After bouncing across Silicon Valley from startup to startup, Rahul Khanna ’00 looked across the ocean to find his calling.

“Things were starting to look interesting in India,” he said. Soon, he convinced his wife it was time to return home. Khanna had ambitions of launching his own business, one that would leverage his experience in telecom and the Internet. But this was a decade ago, and venture capitalists were still a rare breed in India. India’s culture of enterprise was far different from what he’d left behind at Kellogg and in the San Francisco Bay Area. The investors who offered financial help expected majority ownership — an option that made no sense to Khanna.

“There must be many other guys like me who have a desire to build a business and put the next 10 years of their lives behind it, but would accept only owning 10 percent of the company,” he said. “Well, I didn’t think that’s how things should work.” There were few options for entrepreneurs in India without financial backing. Venture capitalists would soon begin to fill that void, and Khanna, recruited by a fellow Kellogg alumnus to join Clearstone Venture Advisors, would help other entrepreneurs get their start.

In 2011, Khanna moved to a larger fund and became a managing director for Canaan Partners in India, a blue-chip venture capital firm with $4.2 billion of funds under management. But as he helped develop India’s venture capital culture, he saw what he called a gap in the financing market and an opportunity to strike out on his own to capitalize on the absence of a financing strategy called venture debt.

In the autumn of 2014, he founded Trifecta Capital, which he said is India’s first venture debt fund and one of the few in Asia.

“Think of it as a specialized bank for new economy businesses,” he said. “Most startups are unable to access credit from a bank because banks have traditionally required considerable collateral or a track record of profitability. That’s where we step in and provide structured debt that supplements the equity capital raised from VC funds.”

The arrival of venture debt firms in India is further evidence, Khanna said, of India’s evolving business climate and a maturing of the venture capital ecosystem.