New Delhi, July 21 -- Ask Indian family offices how they manage wealth in 2026, and the odds of two opposite answers are as good as two similar ones. One will tell you it invests mostly in large-cap listed stocks via an external fund manager, avoids private markets entirely, and trades government bonds like an institutional desk. Another may tell you it prefers to directly invest in listed and unlisted stocks, and keeps debt exposure low. A third will say it focuses on listed small-cap stocks and is raising its own venture capital fund to bet on startups.
Clearly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and family offices are adopting a variety of investment strategies keeping in mind their own needs and ambitions. Some are conservative and are happy preserving their wealth; others have a greater risk appetite and want to multiply their wealth. Many are still trying to find their footing.
The Indian family office story has grown at breakneck speed: roughly 45 formal family offices in India in 2018, more than 300 today, managing upward of $30 billion by recent estimates and expected to reach $45 billion within three years, according to the joint Indian Family Office Playbook, published in June 2025 by EY and Julius Baer.
Knight Frank's Wealth Report 2026 counted nearly 20,000 Indian ultra-high-net-worth individuals - those worth $30 million or more - a population projected to rise past 25,000 by 2031. India's billionaire count rose nearly 60% over five years to 207, the world's third-highest tally after the United States and China, and is expected to climb a further 50% to 313 by 2031. Mumbai alone accounts for more than 35% of the country's ultra-rich. It is this transfer of wealth, as much as market performance, that keeps filling new offices: the EY-Julius Baer playbook estimates roughly Rs 108 trillion of Indian family wealth is currently moving through an intergenerational handover.
Behind this rise sits a less tidy story: promoter families that built operating businesses for decades, sold or partly exited them, and are now deciding - often with professional help for the first time - how that capital should behave. A detailed account given to VCCircle by a top executive at a single-family office managing assets of the order of Rs 5,000 crore, whose promoters sold their operating businesses in the healthcare sector before setting up a dedicated investment arm, offers one answer. A second, by a young multi-family office called Daksham Capital, reported on recently by VCCircle, offers close to the opposite.
"We are not as return-hungry as many other family offices," the executive at the single-family office said, describing an operation built on institutional-style separation of duties rather than the generalist model common elsewhere in the industry. "Many family offices suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out) - or rely on generalists who've moved over from wealth management outfits because of their relationship with the promoter, and just distribute capital across whatever product is trendy. We don't do that."
The philosophy, as he put it, comes from years inside institutional fund management: "You know enough to know that you don't know things."
A third executive-the head of a multi-family office firm that also manages more than a billion dollars for an Indian technology entrepreneur's single-family office-puts it simply.
"Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of clients - those who've already made their money and just want to protect capital ahead of inflation, and those who want their money to keep making more money," he says.
Governance ahead of structure
Nearly 60% of Indian family offices have adopted wills or family constitutions, but only about one in five have moved to formal structures such as trusts or limited liability partnerships (LLPs) - paperwork professionalising faster than legal architecture. A quarter still prioritise pure preservation over growth.
The healthcare-linked office sits at the disciplined end: its mandate fixes a roughly 50:50 split between equities and fixed income across more than Rs 5,000 crore. An eight-person team keeps debt and equity separate, and every sleeve is benchmarked on its own - real estate investment trusts (REITs) against the NSE REIT index, bonds against corporate debt funds plus a spread, equities against the Nifty 500 Total Return Index - rather than one self-selected number.
The executive is blunt about why that matters: many family offices claiming to beat the market in-house don't even have the systems to calculate their actual time-weighted rate of return (TWRR) or internal rate of return (IRR), he said, often pointing to two or three winning stock picks while ignoring the aggregate portfolio.
The executive who manages the tech entrepreneur's billion-dollar corpus says their multi-family office clients who want to keep making more money typically keep a big chunk of their capital in listed and unlisted equities.
"Of the unlisted-equity portion, the larger share is through AIF structures, and a smaller share is direct co-investment into companies," the executive says, asking not to be identified for confidentiality reasons. He adds that such clients keep their fixed-income exposure low because of the lower yield.
Many wealthy people using multi-family offices also invest outside India, he says. "Broadly, outside-India exposure tends to be in the lower double digits. Anyone who takes money out also picks up 3-4% appreciation on the dollar in any case, given the rupee's depreciation," he says.
A split on alternatives
Almost six in ten Indian family offices allocate less than 10% of their portfolios to private equity or venture capital, though a smaller group invests more than 20%, and the largest allocators put 15-25% of total assets into alternatives, with 25-30% of that into private credit. The healthcare-linked office has ruled out both entirely.
