 My name is Patricia Chin Sweeney. I'm a venture partner with Beyond Capital Ventures, which is an early equity investor in India and sub-Saharan Africa into need to have sectors. So we do look at impact in companies, but we are a commercial return-seeking investor. In my other life, same life, I've been a consultant for many years in the impact investing sector for companies on their growth journey, their exit journey, and then also for many different investors across every geography. So it's been great to talk to everyone this morning, and I'm gonna pass it to the true experts on this topic of successful exits. As we all know, that is kind of the holy grail of the venture capital sector in general, and it is even more important in many regards for impact investing, because we will also be talking about exits that don't compromise values and the mission and vision of incredible founders who start their companies with that at their core. I'm gonna have everyone introduce themselves because they can do that much better than I can. We have a founder, I think former founder as well, former founder, investors, investor whispers here. Now, just to start, I'll start with Mahesh, who is the India Country Director for Acumen. I think we all know Acumen as one of the early impact investors that primed the whole ecosystem and maybe defined impact investing itself. I'm gonna ask you, and then I'll ask each of you to introduce yourselves as, from an investor perspective, when you come in, what you look at in terms of sector and impact, because we have many founders here, ticket size that you look at investing, and then also as you enter like this kind of screening and diligence process, what are the key challenges you anticipate and anything related to exit and exit ecosystem that you use as framing your investment thesis. Sorry, that's a lot, but we already talked about it, so I think it's okay. Go ahead, Mahesh. Thanks a lot, yeah. Yeah, once again, thanks for being here and thanks for all of you and really happy to be along with Shruti here on this, who's our star entrepreneur. I've been with Acumen now for five years and prior to that I was an entrepreneur close to a decade and before that I've committed my level of sins. I've been in a big oil company before that and prior to that in Unilever, so that's my history and in terms of the last five years in Acumen, I think recently the only thing I wanna talk about is we're kind of quite humble then the same time at the milestone of reaching half a billion people through the lives impacted through the work of entrepreneurs like Shruti. So that's kind of what we are just announcing and talking about it after all these years. And yeah, in terms of the questions that you are asking, I'll just kind of bucket it into two parts. One is about the kind of investments we do and we are very clearly impact first investors. I mean, we started investing before the word impact investing was coined, so we talk about it as capital required, patient capital required for the long haul to create these kind of enterprises which have long-term impact, which can bring people out of poverty and give them a life of dignity. And to do that, I think you need a long time and we think about our capital as a tool to make that happen. That's our philosophy and that's how we look at any investment. In terms of investments, we do look at clear impact criteria in terms of number one, are they affecting the target segment in specific focus for India? In the currently is climate resilient agriculture with focus on small older farmers as well as future of work workforce development. These are two target segments that we look at in terms of our investments and teams and our range of investment is anywhere between $300,000 to $600,000, $750,000. That's the range in which we operate. The average is around 500. We do follow on in some of the cases, but we are quite often the pre-series, quite often the first institutional investor of the 35 companies that we have invested in India. Over 22, we were the first institutional investor. So quite often we are the first institutional investor who comes in de-risk and investment after they have taken angel and seed routes. That's the kind of very early stage risk that we take in many of these models, which are innovations designed to solve problems of poverty. That's about the investment side. The other part of the thing you're asking about is how do you look at it in terms of the lifecycle and the potential exits? That's always a harder one. As you rightly said, it's a holy grail. And if I could say, I would probably do, I've also been on the other side, I've raised money and I've done a strategic sale to a strategic investor. So I have an experience of this outside Akiman and of course within Akiman. I wish we all in general overall and specifically in this space, give as much importance to Zebra as we do to Unicorns. We wrote an article in Impact Alpha on this. I mean, everyone talks of Unicorn. There's a lot of talk about money coming in and Unicorn is a mythical figure. Whereas Zebra is black and white stripes. You have to balance, you have to be 10 years. You have to be vulnerable. You have to do things to build companies. I think we do look at investing in Zebras also. The reason I mentioned this is there's so much focus on money coming in. And if you see that, India has phenomenally good $27 billion have moved into what is classified as Impact in the last few years. However, it's centered on few teams, financial inclusion, financial services. And also the exits I will come to that is a very different story. And if you think about it exits in the 2010 to 2015, only 10% of companies exited actually, 10%. And it's moved to probably just 12 in the next five years. So it's, I'm not talking of successful exits, I'm talking of exits. So exits is such a hard thing to do. And that is something we need to just realize and also in no way meaning to refer to anything. All of you coming in here is great. But if you just think about it, the attention exit gets, vis-a-vis the money raises disproportionate. And that is something to think about if anybody is talking of raising $100 billion, that will be a lot of excitement today in SoCAP compared to exits. So that's kind of one of the things to keep think about. And this is important because that's what keeps the cycle going so that investors, first of all, the entrepreneur has different types of capital coming at different stages and different people supporting them. And as far as people who take