not passive. There is no index to hide behind. And the spread in outcomes can be dramatic. Manager selection has become a critical driver of long-term return.

The chart below says it plainly: unlike public equities, the difference between top and bottom quartile managers in private equity isn’t marginal. Choosing the right manager is ultimately the gap between building wealth and missing the mark in private markets.

Public and Private Managers' Returns Dispersion, (based on returns from 1Q15 - 1Q25) | Source: Guide to Alternatives – Q2 2025, J.P. Morgan Asset Management

Which brings us to the real question.

In a market crowded with options, how do you know which funds are worth backing? What actually separates a product that performs from one that just promises? So if the money is real, the desire is sharp, and the questions are finally getting better -

Let’s get to it. What actually makes a private market product good?

The Anatomy of a Good Private Market Fund

Not every product is the same, nor should it be. Over the past few years, we’ve had the unusual vantage point of watching dozens of private market products move from pitch deck to deployment. Some flew off the shelf. Others needed time, iteration, and trust. We’ve sat in the room with families, institutions, and intermediaries, and heard the same question asked in different languages: Does this actually hold up?

As an alternative asset manager, we’ve invested across secondaries, fund-of-funds, and top-tier VC/PE funds, and private transactions across vintages, sectors, and geographies. That perspective doesn’t make us right. But it does make us grounded. What follows is what endures when the dust settles.

Here’s what tends to separate products that endure from those that don’t.

I. A Clear and Coherent Underwrite

Strong underwriting starts with clarity.

Every deal should show:

What the base case is and what the floor looks like.
How the risk is distributed between GP and LP.
Why this moment in the cycle matters.

You learn a lot by asking a manager one question: “What needs to go wrong for this to break?” The good ones don’t hesitate and don’t rely on vague themes or inflated narratives to justify themselves.

The core thesis is sound, assumptions are transparent, and the logic holds when tested. A good underwrite should make sense the first time you hear it.

It’s also where process matters. Every opportunity should run through a repeatable, institutional-grade lens, one that looks beyond the pitch to test durability. That means pressure-testing not just past performance, but how it was built: Is it repeatable? Is it concentrated or broad-based? Do team dynamics, carry splits, and decision rights support long-term value creation? Governance and downside protection also matter, what happens when things don’t go to plan?

Good underwriting is designed to ask the hard questions up front, so the answers hold up later. Good underwriting is designed to ask the hard questions up front so the answers hold up later.

Quick test: Can you explain the product’s core thesis in two sentences, without adjectives?

II. Incentives That Align

Strong products are built on real alignment.

In private markets, alignment is a design choice and great products engineer it with intent and clarity.

The strongest funds are built so that GPs and LPs win together, on the same timeline and under the same conditions. That means fee models that are transparent and reflect actual work. It means carry that rewards realised outcomes, not early paper gains. And it means GPs having meaningful capital at risk, committed for just as long as the LPs.

When incentives are structured well, they create trust. Everyone is rewarded the same way: by outcomes.

Quick test: Who gets paid, when, and based on what? If the answer isn’t simple, alignment might just be surface-deep.

III. Strength of the Underlying Asset

Illiquidity only works when the asset justifies it.

A long hold period should be a tool to unlock value, not a cover for underpreparedness. What a strong asset looks like depends on its stage and strategy.

In early-stage VC, it looks like clarity of direction, founder-market fit, and an honest assessment of how time could compound the edge. Even belief-driven investments need to be grounded in a thesis that’s internally coherent and externally testable.

In growth and buyout, it is operational stability, visibility on cash flows, governance readiness, and clear levers for scale or efficiency.

Strong private market products align their structure to the state and stage of the asset. They don’t assume time will fix fundamentals, they ensure fundamentals are in place for time to do its job.

Quick test: Is the hold period serving the thesis or compensating for it?

IV. Transparency Around Risk

Risk needs to be part of the product, not hidden around it.

Good private market products talk about risk upfront. They don’t bury the bad scenarios in footnotes or rely on fine print. The downside is made clear. Tail risks, the unlikely but serious ones, are acknowledged. And if the investment doesn’t work out, there’s a clear understanding of what that means.

When products handle risk with honesty, they tend to attract investors who do the same. That usually leads to better, more stable outcomes for everyone.

Quick test: Has the sponsor openly talked about how this could go wrong and what happens if it does?

V. Temporal Awareness

Great products don’t depend on market timing, but they do understand context.

The best private market strategies are shaped by the environment they’re launched in. They reflect current realities without being limited by them. Strong design balances urgency with restraint. It should be designed to work across cycles. If a product only makes sense today, it may not make sense at all.

Quick test: Does this make sense now? Would it have made sense two years ago? Will it still make sense two years from now?