"For every major success story, there are multiple failures," its executive said, adding that a genuinely elite investor would rather start an independent fund - earning a standard 2% management fee and 20% carry - than manage capital for a single family. Its only private-market exposure runs through the promoters' own acquisitions of small pharmaceutical companies, treated internally as the family's private equity allocation.
The healthcare-linked office allocates some money to private credit, too, but outsources it entirely, judging the asset class to need specialist skills it hasn't built in-house, while targeting a 13% benchmark return.
There are reasons for that caution. Before the office was formally structured, the promoters made a handful of opportunistic direct deals brought in through friends and community relationships - the kind many Indian family offices still do. It says it won't repeat that. "At our scale, if you generate a conservative 10% blended return, you are compounding wealth by Rs 500-plus crore a year," the executive said. "The promoters have sold their operating businesses and want a conservative, professional setup that simply compounds wealth quietly."
A trading book, not an afterthought
Where this office departs most from convention is bonds - the one asset class most Indian family offices outsource, on the view that in-house fixed income talent is scarce. It runs the opposite model: a roughly Rs 1,000-crore book traded actively, restricted to sovereign paper and AA- or higher corporate bonds, targeting 9-9.5% against a 7% benchmark for standard debt funds.
One trade illustrates the approach: long-duration government securities bought in late March and unwound in May-June captured an annualised return of about 20% over two to three months. "You invest in equities," the executive said, "but you trade bonds."
The conviction runs deep enough that the office has discussed opening the desk to other families as a multi-family mandate. "We target 9% where mutual funds generate 7%," the executive said, explaining an idea that has stalled less on economics than on the promoters' caution about managing other families' money.
GIFT City's uneven opening
The most consequential structural change in 2026 is the opening of GIFT City's Family Investment Fund (FIF) regime under new rules by the International Financial Services Centres Authority, letting wealthy families manage generational wealth from the special economic zone rather than through Singapore, Dubai or Mauritius.
In April, the regulator granted its first FIF registration - not to an Indian family, but to Poornam Asset Management IFSC, a UK-based office - nearly three years after the framework was floated. Premji Invest and Catamaran Ventures-the family offices of Wipro founder chairman Azim Premji and Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy, respectively-applied as early as 2023. Premji Invest reportedly won initial approval, but final clearance for domestic applicants remains stuck pending clarity from the Reserve Bank of India on India-sourced capital.
The healthcare-linked office hasn't waited for that clarity. Residual funds sitting in Singapore from an earlier acquisition have simply been left in a savings account, uninvested even in treasuries, to avoid any compliance question. "We've made our fortune," the executive said. "We want a highly professional team, and we'll do simple, clean things that keep us entirely on the right side of the regulator."
A different approach
Daksham Capital, a multi-family office founded in October 2025, is making a version of the alternatives bet the healthcare office has ruled out - at far greater scale. Advising roughly Rs 2,200 crore through a two-person client team, it is raising a Rs 250-300 crore Category-II alternative investment fund for venture investing, VCCircle reported, targeting a net XIRR (extended internal rate of return) of nearly 25% across 12-15 companies - much of it expected from Daksham's own wealth-advisory clients seeking co-investment.
It is, in effect, building the in-house alternatives capability many single-family offices say they cannot justify - and renting it out. Its four co-founders are targeting business families in Jaipur, Chandigarh, Kanpur, Lucknow and Hyderabad rather than the metros where bigger platforms cluster.
Unlike the much larger healthcare-linked family office, Daksham is eyeing GIFT City, though from a smaller base: only 5-7% of client assets are currently allocated globally, with an offshore capability still 12-18 months out.
To be sure, none of the three family offices cited above is representative of the industry - that is their value. The healthcare-linked office is more conservative on alternatives than roughly half its peers, more hands-on with fixed income than nearly all of them, and wary of offshore structuring than the direction of regulatory travel would suggest is necessary. The tech entrepreneur's office is slightly more tuned towards equities than debt.
Daksham's trajectory is the mirror image: built by former institutional bankers, betting the fastest way to grow is to give other family offices direct access to the asset classes they are still hesitant to build in-house.
As Julius Baer's Ashwin Patni put it earlier this year, family offices are moving "from gut to governance". Governance, in some hands, means becoming more ambitious. In others, it means learning, very deliberately, when to say no.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.