the risk early, if there is circularity, you can again go back and do more of that work. So that's the background I want to lay out in terms of investment, in terms of how we look at, we are ready for a long haul, but of course we do like to have exits because we want to do more of this. And we can do that only if we get rightful exits at the right point of time. And I think at the moment, I would think that this part needs a lot of development. We are happy to talk about some successful exits during this conversation, but this is a background I wanted to set out here. Thanks. Thank you. And I would say, it's interesting, we've talked about this, but when we looked at, well, when we look at venture capital, but impact investing and when it began, there wasn't a lot of focus among founders, there's basically no focus among founders or investors really on exit strategy. And as even you said, when you come in as an early investor, there can be a lot of modeling around exit scenarios, beyond capital. So also comes in at up to $500,000 first ticket, series A extension kind of stage, but even then it's very hard to know what the exit is. It's just monitoring it and then also having what we'll discuss, the follow on support resources, brainstorming and perspective to keep on that trajectory. That didn't happen even seven, eight years ago. And it's great to hear from you and I'm overstepping your introduction to hear that exit is something that is considered in the diligence process. And for all the founders here, that's also important for you to be aware of. Like how do you, what would make you happy in exit as well? Because that's part of what the diligence process is going to ask now. Before I go to the other investor on this panel, I'd like to introduce Shruti from Sitara. Hybrid unicorn zebra in the room. And of course she has been leading a very successful housing financing company in India that receive investment from both of the investors on this panel here. So Shruti, if you could give a quick introduction to your company to frame the founder perspective, we'll later go into more on the exit life cycle and the different resources and needs that are out there. Thank you, everyone. This almost looks like a closed door conversation. So Seva Greherin Limited or Sitara, which is the brand name, is a product of very famous Seva network. Seva means Seva is an acronym which stands for self-employed women's association. And self-employed women's association as a movement, a social movement, got started almost five decades ago in India. We are the development part of the whole movement where we look at providing different facets of access to financial services to women and the families who work in informal sector. My company specifically and dedicatedly focuses on providing mortgage finance or housing finance or different kind of housing finance products to women and the families who are working in this sector, informal sector basically. So there is a very clear women's economic empowerment focus, a gender focus, and of course, the overarching financial inclusion focus. Much before the whole terminology of financial inclusion or women's economic empowerment was ever coined, Seva has been focusing on it. The company was started in 2015 with us getting the HFC license or the housing finance license from the regulator. So while there is a social mission, we also have to balance it with the sustainability and the profitability of the institution. And that is what I would like to highlight to the potential startup founders who are here in the room that there is a possibility of doing both balancing the both the aspect of your work, having a mission focused and at the same time focusing on scale and profitability. Having said that, when Acumen invested in us, which was the seed A round or seed capital round or series A round, that was of about one and a half million, even lesser than one and a half million if you look at the USDA rates right now. So, and that's where we started our journey. Oicocredit came in when, and of course I'll leave it to Anirut to introduce Oicocredit, when we had already shown some proof of the pudding and we had successfully sort of laid out our operations and then they came in to support us for the next level of growth. So importance of having different kind of investors supporting your journey, the institution's journey or the organization's journey towards scale and profitability is very, very important. And that's where I would at this juncture pause myself and we can then further talk about what we do. Just little bit of context so that when they talk about the exit strategy it becomes important for you all to understand. Currently the asset size that the company manages is about 120 million. We have already reached out to more than 22,000 women borrowers across seven provinces of the country, of India. We are on an average talking about an average ticket size of about $60,000 for mortgage finance that we do or the housing finance that we do over a tenor of about 10 to 11 years. And this I'm talking about of women and the families. So as a household, at a household level there would be an average monthly income of about $300 to $500 per month. So this is the kind of segment we are catering to and we feel there is immense scope in supporting this our borrowers or our customers or whom we call sitaras. Sitara in India in Hindi means shining star. What do you want to say? Yeah, no thank you and I was going to say it's helpful for you to give that detail on what the core operation and service of your business is. So you're providing long-term loans or like a mini mortgage effectively for individuals or households to improve their homes. Yes. To build their homes, to construct, to repair, renovate. Yeah, great. Thank you. Any of you, please let's turn to you as well from Oico credit. Also another well-known, I mean, both Acumen and Oico credit are more than just India investors. They've been kind of very active impact investors in different regions. So great to have you as well. And I'll just say I've come across Acumen and Oico credit for many years as investors and always thought of Oico credit predominantly doing debt investments, which is very important as Shruti has mentioned. But of course, you are very focused on the equity portfolio and I will pass it to you to explain much more. And please. Thanks, Patricia. Such an honor to be here and thanks a lot for attending this session. So I'm Anirudh, I grew in India and I had the experience of seeing the benefits of