As we enter May of 2025 and celebrate Vistara Growth’s 10-year anniversary, we’re taking a moment to reflect on a decade spent navigating the growth of both our portfolio companies and our own investment platform.
Through a series of 10 posts to mark this milestone, we will look back at how growth capital markets for technology companies have evolved, lessons learned along the way, and how our core beliefs continue to guide how we invest and build Vistara.
The Beginning: From Belief to Blueprint
Vistara was founded in early 2015 by Randy Garg, following a successful run from 2010 to 2015 where the Vistara “growth debt” strategy was born employing the same investment strategy for a family office. That family wanted exposure to high growth innovation companies and the alpha that could be produced, but wanted to do so via a disciplined growth strategy centred on preserving capital vs. swinging for the fences.
Private credit in the form of traditional “Venture Debt” was a very small portion of overall venture funding, with a handful of banks (led by the now fabled Silicon Valley Bank), and a few non-bank funds that largely followed the same Venture Debt strategy of providing capital to recently VC backed companies, offering additional leverage at higher rates with equity upside via warrants.
Outside the narrow scenario where venture equity and venture debt are raised simultaneously, there was a clear gap in available growth funding—for both venture-backed companies not pursuing a concurrent equity raise as well as bootstrapped businesses with a diverse range of use cases. Vistara was founded on the investment thesis of filling that gap.
While there are certainly more players now than when we started (particularly at the larger end), the market remains quite inefficient in the lower to middle portion where Vistara has been focused for the last 10 years and expects to be for the foreseeable future.
Shortly after the formation of Fund I, Randy was joined by Noah Shipman, who became Partner with the launch of Fund III in 2018. Together, they refined the strategy while remaining focused on the ongoing growth funding gap for an increasingly large number of ambitious B2B technology companies.
This focus has served us well, with now five successive funds operating with the same strategy, successfully raising US$600M to date, with 40+ investments, 20+ exits, and our prior three funds all ranking in the Top 10 globally for Private Debt funds <$500M (as at Dec 31, 2024) according to Pitchbook. We’ve had some great wins along the way, but are just as proud of our track record of zero losses to date, (more on how we’ve accomplished this in a later post).
The Name Behind the Model
“Vistara” is a Sanskrit word for “expansion”.
This is reflective of the ambition of entrepreneurs and companies we’ve backed, as well as the growth orientation of the Vistara team. Our capital helps portfolio companies expand their teams, enter new markets, launch new products, and in some cases acquire complementary businesses. “Expansion” also speaks to our own journey — from a 2-person team to a 14-person platform — and to the growth of our loyal investor base, a now 150+ strong extended Vistara family, many of whom have been with us since day one.
From Capital to Growth: Why the Rebrand
In 2021, we rebranded from Vistara Capital to Vistara Growth.
This wasn’t just a naming decision — it was a strategic one. We wanted to make it clear that unlike many passive providers of capital, we were hands on, highly engaged and ultimately there to help enable growth.
“Our core purpose has always been to enable growth of the ambitious technology companies we invest in, our investors, our people, and the communities we operate in,” says Randy Garg, Founder and Managing Partner at Vistara “Although the spirit is already in our name – “Vistara” – we wanted to be clear that our business is about much more than simply investing capital”
The name “Vistara Growth” speaks directly to the outcomes we help create: unlocking potential, supporting scale, and empowering management teams to move forward on their terms while limiting overall dilution. We coined a term internally of “Own Your Growth” and take great pride across our numerous exits where founders and early investors have retained a significantly greater percentage ownership than their counterparts in companies which often raise more equity rounds than necessary in what we call the “alphabet soup” of venture capital.
10 Years of Accelerating Momentum
In our upcoming series of posts, we’ll take a closer look at:
- How we’ve maintained zero losses over 10 years — a track record that speaks to our disciplined underwriting and active engagement with our companies.
- Some of the sectors, business models and other technology investment fads we’ve avoided and bullets we’ve dodged.
- How AI is impacting how we underwrite and view risk and reward for software and tech-enabled services companies.
- How we’ve achieved steady exits across market cycles, with returns that have been resistant to shocks (COVID, interest rates drops and increases, tariffs, and others) along the way.
- The people behind the Vistara platform – How our team has grown to a cross-functional group spanning Vancouver, Toronto, and Seattle.
- Why we continue to back founder-led (non-sponsored) companies and companies where sponsors may no longer be looking to provide further equity support.
- Why we chose to dedicate personnel to specific tech verticals – e.g. cybersecurity, AI, fintech, healthcare IT, and supply chain technologies to name a few – and which ones we are most excited about going forward.
- Why as a credit focused fund we strategically maintain the ability to become equity holders and have in many cases been the catalyst towards our companies securing strategic funding at key junctures in their evolution.
- Noteworthy stories on how the companies we’ve backed — from our earliest investments to our most recent — have scaled, transformed and have embodied the “Own Your Growth” philosophy with an exit on their own terms.
Looking Ahead
We’re expanding — in reach, in team, and in ambition. Our current Fund V is completing its fundraising efforts this year to meet the growing demand for capital in today’s challenging markets, driven by the next wave of ambitious technology companies. We are also continuing to invest in our platform: growing our team, strengthening relationships, and building new partnerships to deliver value for our companies and our expanding investor base in the years to come.
We look forward to sharing more in the weeks to come as part of our 10-year retrospective.
Looking for Flexible Growth Capital?
Read our case studies to learn how our growth debt and equity solutions have enabled our founders and helped our portfolio companies.
