Jio BlackRock Asset Management, a 50-50 joint venture between Reliance group firm Jio Financial Services and global asset management company (AMC) BlackRock, has plans to have a presence in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (Gift City) in the future in its bid to become a full-service AMC in India.
The move will allow domestic investors to access funds managed by BlackRock globally as well as cater to the investment requirement from overseas investors into funds managed by the AMC. BlackRock reported a record-high of $12.53 trillion in assets under management (AUM) as of the quarter ended June 30, 2025.
Having started its operations in May 2025, Jio BlackRock AMC has already launched eight funds, including three index funds and garnered assets under management of over ₹17,000 crore. A flexicap fund is set to be launched on September 23, the first actively managed fund from the AMC. Another 3-4 more funds are in the pipeline across categories that could be launched by March 2026.
“We have also started thinking about having a presence in Gift City. We have got queries from investors wanting to access global BlackRock products and global investors also looking to invest in some of our local products that we are going to launch,” Rishi Kohli, chief investment officer, Jio BlackRock said on Thursday.
The AMC, however, has not set a timeline yet as to when it plans to commence operations in Gift City. Kohli said that the plan is to build the portfolio first for which there is a strong pipeline.
“We have just started, and so there are a lot of categories that are open for us. There are plans to launch an actively managed fund in each of the large categories. In the next 6-9 months, there will be more actively managed equity funds,” Kohli said.
In the pipeline are arbitrage funds, duration funds (that invest in fixed income instruments), ETFs and the AMC is also looking at new areas such as Specialised Investment Funds that bridge the gap between portfolio management services and traditional mutual funds and model baskets that allows AMCs to build a portfolio of a combination of mutual funds.
Kohli said that the upcoming flexi-cap fund will be built on BlackRock’s globally proven SAE (Systematic Active Equity) platform that follows a rule based, predominantly machine-driven process while reducing key-person risks and cognitive biases in fund management.