financial inclusion firsthand while I was growing, childhood, schooling. And that's what inspired me to join Oico credit. Oico, we were founded in 1975 and for the record, we started equity investing in 2000. So India, so my role is to manage the equity portfolio in the Asian region. We are a social impact investor and our thesis is invest into a business which primarily benefits low-income households. So for now, the sectors are typically inclusive finance, agriculture, renewable energy, but the idea is anything which can impact a low-income household, that's a business where we would be interested to invest in. We come in much late. So like Acumen, who would come very early, we would come a bit later. So in a startup journey from zero to 10, if Acumen comes at zero, we come at three or four. And then we are there, there may be a seven. And then we leave it to the later investors to manage the IPOs and for the scale. So we are Series B, Series A investors. We are a patient investor. So because we invest from the balance sheet, we can be there for seven years, 10 years, much beyond. And for us, the exit thinking starts in the beginning because while for early investors, you're taking risks and the probability of failures in terms of especially raising the next round is upwards of 80%. For us, that probability drops to close to 40, 50%. But that means we also pay a premium. So we would typically pay two times, three times to compare to what early investor would pay. But then that would mean we can take lower risks and we need to have a solid plan for exits because otherwise we cannot achieve what we intended. So that's why exit competitions begin very early in the process. There are always a plan A, plan B, plan C. And typically at the fourth here is when we really get into details about how can we start working on this plan A, plan B, and plan C. Another element is that when we invest, I mean a new investor who's just about to invest, in the way it is the investor versus founder weightage. The investor is a heavy weight in the beginning. But then as you move from when we come in at four, when that four becomes seven, then the founder becomes really powerful because the company has really been successful and they've scaled. So then how best do we collaborate with the founder? That's a step which starts in the beginning, but a lot of work around it happens in the year four because we still have some voice at that stage. So I would say our exit thinking is really structured, begins in year zero, but takes shape in year four, and there is flexibility. So either it's seven years, 10 years, market factors, we can consider all of that before the plan ever exits. And then also reflecting on sitara weight, it also connects well with how I grew in India. The kind of impact housing can make in a family's life. And back in those days, mortgage finance was not available to that particular segment, but how important it is to have a house of your own and the different calamities and different pressures a house can protect you from. So I've seen all of that. So, and that also helped me understand sitara better and I came in and did a fantastic job of scaling this company from a zero to three and we thought in the proof of the model is there. So we came in with a $4 million check at the end point of time and we also done three more follow-ons after we invested. So the idea is to continue with this star entrepreneur, she's doing a great job and the company's performing really well. Thanks. And can you just add, so what is the typical ticket size that you come in at? Yeah, so in this case it was about $4 million to start, but our typical ticket size is between 2 million to 10 million. That's a first check and we can do follow-on. So we can go as high as 20 million over the life of the investment. Great, thank you. Well, I think that leads into maybe the next theme. I know we wanted to talk about as well, like the ecosystem, but I think that'll be woven into this example and we can keep going from there. So this specific exit example is a great one because as we've talked about for and you've noted, this is about patient capital to really shore up strong companies with strong values to continue their impact into the long term. And from an acumen perspective, this was a faster exit on the spectrum of exits. And that was a seven-year timeframe. I think that's really interesting. In venture capital here and exits, maybe three, four years, maybe they'll give you a little bit more time, but we've also seen sometimes where that really compromises the impact and the long-term value creation. So let's talk about this incredible example of getting to exit at seven years and we'll also get your perspective on what exit might look like for you and Time Horizon. But what compelled you again to the company? Why do you think it was an example of a faster exit? I'll start with you. Yeah, what compelled us to the company was, I think, very evident from day one. I mean, it was one of those things where we didn't have to think about impact much because, first of all, it came with all the credibility of SEVA, which Shruti mentioned about. And we knew that when we saw on the first time that the impact that it had on people who were informal workers and women was incredible. I mean, to just imagine that stability. Transformative, almost. Stability of just a roof, which was otherwise not stable. A loan for just that. How much that can increase the ability to earn income within the household? It was not that way an easy decision to get into it. And also, of course, Shruti, we have to take an extra line to mention that she comes from the SEVA heritage, which is a very decade old solid nonprofit. But she had the vision to build this institution which is a for-profit enterprise. And she manages her own. That is a phenomenal challenge doing that in that context coming from that. And I think that was very evident from the day one for us and how she thought about what she got as a background and also what she was looking at in future. So those are two things which stood out for us. Yeah, it was always difficult to exit, Sitara. I would say that very openly, but also at the same time, I would say that this is an outlier. If you look at the numbers I was telling earlier that 70% of exits as per studies of India Impact Investors Council happened in financial services and related sector. To that extent, this is in that sector. So it falls in that. At the same time, we got two other exits which we talk about in our exit report. They