New Delhi, July 13 -- Private equity firm ChrysCapital and Premji Invest, the family office of Wipro founder chairman Azim Premji, have expanded their respective public-market portfolios with the addition of a financial services company.
ChrysCapital, which launched its Clarus platform to make private investments in public equities (PIPE), and Premji Invest have bought shares of SBI Funds Management Ltd ahead of the company's initial public offering.
Bengaluru-based Premji Invest, which was set up two decades ago and manages over $15 billion in assets, purchased 3.84 million shares of SBI Funds Management Ltd for almost Rs 200 crore ($20.9 million). ChrysCapital bought 1.74 million shares for nearly Rs 100 crore.
Both ChrysCap and Premji Invest bought the shares from State Bank of India, which sold a total of 28.83 million shares-or about 1.42% stake-in SBI Funds to about two dozen investors for a total of Rs 1,655 crore.
State-run SBI offloaded the shares of the asset manager at Rs 574 apiece-the top end of its IPO price band. Other investors who bought the shares included alternative investment funds managed by 360 ONE and Neo Asset, Tata AIG General Insurance, Go Digit General Insurance, Sumeet Nagar's Malabar Investments and former HDFC AMC investment chief Prashant Jain's 3P India Equity Fund.
SBI Funds is a joint venture between SBI and French asset manager Amundi. Its IPO opens Tuesday and closes two days later. The company is likely to list on stock exchanges on July 21 with a valuation of Rs 1.17 trillion.
The Indian asset manager is not selling new shares in the IPO. Instead, SBI is selling up to 99.5 million shares while Amundi will divest up to 71.45 million shares.
Previously, SBI intended to sell 128.3 million shares and Amundi planned to offload 75.4 million shares. The French company also made a pre-IPO placement, selling about 3.9 million shares for Rs 225 crore to Whiteoak Capital and a fund managed by American investment firm Susquehanna.
Meanwhile, ChrysCapital and Premji Invest are among the most active private equity-style investors in India.
Premji Invest has made more than 160 investments since inception across technology, healthcare, financial services, and consumer sectors. It makes early- and growth-stage investments in startups and also picks up minority stakes in listed companies.
The family office's bets so far this year include investments in Vedanta Iron & Steel Ltd and infrastructure investment trust (InvIT) Anzen India Energy Yield Plus Trust. It also invested in Maharashtra-based hospital chain NewEra Hospitals, picked up a small stake in CleanMax Enviro Energy as part of the anchor allotment ahead of the company's initial public offering, and invested Rs 300 crore in a subsidiary of Bharat Forge.
As for ChrysCapital, the PE firm hit the final close of its 10th flagship PE fund In November last year at $2.2 billion-the largest sector-agnostic PE fund ever raised by a firm in the country. The firm launched the Clarus platform in 2023 and increased its corpus to nearly Rs 2,000 crore in 2024.
Clarus has exposure to healthcare, FMCG, pharma, IT services, financial services, packaging, industrials, and enzymes. Last year, it invested Rs 45 crore in ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company. It added three companies-Akums Drugs, CMS Info Systems and LG Electronics-to its portfolio in late 2025 by investing a total of Rs 180 crore. It invested around Rs 60 crore in Ellenbarrie Industrial Gases earlier in 2025.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.