For years the knock on Indian private equity was simple: sponsors could deploy capital easily enough, but getting it back out was slow and painful. That complaint has faded. In 2024, India became the Asia-Pacific region's most active exit market, and a run of headline deals stretching into 2025 showed sponsors monetising Indian assets through every available route: strategic sales, secondary buyouts, and initial public offerings. The exit engine is finally running.
The strategic sale: Advent's $1.6 billion pharma windfall
The cleanest example of a mega-exit came in July 2024, when Advent International agreed to sell Bharat Serums and Vaccines to Mankind Pharma for Rs 13,630 crore, roughly $1.6 billion. Advent had acquired the women's-health and critical-care specialist in 2019 and rebuilt it into a franchise attractive enough to spark a bidding contest, with EQT also in the running before Mankind prevailed. Selling to a strategic acquirer at that scale, rather than drip-feeding shares into the public market, delivered Advent a decisive single-stroke return and handed Mankind a leadership position in fertility and immunoglobulin drugs.
The secondary: one sponsor sells to the next
The second exit route, sponsor-to-sponsor, was on display in May 2024, when KKR agreed to acquire Bengaluru-based surgical-devices maker Healthium Medtech from Apax Partners for about Rs 7,000 crore ($839 million), taking a controlling stake. Apax had bought Healthium in 2018 and scaled it from a domestic suture business into a global medical-devices exporter, then handed the baton to a larger fund willing to finance the next leg. Such secondary buyouts are a sign of market maturity: they give earlier investors a clean exit while keeping the asset inside the private-equity system, and healthcare in particular saw exits diversify across strategic, secondary and public deals.
The IPO: Bain rides Emcure to the market
The third and most-watched route was the public listing, in a year when India's IPO market ran hot. Bain Capital-backed Emcure Pharmaceuticals raised Rs 1,952 crore in its July 2024 IPO, priced at Rs 1,008 a share. The issue was subscribed 67.87 times, and the stock listed at Rs 1,325, a 31% first-day gain. Bain, which owned about 13% of the drugmaker going in, trimmed part of its holding in the offer-for-sale and then sold down steadily over the following year, fully exiting via a final block deal of roughly 1% for about Rs 352 crore in 2025. It was a textbook staged IPO exit: use the listing for partial liquidity, then work down the residual stake into a rising market.
The numbers behind the surge
The individual deals map onto a clear macro shift. According to Bain & Company's India Private Equity Report 2025:
- Exit activity reached about $33 billion in 2024, up roughly 16% year on year.
- Public-market exits, including IPOs and block trades, rose from about 51% of exit value in 2023 to 59% in 2024.
- Overall PE and VC investment rebounded about 9% to roughly $43 billion, ending two years of contraction.
Independent data tells the same story: a Global Private Capital Association report found India topped global private-capital exits with about $27.9 billion in 2024, and financial services, healthcare and consumer names led the monetisations.
The caveat
The exit boom is real, but it rests on a buoyant public market and continued strategic appetite. Much of 2024's exit value came through IPOs and block trades priced into elevated valuations, which makes the channel sensitive to any correction. The lesson of 2024-25 is nonetheless durable: India now offers sponsors more than one credible way out, and firms that entered a decade ago are finally collecting. For an asset class ultimately judged on realised returns rather than paper marks, that is the metric that matters most.