have taken 14, 15 years. So that's the kind of span which happens. So as far as here, it was concerned that I think the difference in financial services, because of the fact that it's a mortgage lending business, you need to raise a lot of capital because the main product is money. So the investment has to be very high and then she also has to leverage it with debt. So with our one million, one and a half million, if we are sitting there, I think after a while, we are not adding value from that perspective. It requires people like OECO credit and others who come and take it to next stage. So at some stage, after we did all the initial work which we had to, we just thought that this is very good at hands of first of all, Shruti, which we have no worry about in terms of impact. And we had phenomenal investors coming after that which we could attract potentially along with her because we have all these very good investors coming in. So we had an opportunity and OECO credit, I must give a huge credit to OECO credit. That sounds very rhyming, yeah, because they were very, very understanding of this whole process. And of course, the role of the entrepreneur which Shruti will talk about. I don't think exits can happen if the entrepreneur doesn't play a role. This is something else I want to really highlight. You need investors, but you need entrepreneurs who are willing to do. Another angle is to fundamentally build sustainable, scalable companies. Exits can happen like it has happened in this case, but sometimes there is no secondary coming from any other next investors. Then we're allowed to just build a company to be sustainable so that you're even ready to say that at some stage you can get money back from the company. You ought to be ready for that. So build scalable, sustainable companies, that's what I would say. Can I ask, what was your greatest concern flagged when you invested, if anything? And how did that kind of manifest? I don't think so, there was a... I will answer on his behalf. Oh, okay. Next city. We'll see if he agrees. So the, I mean, acumen funds, and along with acumen funds, there were other five, six investors, five, I mean, six other investors who practically took leap of faith. We did not have our HFC license. The license to function as a housing finance company was not there with us when we got the fund. With the fund coming in, we were able to apply for the license. So that was the biggest sort of leap of faith one any investor or any seed capital provider could take. And then of course, when we got the license and then I still remember a date and a mail, email that I wrote to the then leads from acumen funds, Mahesh's predecessors, and even to Jacqueline that today we have got HFC license. Now we'll go ahead and operate, start our operations. I do remember that that was of January of 2015. So... What is the ecosystem for leap of faith stage investors in India today? And anything else if you want to comment and if you agree with the, what she flagged? So I think Patricia, I think it holds true for any geography. If you have a clear business model and you know this is what you want to do, clarity of what kind of operations you want to build clarity of your overall vision, mission and the other investors who are ready to support the cause. That is a very important mix. And that needs to be put in place for any investors to have that kind of leap of faith. Okay, did you want to add anything to that? Absolutely. You asked me, was there a red flag? She talked about the fact that there's a leap of faith that I humbly accept the point that she's taking. But I think there was no red flag at all. As I said, I mentioned earlier, coming from the background of SEBA, which was phenomenal institution in a huge respect for what they do and for what Shruti was coming out. That was not a red flag. I think we saw a possibility that you could create something with that combination which many people would actually see as a red flag. That is that if you actually see a non-profit phenomenal organization which is used to a particular way of working and then there is a outfit which comes out of that, which is seen to be building a business, one could get very worried that will this work or will that be? I think that was if you ask me a leap of faith in a way. But I don't think we had a concern on that once we knew first of all we had comfort with SEBA and we had huge comfort with what Shruti was doing from. What my predecessors tell me, I must say, I don't want to claim any of that, but they took that leap of faith. And it's more institutional in a human's case, yeah, thanks. Okay, and then just quickly, can you also talk about when looking at a company such as SEBA and Satara, like what were the exit scenarios you modeled out? And if that's evolved at all to today as you look at companies, what does that look like? And then I want to go over to you to talk about the continued path to SEBA. Yeah, as I said though, within the impact investment ecosystem as well as within India overall, to some extent this is an outlier because being in financial services because you're going to raise funding again and again from more financial investors, the obvious answer was to look for people coming in to invest, to seek secondaries from them. It was a bit more obvious here, but if you ask me for other companies which are not in this, it's not the case at all because then we have to really think also about strategic investment. Is it possible strategic investors? Are they possible or not strategic sellers? That is something we think a lot about. Having said that strategic sale is not easy either, it's pretty hard to do. And then as I said, eventually what we bank on which is quite a bit is that the company becomes sustainable and scalable at some stage that you have enough cash flows coming for the company that there are options which can come later which could be in terms of trade sale. IPO and all this is I think just a very rarity. Don't want to even paint a picture of that but I think that comes in later but in this case it was a little more clearer to us that it will be secondaries which would work. If not in this round, it would have been the next round. We were fairly comfortable also. Shruti was very clear that okay, thanks a lot, you're really done but I'm happy to figure out a way that you exit and that was such a easy conversation sitting across when we initially talked. I don't think the, as I said, the role of entrepreneur is super important and that was very, very clear in her mind