On SIDBI’s current plans, Ramann said in a statement, “Along with equity investments, we are talking about the ability to provide debt. A lot of banks, even today, are not in a position within their straitjacket to provide debt to companies. So, SIDBI has gone into what is known as venture debt. It’s very small beginnings, but I think we’ve done about 4 investments, and this we are doing with, in fact, the partnership that has grown amongst all of you. We’ve partnered with a few of the funds that we’ve supported and we’ve been able to get leads from those funds.”
Commenting on SIDBI’s efforts to incentivise the startup space, Ramann remarked, “We’ve talked a lot about seed-stage investing. We’ve talked to several incubators around the country – whether incubation is something we need to grow more, we need to take that up in a bigger way, or is there a consolidation that is expected to happen. Because I was told that there were over 200 incubators in this country, and we probably don’t know what’s happening amongst them, but this all adds up to the startup space.” He also asked funds to consider early-stage investing to a greater extent: “When you are already straddling the space of startups, where you are talking about series A and upwards, are you also willing to look to come up to the early stage more easily?”
Earlier, SIDBI had declared that the MSME sector can serve as a strong foundation for the recovering economy. Thus, it aims to grow its balance sheet to Rs 5 trillion in the next two years and facilitate credit supply to the MSME sector in line with the Government of India’s vision of making India a Rs 5 trillion economy.
