A couple of years ago, the leading Indian stockbroker, Zerodha, made a surprising announcement. Its investment arm, Rainmatter Capital, would deploy an additional INR 1K Cr in ‘patient capital’ to support Indian startups. What set this move apart wasn’t the scale but the investment thesis. Cofounder Nithin Kamath took to X (formerly Twitter) to post a refreshing approach to startup investing.

“Good businesses cannot be built overnight, something we learned in our journey. So we are perennial investors and stick with the founders for as long as it takes the founders to build a sustainable business,” he tweeted.

Zerodha is not alone. A handful of venture capital (VC) players, including Blume Ventures, Aavishkaar Capital, Bertelsmann India, Artha India, 3one4 Capital and others, have opted for patient capital, backing early stage growth companies for the long term, even in a fast-paced market.

The concept is not new. Venture capital has long proclaimed itself as a provider of patient capital, a label popularised in Silicon Valley and echoed across global startup ecosystems. However, in India, that ‘patience’ has been more a myth than a method, especially in the early years of VC play.

Around 2010–2011, the country’s venture capital ecosystem was still taking shape. Most funds were supported by overseas limited partners (LPs), including development finance institutions (DFIs), global family offices and international fund-of-funds. They considered India a high-growth market with the promise of outsized returns.

Despite the patient capital rhetoric, early VCs in India moved fast and expected faster returns. Their playbook had no ambiguity. It was all about investing early, helping portfolio companies scale rapidly and exiting in three to five years.

LPs also understood this math — a few big wins, several failures and many write-offs in between. It wasn’t about India-specific projections or long-horizon thinking. It was portfolio theory in action, fuelled by global capital, global networks and a tolerance for high failure rates in exchange for a few mind-boggling returns.

There were a few exceptions, though. Blume Ventures, for instance, launched its first fund in 2011 with purely domestic capital. A couple of Indian family offices, led by Azim Premji and Ratan Tata, dabbled in venture bets, but those were standalone initiatives.

For most fund managers, reaching a first close meant courting foreign DFIs like the International Finance Corporation, the CDC Group and the Asian Development Bank or tapping into high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) abroad to gain initial traction and credibility.

India’s institutional capital was painfully absent at the time. Banks, insurers and pension funds steered clear of the VC ecosystem, citing regulatory friction and a deep-rooted aversion to early-stage risks.

In this edition of Inc42’s ongoing Moneyball series, we will dive deep into how patient capital gradually evolved in India to make the cut as a structured investment category and its critical importance for complex sectors with long innovation or impact cycles and high levels of uncertainty.

From Impact At Scale To Venture-Grade Returns: Patient Capital Made The Cut

Until 2015, patient capital in India was synonymous with philanthropic or concessionary funding. Early movers like Aavishkaar Capital embraced this model, backing impact-driven ventures such as Ergos, a grain storage platform for smallholder farmers, and Vaatsalya (now exited), one of the country’s first rural hospital networks. These were long-term bets, often held for seven to 10 years or more, in which investors accepted delayed liquidity in exchange for scalable social impact.

Omidyar Network India which exited the market in 2024, followed a similar playbook, supporting 1Bridge (rural commerce), Doubtnut (vernacular edtech) and Agami (legaltech for underserved communities).

But after a year, that scenario began to change. As capital-intensive sectors like cleantech, climate tech, deeptech and biotech gained traction, patient capital started to look less like impact funding and more like a strategy.

GrowX Ventures, for example, invested in the spacetech startup Pixxel at the pre-seed stage in 2019 and secured a 17x partial exit by May 2025, a 68% internal rate of return in 5.5 years. This kind of performance reframed long-horizon investing as a viable path to venture-scale returns.

These success stories were nudging more domestic LPs, including family offices, quasi-institutional players and government-backed funds, into early stage investing. Although domestic capital still accounts for

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