also. Yeah, I mean, so secondary is I think still the most common out there, right? IPO is something that was the traditional model that we still kind of look at, right? And then, of course, strategic just to kind of highlight those three. Okay. I want to find out from a founder perspective also how you thought about early days of exit, were you thinking about it? If you can give a quick answer to that and then I do want to get over to hear more about the follow on stage of this. So as Mahesh and Anirudh have highlighted at different stages you need different kind of capital and this is a very capital intensive business. So every year we keep on raising more and more funds to maintain certain debt to equity, which is of course then once equity comes in, we keep on leveraging. But any and the other piece of sort of knowledge, sharing that I would like to do with the other potential startup founders is that money will never come at the time when you want it, it will always come at its own pace. And therefore, even if with the best possible intentions that you have, it becomes a bit difficult to provide secondary exits to the early stage investors. So in case of acumen, we have been talking about an exit since series B, but eventually the exit happened in series D. So there was series B, series C, series D that happened and series D is when they got the exit. Now the other part of the story is that you have with all the investors and the shareholders typically you end up having your shareholder agreement. And therefore there are instances or there could be instances where some of the investor or one of the investor may come and say that this is what the binding term sheet says, this is what the shareholder agreement says and you have to give me an exit. While there are instances as it happened in case of acumen that they stay patient, they understand the liquidity requirement of the company and therefore they are willing to collaborate and work with the management and with the other shareholders to find a potential graceful way of exit. So this is what are different scenarios which I wanted to highlight. And then of course the investors who came in later on in series B, series C, they are looking at creating further value and therefore exited at a time where company has achieved definitely a good scale. Thank you. Anirudh, can we move to you? And can you also actually share how you first found out about the opportunity to invest in, say, Versatara? Like were you guys talking for a long time? Was it always on your radar? Continue the story? No, so this actually went on for more than eight months and I was in touch with a few of the board members of Sitara. And the biggest concern we had in the beginning was that it's not ready to absorb a larger investment. The company's still not profitable, it's burning cash, scale is very small. So every three months there would be an update. And I think the good thing was the board members kept in continuous touch with us. And that's how we were able to understand the company much before which we started a due diligence. So that worked out really well. And... Eight months is not that long either. Right, for conversations. No, keep going, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Yeah, so I think that's it. The main idea was to understand early and we had certain ideas of how a company like this should grow. So typically what we do at a series B, series C is to look at the listed assets in the country. So in Oikokated is active in about 33 emerging markets and India is amongst a more developed ecosystem in terms of venture funding. And even within India, HAFC is one sector which is further developed than many other impact sectors. So there's a clear traction of public markets operating. So the idea is to look into those bigger players and then back calculate that, what is it that Sitara needs to do now to achieve that level of a listed company's ambition? Because for us, IPO is the way to exit. So then we were trying to understand, is Sitara, can Sitara do this in the next seven years? And what is that missing element? So I think we had good conversation with Shruti that why is a company not profitable? Why haven't you reached the scale? But the moment we invested, I think the first job at hand was to make it profitable. And I must say since 2019, Sitara has been profitable. And I think that was the main idea was that if they don't become profitable, how do you improve your credit ratings? How do you attract low-cost funds? And if you can't do it, you can't scale and you can't be ready for an IPO. So I think that really went in detail in terms of the planning. Can you talk more about that? So because even the other day I was having conversation like value creation, value creation for portfolio, every fund does it differently. Yon Capital, for example, gets really embedded, provides like a lot of pro bono support. I think Acumen's always done that in different markets. You came in to help the company become profitable. I'd actually like to hear from both of you on how did you help to do that? Like what was the analysis, the support? Shruti also, then maybe you could follow on what you thought worked the best, what you'd hope to see other investors start to think about providing in your journey. But we'll start with you. Sure. So we keep talking about mission alignment. There's also this thing called a shareholder alignment on the business plan. So it was very important to first align with the management team that the way we are thinking is it the way that they are also thinking and is the board also thinking similarly? So discussions about profitability, teaching a particular scale in the business plan, we build alignment on those with the entire stakeholder group much early in the process. I think that was the way to go about. And then from a board perspective, because this was pre-agreed, it's always been very healthy. We've never had any disagreements that, no, let's chase only scale or let's chase only profit. There's always been a good balance because that was pre-agreed right in the beginning. I can perhaps rattle on and on about how important it is to have a very well-aligned board and shareholder group. It's very, very important. And therefore, because I'll just take one minute, that the overall focus was the manner in which we were expanding and manner in which we were looking at other geographies. I think with the series B round coming in, we were able to focus more on overall consolidation and therefore have a very clear path to profitability. So I guess that was the difference which was brought in. And over to you, Patricia, I think we need to move ahead with the other aspects of our conversation. