Ajay Piramal, who sold his drug formulation venture to Abbott five years ago for $3.7 billion, has been planning to make it big in real estate and financial service businesses.

He has just now floated a Rs 150 billion fund aimed at financing real estate developers. He is also looking to turn venture capitalist in a bid to ride the start-up wave.

Under a programme called ‘Piramal Preferred Partner’, Piramal Fund Management, an arm of Piramal Enterprises Ltd, will allow selected existing development partners to draw from a pre-sanctioned limit to pursue acquisitions.

Though the company declined to name the developers, Piramal Fund Management has previously invested in developers like Omkar and Century Real Estate, among others.

“The market has been consolidating in the last couple of months,” Khushru Jijina, Managing Director, Piramal Fund Management, told BusinessLine..

“Developers have been undertaking joint development and also sealing deals in the real estate sector. Our effort is to give a fillip to such deals for developers who can go ahead without worry,” he said.

“The corpus will be entirely from our balance sheet,” he said, adding that during the first phase, the company will be tying up with 8-10 leading developers in the top five markets.

“We will be looking at developers with whom we already have existing development partnerships,” he said.

Asked whether the funding will be for residential or commercial developers, Jijina said the company was eyeing developers who had large exposures in the residential segment.