VI. Emotional Soundness

This is the hardest trait to quantify, but often the most telling: how the product feels to hold.

Good products offer clarity over time. They reduce noise. Conviction should grow with each passing quarter. If investors find themselves second-guessing the thesis or chasing updates to feel secure, something is off. A product that wouldn’t be offered to the sponsor’s own family capital signals misalignment. Emotional soundness shows up in trust and that makes all the difference.

Quick test: Could you hold this through a rough quarter without losing sleep, or your investor’s confidence?

Before we go further, it’s worth stating clearly: even the best frameworks have limits. Structure helps, but it can’t see the future.

A Few Caveats

No framework is perfect. This one doesn’t:

Predict returns. Good structure can’t rescue a bad asset or bad timing.
Replace judgment. Some great deals don’t tick every box, and that’s okay, if you know which ones you’re skipping.
Eliminate risk. It just shows you where it sits, and who’s holding it.
Apply equally to everyone. A product that’s right for an institution might not work for a single-family office, and vice versa.

So with all that in mind - caveats, nuance, and lived experience, we now come to the deeper layer behind every product decision:

While structure matters, it never exists in a vacuum. The same product can look brilliant to one allocator and baffling to another. Context changes everything. Which brings us to a critical, often overlooked question: who’s buying?

The Unlisted Intel

What’s “good” also depends on who’s asking

Even the best-designed product performs differently depending on who’s across the table. A family principal, an institutional allocator, and a UHNWI may be looking at the same deck, but they’re reading it through completely different lenses.

Institutions look for repeatability, governance, and policy alignment. Their questions are: Can we scale this? Can it pass our committee? What’s the dispersion risk?
Family offices care about narrative clarity, liquidity risk, and alignment. Their questions are: Do we understand this? Can we explain it in plain language? Do we trust the sponsor to deliver?
UHNIs are often intuitive, but increasingly sophisticated. Their questions sound like: Will I think about this again when I have left the room? Would I explain it to my children? Does this feel like capital I’d deploy myself?

None of these perspectives are better or worse. But they are not interchangeable. A good product knows who it is built for and builds accordingly.

Just as a strong design lands differently across buyer types, a weak one tends to reveal itself in the same way, fast. If the earlier section showed what to look for, the next shows what to avoid.

What Weak Design Looks Like

Strong products tend to follow patterns. But weak ones leave traces too, often from the first conversation. We’ve seen structures that collapse under a second layer of questions. Red flags include:

Fee layers that heavily favour the GP, especially in back-ended return structures.
Products built around markups, not monetisation.
Over-structured vehicles with unclear economic ownership.
Sponsor liquidity that precedes LP liquidity.
And perhaps most revealing: no real skin in the game.

There’s no definitive rulebook here, and the rules themselves are still evolving. But if this cycle has taught us anything, it’s that certain fundamentals still matter. Strong design always shows up in the fundamentals: a clear thesis, disciplined structure, and behaviour that holds up in tough times.

This cycle may have more surprises in store. The last half-decade has taught us that we rarely know where we’ll sit five years from now, just like we didn’t in 2015, or even 2020. But we’ve also learned to pay closer attention to the structures we build, the products we back, and the questions we ask.

The underwriting is getting sharper. The ecosystem is maturing. And while we won’t pretend to know where this all leads, we’ll always bet on this: stronger markets are shaped by stronger investors, and better products make both possible.

Here’s to building with that in mind.

If you’re holding the same questions we are, about structure, alignment, or timing, drop us a line. We like talking to people who think in drafts.

Disclaimer

Second Thoughts ft. Progcap | A Series on Secondaries | EP1

The Unlisted Intel by Oister — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 06:40:38 GMT

We’ve all heard the zero-to-one stories.
But what about the stretch that comes after, when the pace shifts, stakes rise, and secondaries enter the room?

At Oister, as India's premier alternative asset manager, we get to sit across the table from founders navigating that late-stage headspace, where secondaries emerge, timelines compress, and decisions become more defining.

Second Thoughts is our way of capturing that headspace.

We begin with Himanshu Chandra, of Progcap, on becoming an RBI-regulated NBFC and backing India’s small retailers at scale.

We hope you enjoy this as much as we did

The Unlisted Intel by Oister

Higher Risk. Higher Return? Not Quite.

Sources:

1. Markowitz, Harry. (1952). “Portfolio Selection.”

2. Nobelprize.orgDisclaimer

Drafting or Drifting?