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think we still want to talk about graceful exit, what other, we're still a little bit high level on the actual support that is needed to graduate good companies through these different milestones. So I'd love to hear more thoughts on that. I mean, I think we can go into, that's also my reminder, my phone vibrating on maybe I'll ask you, what continues to be the biggest challenge and gap in the support you'd like to see to help more companies get to, to exit. Can I do a quick on each of you? Companies to get to exit you. Yeah. Whether it's like a different stage investor that is aligned with your values and will come in, or it's again the role of development finance institutions to de-risk something, is it? Yeah, I think there are three things I think. I think the core is what the company needs to do, which is become sustainable, profitable and scalable. I think if that happens at some stage, I think that sets the stage for everything else. I think I keep bringing this importance because quite often money raises the main index of success for so many of them. And I think the importance given to building a sustainable company is, I'm not saying sacrifice, it comes later. It's like money raises. The main success is how much money has been raised. I think that's one of the big things to guard against if the company is building the model well. I think that's the first thing which the company and the entrepreneur does. In terms of us, in terms of looking at it, there's aligned investors who can come in later and who are able to see the growth possibility and willing to stay for whatever time requires for the next stage. And I think that's important to look at. I think since you mentioned that side, I was gonna come to that anyways, the development finance institutions, DFIs, they have played a very important role actually. I wanna credit that most of the, India has some 130 impact investment funds. Very few of them would exist if it was not for DFIs. They play a significant role. They come and contribute very, very big time in those funds getting launched. So they have played a big part in that side of the ecosystem creation. But they also come in much later, series D, series C and D. They don't have the equal appetite or equal concern towards providing exits. If you ask me, that is a missing, that is a challenge. We have very mixed results on it. We have had some of them providing exit, but by and large, it's very difficult. They don't, because they almost have a view that if we give money to give exits, it's not going to the people who are being served. So why should the investors get the money? So that's the kind of almost the approach they have, which makes it quite hard for getting exits out of DFIs. And it should be part of the toolkit. So I do not know why that doesn't happen at the same level as about the money they bring in. So this is the way I'll put it. So if you ask me, early stage, we are dependent much more on other investors, not the DFIs to provide exit. Like I'll go credit on others if it was financial, but if in other sectors, it's much harder to get those kind of investors to do secondaries. That's kind of fair. I would also say, so there's DFIs, and I think this conference has had a fair representative of private foundations as well that maybe arguably could do similar things as DFIs. And then there's also the functionality of them being a fund of fund actor investing as an LP into an acumen, I could credit, I actually, I don't know the entire LP base and playing that indirect role or the direct role of actually providing the secondary exit. And then also maybe the other one, which is like the capacity building, right? There are functionalities of DFIs that are funding capacity building and strengthening programs we talked about, which I will say, because I think it, there's a lot of funding for programmatic support. And if we actually wanna get to exits, programmatic support doesn't get companies to that final stretch. They need very catered support and strong leaders that can utilize even software resources to put it toward rounding out management or fundraising more or whatever else it is. But anyhow, okay, so that's some of the challenges, gaps in the market, I'm getting another reminder that we're getting close to the end. So Shruti, do you want to add anything else to like, if you could see one to two things that are still weak in this or that you could have had more support around, not for these guys of course, but just in general, do you have any comments on that? No, I guess overall the exit is something which is on the radar or on the mind of any investor who comes in. But at the end of the day as founder or as the institution which is running on the fuel which is provided by this investor, one also has to look at what are the other avenues of generating value for that investment. So that is something which as a leader or as a head of the institution, one has to continuously bear in mind. So one is of course the social impact, the mission alignment and that is if it is achieved on the monetary aspect, one has to focus on creating more and more value for the investment that has come in. And that's where support from institutions like OECO credit, Acumen, and some of the investors that we have on our board in terms of supporting the management on how do we create that value? How do we continuously provide those kind of avenues? Is very, very critical. So there are, I mean, we have limited time over here but there are multiple conversations one ends up having with directors like Anirudh or someone like Mahesh and many others where we are continuously talking about how do we create further value? How do we maximize the returns for the investors and therefore also for the company? And that's a conversation which is very dynamic and which needs to happen with very open and clear dialogue. And at your series B raise and beyond when you were approaching debt and equity investors, just roughly what percentage of them aligned with the values you wanted to maintain in your company from a founder perspective? So we have had instances where as I mentioned earlier quickly that someone holds you accountable for a certain clause of your shareholding agreement and therefore they come back saying that this is the end of our fun life. We need an exit. So