Roughly three months after the close of its second product's NFO, Bandhan AMC's Arudha SIF platform is being closely watched as one of the more actively built-out entrants in India's Specialised Investment Fund category. With both the Arudha Hybrid Long-Short Fund and the Arudha Equity Long-Short Fund now trading, the platform offers a useful early case study in how a fund house with a large existing retail and HNI base is approaching the SIF opportunity.

What's changed in the broader SIF landscape By mid-2026, the SIF category had expanded well beyond its earliest entrants, with well over a dozen AMCs holding SEBI approval to operate SIF platforms and live products spanning equity, hybrid and debt strategies from houses including Edelweiss (Altiva), SBI (Magnum), Aditya Birla Sun Life (Apex), Union MF (Arthaya), ICICI Prudential (iSIF), Tata (Titanium), and ITI Mutual Fund (Diviniti), among others. Industry estimates placed total SIF assets under management well into the thousands of crores within roughly a year of the category's launch — a pace of growth that has made differentiation increasingly important for newer entrants.

Where Arudha stands

  • Two live strategies covering hybrid and pure equity long-short mandates

  • Access to Bandhan's distribution network across more than 800 locations and 3.5 million existing folios

  • Interval, exchange-listed structure for the hybrid fund; open-ended structure for the equity fund, giving investors a choice of liquidity profiles

  • No debt-oriented Arudha product yet launched, leaving one of SEBI's three permitted SIF categories still unaddressed by the platform

Wealth managers tracking the space note that Bandhan's decision to launch a hybrid product first, followed relatively quickly by a pure equity long-short fund, gave the AMC an opportunity to test investor appetite at different points on the risk spectrum within a short window — a strategy some rival AMCs have taken longer to replicate.

Attention now turns to two questions: whether Bandhan will round out the Arudha platform with a debt-oriented long-short SIF to complete its three-category coverage, and how the existing two funds perform once they have a fuller track record to assess against their respective benchmarks — the NIFTY 500 TRI for the equity fund, and Bandhan's back-tested hybrid framework for the interval fund. As with the SIF category more broadly, meaningful performance conclusions are still some way off, but early subscription and distribution reach suggest Arudha has positioned itself as one of the more comprehensive SIF platforms launched in the category's first fifteen months.