New mutual funds in February 2026: 22 launches

Twenty-two in a month

22 new schemes published their first NAV in February 2026, counting each fund's Direct plan, Growth option. That is twice January's 11, and four more than the 18 that started in February 2025, counted the same way among funds still publishing a NAV.

A first NAV is the end of the story that a new fund offer (NFO) begins: the scheme collects money during the offer, allots units, and then starts pricing them daily. So these are the funds whose offers closed in late January or during February.

One more scheme began in February and is left out of the count: Axis Fixed Maturity Plan Series 129, a 108-day closed-ended plan rather than a fund anyone can keep buying.

The list

Active equity came back

January's eleven launches had no active equity fund among them: they were index funds, debt funds and fund-of-funds. February turned that around. Eleven of the 22 were actively managed equity funds:

• Seven sectoral or thematic funds. Three of them are financial-services funds, from Bank of India, Edelweiss and Motilal Oswal. The other four are built around a theme or a style: innovation, consumption, sector rotation and quality.
• Four diversified funds, one in each of the large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap and dividend-yield categories. Parag Parikh Large Cap stands out because PPFAS runs so few schemes: it is the house's seventh scheme with a Direct Growth NAV, joining a flexi-cap fund, an ELSS, three hybrid funds and a liquid fund.

The rest were passive or close to it. Four index funds track a value factor, a consumption index, sector leaders and a Shariah-compliant version of the Nifty 500. Of the five fund-of-funds, four each buy a single ETF (gold, PSE stocks, defence stocks and metal stocks), and DSP's spreads its money across several asset classes.

The 22 came from 18 fund houses. Groww, Kotak Mahindra, Mirae Asset and The Wealth Company launched two each.

The first few weeks

A new fund usually starts near ₹10 a unit (₹1,000 for some debt funds), so its early NAV moves are easy to read. By 4 March 2026, all 15 of the new equity funds and equity index funds were below their first NAV. The gaps ranged from 1.40% for Bank of India Banking & Financial Services to 7.10% for WhiteOak Capital Consumption Opportunities.

That is mostly the market. The Nifty 50 closed at 25,088.40 on 2 February, the day the first of these funds was priced, and at 24,480.50 on 4 March, a fall of 2.42%. The start date matters too. The index was higher than that for most of February, peaking at 25,953.85 on 11 February, so the funds that began in mid-February started from a higher point. WhiteOak Capital's fund, the furthest below its first NAV, was first priced on 11 February.

The gold fund-of-funds from The Wealth Company went the other way: it was 5.25% above its first NAV.

What this does not tell you

A month says nothing about a fund. Four weeks of NAVs measure the market's path since launch, not the manager's skill. None of these funds has a one-year return yet.

The count misses ETFs. ETFs have no Direct plan, and this count is built from Direct Growth NAVs, so new ETFs are not in it.

A ₹10 NAV is not cheap. The unit price at launch is a convention. What you own is a share of the portfolio, whatever the NAV.

Where to go from here

Each fund above links to its page, which fills in as its record builds. The guides to sectoral and thematic funds and fund-of-funds explain the two kinds of product that dominated the month. For how the market moved while these funds were starting, see the February 2026 market recap, and the screener lists every new scheme once its NAV is published.