you need to make an exit happen for them. And that does put a lot of stress on your overall bandwidth. You would want to focus on operation but here you are wanting to create that or make that exit happen within a certain timeframe. So that's something which is, I would suggest I would sort of hope and aim that should change or should undergo some kind of, at least some level of openness needs to happen as far as those kind of instances are there. The other would be on how and that is where I would want Anirut to come in about responsible ways of exiting from the institution. And which is where, if I may say so very honestly and candidly over here, accuments exit actually happen because of OECO credit. OECO credit do you doing and follow on on our series D? Yeah. No Anirut please, if you can chime in as well and I think also now you are the later stage investor you want an exit as well. So just from looking at where the ecosystem is today and where you'd like it to be going forward what's your thoughts on that and also what you would like to see other players in the sector kind of step up to support you on. Sure. So for us responsibly exiting an investment is super important. And here I would like to share one of the examples where we've already implemented this from a Southeast Asian exit. So in this case, there were about three bidders and three of them were interested. Everybody could at a price and we actually sold to the second highest bidder not the highest bidder. It's very tempting because you want to maximize on your gains in IRR. But the framework we apply is step one the exclusion list which covers KYC ML aspect and the reputation and brand of the purchaser. The highest bidder year had a history about not working well with minority shareholders. So that's not a buyer with whom we want to leave this company and other shareholders with. So that's the reason why this highest bidder got ruled out. The second step is the financial criteria where if anybody who spars the first stage whoever is the highest in terms of the financial bid that is a bidder to whom we sell. We don't have to go to step three but I'll still talk about step three which is mission alignment. So if the financial offers are equal then the third step is the mission alignment and the shareholder alignment. So buyer who's acceptable to the management team to other shareholders and who aligns well with the social impact strategy and that becomes the preferred buyer for us. So even in case of Sitara that's going to be a plan going forward. While the primary ambition is that Sitara is ready for an IPO in a few years time doing really well. So I don't think we may be reaching the stage of this exclusion criteria. The listed market it's all taken care of. So yeah, that's on Sitara. And I'm just going to ask a question that I think will be interesting which is when you, so separate from IPO because I'm not going to quantify the number of that but when you look at off the top of your head the number of follow on investors in the market that will align with values and support this patient capital growth process. Roughly how many follow on investors are there let's say series B, C range. There are quite a few. I think I would say somewhere in the ratio of for somewhere on four to five one is to if you have one that at least we can find four to five. I mean that's there's five out there or there's easily. Yeah. Yeah. So you do, you can get them at various stages here. It doesn't sound like that many to me. Yeah. That's what the number is. You'll have many more initially coming in but eventually it'll be around four to five who are aligned and I'm talking of the actuals not per in a round or in total in the market that you can address that you can target. Yeah. See, I mean it depends on which series you go to but I think up to B and C you ask. So I think in those stages, it's around five to six times which is actually less is what I'm trying to say. Sounds high but that's the kind of range you will get five, six eventually you come with all the criteria. Yeah. And the cap table at that stage will be five, six people but in financial inclusion, I'll make it exceptionally different. There'll be many more. It's not the case in others. And you agree with this, this number. And when you look at maybe I don't know if your perspective on the co-investors that you typically look at at your stage that align with values or will align enough on board level shareholder agreement, is it similar? Yeah, it's super important. It's very important to be aligned and we typically hold stakes close to 10%, 15% not beyond it. So if you have a co-investor with a similar scale then practically in the legal language you can block a special resolution. So it makes a lot of sense to align with your co-investor. And at the, let's go for C and D rounds where you've come in, how many roughly co-investors can you think of that will invest in Asia or India in this case that can align with you? Yeah, so I think one area where the ecosystem needs to work more is that the number of social impact investors from CDCD starts dipping down. Does not impact capital available at that level of scale. So even in Sitara's journey, the idea would be to start raising commercial capital at some point of time. There's only something little that impact investors can do. And we have done our role given the capital and now it's to work with commercial investors who can bring in larger volumes of money. So the short answer is it keeps coming down. We got work to do, yeah. And I'd say, okay, to be fair that was not including strategic and fortunately at least India is now the most populous nation in the world. There's a lot of things going on in other parts of the world where India is becoming a more interesting trade partner and I do think strategic becomes a bigger avenue as an exit and hopefully we'll also be seeing many more IPOs that are happening in the market. I know we're at time, I don't know if that also included question Q and A time. We have about seven to eight minutes for questions. Okay, do we have cards or can we just have people? Point, yeah. I think I'm just gonna have one or two people. Go ahead. Thank you. I'm just curious about the end of this journey, of the journey we're going to start with. Yeah, when you talk about public markets you said sort of they take care of themselves. Is that true? I mean, I won't be an expert in the agency sector in India but if you, I feel in your public list there's analysts, there's, you don't get to decide who your