6 August 2026

SEBI's Annual Report for 2025-26 puts the AIF register at 1,829 funds as on 31 March 2026, up from 1,526

What changed

SEBI released its Annual Report for the financial year 2025-26 on 6 August 2026. The report is statutory, prepared under the SEBI (Annual Report) Rules, 2021, submitted to the Government of India and tabled in Parliament as required by the SEBI Act, 1992. It covers April 2025 to March 2026.

Section 5.2 of Chapter 5 is the AIF section, and it is the year's official count of the register.

The register by category

Infrastructure funds are the only line that fell, by one. SEBI records registration growth of 17.1 per cent for Category I, 18.2 per cent for Category II and 26.5 per cent for Category III.

The money

Table 5.16 reports the three figures SEBI collects: commitments raised, funds raised and investments made. None of them is a performance measure.

Funds raised stood at ₹7,02,724 crore and investments made at ₹6,76,365 crore. Commitments rose 25.6 per cent, funds raised 24.7 per cent and investments made 25.7 per cent. Category II held ₹12,74,300 crore of the commitments. Within Category I, SEBI notes that social impact funds raised 138.7 per cent more than in the previous year while their commitments fell 11.1 per cent.

By instrument, unlisted equity, equity-linked instruments and LLP interests took 37.1 per cent of funds invested, listed equity 29.8 per cent and debt and securitized debt 22.7 per cent. Units of other AIFs reached 7.2 per cent, from 4.3 per cent a year earlier. Real estate was the largest sector at 19.1 per cent. Cumulative net investment in start-ups stood at ₹20,029 crore, with ₹13,001 crore of it from Category II.

The policy year it records

Section 5.2.1 lists ten policy developments, most of which this site has covered as they were issued: the accredited-investor-only scheme and the reduction of the large value fund threshold from ₹70 crore to ₹25 crore, the co-investment scheme within the AIF structure, the revised angel fund framework, the NISM certification requirement for compliance officers, and the replacement of quarterly reporting with an annual report. Box 5.3 puts a number on that last one: the condensed quarterly format cuts data points by about 53 per cent, and the framework as a whole by 35 per cent.

Two items are recorded here that are easy to miss elsewhere. The minimum investment by an individual investor in a social impact fund was cut from ₹2 lakh to ₹1,000, to align with the Zero Coupon Zero Principal Instrument threshold under the ICDR Regulations, 2018. And the additional liquidation period for venture capital funds migrating to the AIF regime was extended by one year, to 19 July 2026.

What is not settled

One paragraph in the report does not reconcile with itself. Section 5.2.2(D) gives six sector shares as on 31 March 2026 — real estate 19.1 per cent, financial services 9.8, IT and ITeS 6.1, non-banking financial companies 5.1, banks 4.3, pharmaceuticals 3.4 — then states that the top six sectors accounted for around 39.6 per cent of total deployment as at the end of December 2025. Those six shares sum to roughly 47.8 per cent, and the date does not match the section or Chart 5.4 beside it. SEBI has issued no corrigendum. The sector figures above are taken from the March 2026 series.

Dated 6 August 2026. The dateline is the date of the instrument this item reports, not the date the page was written. This page reports what a document says. It is information, not legal, tax or investment advice, and it is not a recommendation about any fund.

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