Sources:https://www.vietnam.vn/en/spacex-cua-ty-phu-elon-musk-lam-nen-lich-su-voi-ipo-75-ty-usd

What Backtesting 26 Indian IPOs Taught Us

The Dataset: What we looked at

The Premium on Time

The Catch: Extreme Dispersion

Here’s the Blindspot : Good Structures

Secondaries as a Liquidity and Structure Valve

So what’s the takeaway?

Volatility, Vested

The Nurturing Years: 2012 to 2020

2020 Onwards: The First Real Test

Sources:https://www.niftyindices.com/docs/default-source/aif/nse-indices---aif-primer---march-2024.pdf

https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-the-day/india-tech-startup-funding-in-2023-takeaways-from-a-fiveyear-low/90409/1Disclaimer

Staying The Course: Private Markets Edition

A Brief History of Stress: How Private Markets Actually Behaved

1. Dot-Com Bust (2000–2002)

What Happened

What It Did to Private Markets

2. Global Financial Crisis (2008–2009)

What Happened

What It Did to Private Markets

3. The Eurozone Crisis (2010–2012)

What Happened

What It Did to Private Markets

4. COVID-19 (2020)

What Happened

What It Did to Private Markets

5. Inflation & Rate Shock + Russia–Ukraine War (2022–2023)

What Happened

What It Did to Private Markets

6. Current Geopolitical Volatility (February 2026 – Present)

What’s happening now

What it could mean for private markets

What to watch

https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/articles/2025/12/private-equity-dry-powder-recedes-from-all-time-highs-amid-slow-fundraising-96015525Disclaimer

Built. Backed. Now Returning

This Is What Critical Mass Looks Like

The Usual Suspects Have New Company

The Exception Has Become Routine

Persistent Outperformance

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Gets Going

It’s Coming Back

Yeh Dil Maange More

No Second Thoughts About Secondaries

The Secondary Opportunity Set Is Thickening

Sources:Crisil and Oister Global. No ifs about AIFs 3.0Disclaimer

The Comfort of an Exit

The Lesson from Public Markets

Engineering the Bridge

Sources:

Thanks, it’s Vintage!

80% of Venture Returns Came from Just 5–7 Vintages (2000–2022)

Recession-Year Vintages Have Historically Outperformed Pre-Crash Years

Even Perfect Vintage Timing Barely Moves the Needle

Staying Invested Matters More Than Getting the Year Right

The story of great and not-so-great years

The “great” years

The “not-so-great” years

Now flip the lens to the years no one wanted to talk about.

2025: what kind of vintage are we minting?

Sources:

Are We Already Playing in a Higher League?

Where Do We Stand Today?

How Do We Compare Globally?

Not US/China Yet

But Far Ahead Of Many Other Markets

India Is Young By Years, Mature By Outcomes

Where The Headroom Lies..

What Does This Mean For The Next Decade?

Sources:https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/busy-startup-ipo-season-gives-risk-investors-rs-15000-crore-in-cash-exits/articleshow/125369810.cms?from=mdrhttps://www.eaaa.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Industry_Research_Report_on_Alernatives.pdf

List Of 9 Things We Read Or Watched Recently That Survived Our ‘Close Tab’ Reflex.

The Next Act of Indian Capital

Sources:Bernstein Report, July 2025https://content.knightfrank.com/resources/knightfrank.com/wealthreport/the-wealth-report-2025.pdf

All Good Things Come To Those Who…Exit?

2. Nobelprize.org

Disclaimer

Sources:

https://www.vietnam.vn/en/spacex-cua-ty-phu-elon-musk-lam-nen-lich-su-voi-ipo-75-ty-usd

Sources:

https://www.niftyindices.com/docs/default-source/aif/nse-indices---aif-primer---march-2024.pdf

https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-the-day/india-tech-startup-funding-in-2023-takeaways-from-a-fiveyear-low/90409/1

Disclaimer

https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/articles/2025/12/private-equity-dry-powder-recedes-from-all-time-highs-amid-slow-fundraising-96015525

Disclaimer

Sources:

Crisil and Oister Global. No ifs about AIFs 3.0

Disclaimer

Sources:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/busy-startup-ipo-season-gives-risk-investors-rs-15000-crore-in-cash-exits/articleshow/125369810.cms?from=mdr

https://www.eaaa.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Industry_Research_Report_on_Alernatives.pdf

Sources:

Bernstein Report, July 2025

https://content.knightfrank.com/resources/knightfrank.com/wealthreport/the-wealth-report-2025.pdf

Sources:

https://www.business-standard.com/finance/personal-finance/how-much-do-indians-save-in-fds-all-india-average-is-rs-42-573-123070700236_1.html

Oister Global & Crisil. No Ifs About AIFs 2.0. https://oisterglobal.com/report-assets/Crisil_Oister_Report_Jan13_2025.pdf