Equity is the most expensive money a company will ever take. Sometimes it is still the right money. Often it is not.
Not every need should be paid for with a share of your business. A loan is priced in rupees. Selling shares is priced in the whole future of the business. Too many owners give up more of the company than they had to.
Mainly for
Money comes in layers, ordered by how much return it wants back and how much risk it will take. Each layer should lower the risk enough to make the next one cheaper.
Start from what the money is for
Match each need to the cheapest layer that will pay for it. Don’t raise one big number and let one kind of money cover everything. Most owners find at least one need belongs in a different layer.
Read the essay: the capital stack, cheapest to most commercial
Cheapest
Debt and blended finance
Pharma: Ahmedabad
₹4 Cr working capital structured in 60 days.
A mid-size API manufacturer was running on expensive informal credit. We renegotiated banking limits, cleaned the books, and structured a proper CC facility: reducing cost of capital by 30%.
Climate Tech
24 months of runway secured
Planned grants, a venture loan and equity, raised in stages, to give the company more months of cash without giving up more shares.
It shows whether impact and blended finance are open to you, and which kinds of funding fit your stage. Blended finance mixes low-cost and commercial money.
It asks four questions. Does your business work on a problem that matters? Is the good you do part of how you make money? Would ordinary lenders and investors pass businesses like yours by? Can you prove your results with data? It also asks what the next money is for. You do it with our team, so the answer comes with a conversation.
18 Sept 2026, 5 min read
Founders raise a round. Capital actually comes in layers, ordered by how much return it wants back. Each layer should buy the de-risking that makes the next one cheaper, and taking them out of order is expensive.
20 Sept 2026, 10 min read
Customers pay late, credit is hard to get, and nobody has planned for the day the founder steps back. There are rules and records that help with all three, and most owners are not using them.
16 Sept 2026, 9 min read
A diagnostics chain across tier-2 towns was told its margins were thin and its geography hard. In the language of a whole class of investors, it was an impact business, and there were funders whose entire job was to back exactly what it was building. Not a shortage of capital: a blind spot about which capital.
18 Sept 2026, 5 min read
Five families fund impact businesses in India, each with its own calendar and behaviour. Knowing which one fits saves months of chasing the wrong door.
16 Sept 2026, 8 min read
A revenue operating system for manufacturers: planning from plant capacity, demand built rather than found, and collection tracked as closely as dispatch.
11 Sept 2026, 7 min read
Every company runs on the same information stack, but the stream that hurts you first depends on how you make money. Sriram Chidambaram walks the archetypes (SaaS, platforms, D2C, manufacturing, deep tech) and the two streams almost everyone under-instruments.
Running an accelerator or a corporate venture programme? See Strategy Labs.
From Sriram Chidambaram, Founder & Managing Partner
Put the concessional layer in first, in the right place, and it does the heavy lifting of de-risking everything above it. Done well, a small slice of patient money changes the price and the availability of all the capital that sits on top of it.
The concessional slice is the lever. The commercial money it pulls in is the prize.
