Investor Aashish Kalra Talks About Shaping a New India

When Aashish Kalra returned to his home country after earning a graduate degree in the United States, he had plans to start a venture capital fund to invest in the booming Indian economy. “I had an epiphany,” said Kalra, the cofounder and managing director of Trikona Capital, speaking before the SOM South Asian Business Forum on February 28. “With or without me, India grows. The only question was whether I wanted to be part of it.”

But raising the kind of money Kalra and his partner needed proved difficult. The way he tells it, India six years ago might as well have been India sixty years ago, with capital markets far behind those in New York and London. Back then, he said, foreign institutional investors such as Lehman Brothers and Wachovia were willing to invest with him, but not the amount Kalra needed to have an impact. “I used to joke when I was in the United States that the only news that came out of India had to do with the bubonic plague,” he said. “It was a whole different world from now.”

For four years Kalra and his partner worked with investors, built a staff and worked on deals. But still, they couldn’t raise the kind of money they needed. So in 2006 they decided to go elsewhere to get it. “We decided to form a fund and list it on the London Stock Exchange,” he said. “So we got on a plane and we got an apartment in London. We decided to give it four months; if it doesn’t work, we’ve still got Lehman Brothers and the others to work with. We ended up raising $500 million at a time when no one was raising money for India at all.”

The fund, Trikona Trinity Capital, began investing in Indian real estate, focusing on commercial developments and urban revitalization. In the last year, Kalra said, the company has become the one of the largest — if not the largest — developers in Mumbai. For one huge project, a residential complex next to the Four Seasons downtown, they are essentially razing a slum; taking down a subpar, illegal series of apartments; and building new homes for the residents on another site. The company is also invested in what will be the largest shipyard in India, thousands of miles of road projects, and several mini-cities just outside major metropolises. “We are picking projects that add value for India,” he said. “We’re not running a charitable organization, but 10 years from now I hope we’re looked at as someone who helped the country, as people who didn’t come to invest opportunistically, but as someone who helped shape a new India.”

As an example of how much things have changed since he returned six years ago, Kalra explained how when it came time to raise another fund, he didn’t go to London, or even New York. This time the money — $700 million — came to him. “In Mumbai, the markets are mature now,” he said. “Anytime there used to be a hiccup in the U.S. economy, people used to withdraw money from emerging markets. But this time, the opposite happened. India and China, for whatever reason, have become safe havens. Our business has never been better.”

To drive home his point, Kalra mentioned a popular joke in his office. “These days,” he said, “the new emerging market is New York.”