Stoicap Ventures plans to raise a ₹750 crore fund to acquire rent-generating K-12 schools and student-housing assets amid rapid growth in India’s private educational institutions.
The Stoicap-NDR Edu-Infra Rental Yield Fund (EDIYF) will have a base corpus of ₹500 crore and a ₹250 crore green-shoe option. Chennai-based warehousing and logistics company NDR Group is the co-sponsor and anchor investor in the fund.
This is Stoicap’s maiden fund, which is a Category-1 Alternative Investment Fund (AIF), with an investment profile similar to an InvIT or infrastructure investment trust that owns assets and earns rental income. The fund got the mandatory approval from markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in June.
Stoicap Ventures was set up in 2024 by industry veteran and former head of real estate funds at Investcorp, Ritesh Vohra, and Kunal Sabharwal, former senior general manager-investments at ESR India, an industrial and logistics property developer and fund manager in India.
The fund comes as India sees rapid growth in private educational institutions, and operators increasingly look at an asset-light strategy, while India’s institutional investors show greater interest in alternative real estate segments such as student housing, senior living and shared living.
“There are multiple investment managers in the mainstream real estate asset classes. Stoicap’s focus is on differentiated sectors from a real assets and infrastructure perspective, such as education, healthcare and senior living,” said Ritesh Vohra, managing partner, Stoicap told Mint in an interview. . “Our investment strategy is to acquire and own mature, operational assets that generate healthy rental revenue and capital appreciation from these highly resilient sectors.”
“These are rather essential social infra sectors that are growing in lock-step with India’s societal and economic evolution. We feel there is a need for focused capital pools to come in towards creating the physical infrastructure that operators can then lease and operate,” Vohra added.
Sale-and-leaseback strategy
Stoicap’s fund will follow a sale-and-leaseback structure, in which it will acquire the infrastructure (land and assets) from the trust or the founder and lease it back to the operating trust or society for a long-term rental tenure of 25-30 years. The assets would be backed by stable rents and contracted escalations. The fund will offer regular quarterly distributions plus capital appreciation.
Stoicap has signed a term sheet with a global institutional investor to acquire a portfolio of seven K-12 schools and around 2,000 student housing beds across cities, for around ₹500 crore in equity value plus leverage, which would function as the seed portfolio for the fund.
The remaining ₹250 crore of the targeted corpus will be deployed to buy new education infrastructure assets.
The first close of the fund is expected to happen over the next couple of months within this year, Vohra added.
Education real estate opportunity
As per industry estimates, India’s K-12 school sector is expected to reach a market size of $100 billion by 2030, from $66 billion in 2026. Of this, as per Stoicap’s estimates, the addressable K-12 market size suitable for the fund is $37 billion, and around $12 billion for higher education and student housing.
The country’s higher-education sector is emerging as one of the world’s largest institutional real estate opportunities, Anarock Capital said in a February report. Nearly 30,000 acres of new campus land and approximately 2.7 billion sq ft of academic infrastructure are set to be developed to meet surging student demand.
This expansion is underpinned by demographic momentum, rising enrollments, and globalization of education among other factors.