The Next Act of Indian Capital

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.

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.

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.

Chief Brand & Investor Relations Officer

Sneha Dadrwal

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does “after mutual funds” really mean?

A: Mutual funds built India’s first financial system for public markets, turning savers into investors. What comes next is a similar system for private markets, led by alternative asset managers who organise long-term, illiquid capital with structure and discipline.

Q: What exactly are alternative asset managers?

A: Alternative asset managers are firms that invest in private assets such as venture capital, private equity, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure. Unlike mutual funds that deal in daily-traded securities, these managers handle long-term, privately held capital committed for years. Their role is to design structures that balance returns, risk, and liquidity across multiple private markets’ asset classes.

Q: How large is India’s investable wealth base today?

A: According to Bernstein, the top 1% of Indian households hold about $2.7 trillion in liquid financial assets, projected to grow to $9 trillion by 2035 at a 13% CAGR. This represents the core of the country’s serviceable wealth pool.

Q: Where does India stand globally in wealth concentration?

A: India ranks 3rd in the number of billionaires (>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.

Q: How big is India’s alternative investment industry?

A: As of June 2025, India’s AIF industry manages over ₹14 lakh crore in commitments, a ~36x increase since 2016, across venture, growth, private credit, and real-asset strategies.

Q: Why are alternative asset managers important?

A: They provide the institutional structure that India’s growing private markets now need, designing multi-asset, long-horizon portfolios that bring stability, liquidity paths, and continuity to private markets, much as mutual funds did for listed equities.

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