shareholders are at that point. So how are you thinking about preserving impact beyond the IPOs? It all depends on how you build the institution. Now even at this stage, pre-IPO stage if I may call it and if we were to get a growth capital this is the same question which is being asked. And now okay you have from that one and a half million which we raised in seed A round or series A round you almost having a net worth of about 30 million plus and we are asking for 30 million more going forward. This is a very question which is being asked how do you preserve your core? And that to my mind after being in the institution and after having built the institution over the last eight years it becomes your DNA. After all the company is your people and process and the end customer. So if you have built it, if you have all those blocks in place then that impact will continue. Nobody, we are not going to suddenly start lending to women of high net worth, forget women even any other gender. I hear the focus is to enable these women to have the access to financial services through housing finance because as Anirudh then Mahesh also alluded earlier home is very important. Home for most of this informal sector becomes their workplace. So I don't think that thesis is going to change even if we do the IPO and perhaps. If I can add just to that, so we have some experience wherein we have sold to a larger investor in the company IPO and based on my limited experience I haven't seen public markets changing the DNA of the organization. So if the management is motivated to change the DNA that's when those problems happen. But if the management and the board are aligned that this is a DNA, public markets won't change it. Can I actually just ask, so I mean that's like SOPs, standard operating procedures. It's like the culture of the company. It is what is getting bought by anyone, right? That's the attractiveness but does it always have to be there in the Indian market before you can IPO. Like all the strong internal processes. And I think it's also, yeah. It's a big requirement. Well, it's just right, because in some markets you can kind of IPO not have all of that there. No, no, no, no, the regulations are very strict. Very strict in terms of very strict, I think. But the IPO process, extremely robust and stringent procedures in place. But that's great, then that also protects the entity, okay, great. Yeah, go ahead, Franky. Sure, so, you stood up on the OICO credit and after with respect to what percentage of your exit exits have been just secondaries versus strategic, for example. And maybe on the OICO credit side, which is later stage, what are you seeing with strategic acquirers? Are they exiting at market multiples? Is it below multiple because it's impact oriented? I'm kind of curious to see what the market's doing. From our last six exits, I would say it's equal to strategic's two IPOs and two secondary markets. From a value maximization point of view, IPOs give the maximum value in India. Strategics have this thinking of build it yourself versus buy. So, and that's why the premium is low. So, strategics are the ones who give the least value, but even they are important if nothing else is working out. For us, of course, we have seen no IPOs actually till now from our perspective, but it is mostly secondaries and strategic is less because I think it needs to reach a certain stage when strategic happens. Within secondary also, I want to differentiate. It's not just secondary, we also have instances where I say I keep alluring to the companies become sustainable and they have the cash flow to give exit and that's where the role of the entrepreneur is important. In our case, two of our exits in recent times have actually come from founders giving money from the proceeds of the company and that's a perfectly legit and probably the, I would say neatest way for sustainable growth of the company if the other markets are, if they don't have to keep raising money to give money to someone else. But that's what our experience is. And I would actually say just having consulted a lot in the sector, the interesting thing with strategic is, but probably a little bit earlier at the stage, sometimes strategic's come in with the highest valuation and more oftentimes, if it's later stage, they come in with the lower ones because it is, yeah, it's just a different angle. I think we're out of time or do we have, well, I think we're good. We'll just invite everyone up if you have other questions. Does everyone have a few minutes? Do you wanna do one more? Okay, we'll do one more quick question, sorry. Yep, go. Are you seeing a change in expected returns based on macroeconomic factors? No, it's the same growth versus profitability rate and now the pendulum is in the favor of profitability. I'm hoping maybe next two years, again, people will talk about balance, but last two years was only growth. Now it's only profitability, but there has to be a balance. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think so. In fact, yeah, there's been too much, as I said, too much emphasis on just growth, growth of the company and money raise and it is due to the funding winter or whatever it's called. It's moved totally to the other side. I don't think there is big change in return expectations. I would say that there is a dominant narrative that you can achieve impact and get very high returns both very easily while what Shruti mentioned that you can create impact and create a good business, that is totally true, but to make it an easy narrative that oh, we can have very high returns and as well as create large impact, I think one has to be more cautionary about it. It does require a lot to build those kind of companies and very few are that which can do both. Quite often you can get high impact and moderate growth. Moderate returns is what I would probably actually honestly admit in the sector. Final point really quickly, one word ideally, call to action, something you want everyone in the audience to remember out of this. Let's call to action. It doesn't have to be one word, it can be a few words. Yeah, overall capital cycle from an environment point of, how that moves around a role of everybody in the ecosystem. I think that's kind of the main thing in my mind. Different stages require different set of investors and it's very, very important to have that balance. For me it's responsible exits and responsible exits are actually good business. You're not leaving anything on the table, it's actually very good in the long term.