When the private-equity arm of Motilal Oswal Financial Services launched its fifth India Business Excellence Fund in April, there was a lot of interest from institutional investors and family offices alike. 

After all, this was the financial-services firm’s vintage fund, with a history of betting on the likes of electronics-manufacturing-services company Dixon Technologies and AU Small Finance Bank way before they went public. Both gave 100X returns. Even the fund’s latest bets in its fifth edition looked pretty sweet. Case in point: Lal Sweets, a regional sweet chain from Bengaluru that’s been seeing double-digitThe Economic TimesMotilal Oswal PE buys 25% stake in Lal Sweets  growth.

But returns were just part of the hype. Investors were also banking on something else: Motilal Oswal making huge “co-investments” in these funds, as it always has.

That’s because top guns at the financial-services firm—Vishal Tulsyan who founded the private-equity arm and Vaibhav Agrawal, board director and son of promoter Raamdeo Agrawal—have been repeating this ad nauseam, as five investors and investment professionals told The Ken.

While the industry norm is that asset and wealth managers invest about 1–5% of their capital in a new fund, Motilal Oswal uses its treasury book to cut comparatively bigger cheques. So its sponsor capital The minimum or seed capital contributed by the sponsor to launch or anchor a fund. It can even be the capital required to start an asset management companycomprises 10–15% of the total.

Over the last five years, the mainly broking-and-asset management firm has seen investments through its treasury jump 2.5X to around Rs 10,000 croreMotilal Oswal - data book as of the September quarter. 

Motilal Oswal has been leaning into this, highlighting its growing treasury book in investor presentationsMotilal Oswal - Q2 FY 2026 presentation and calling it the source of the firm’s “double-engine growth”. In FY25, treasury investments contributed 13% to its revenue and about 19% to its profits.