A Fillip To Friendship: Why We Created Blume Founders Fund

Over the last 12 years, being one of India's largest homegrown funds, we have proudly supported over 150+ companies and 300+ founders. We affectionately refer to our founders as 'Blumiers' and take pride in the strong network we have cultivated.

In August 2020, we noticed the growing size of the Blume brigade, with talented individuals returning to us in various avatars. With this abundance of exceptional talent, we faced a challenge - i.e.: being able to invest in just 25-30 companies in a fund cycle. While our framework constrained us, we firmly believed in the potential of these founders and their ideas and wanted to play a catalyst in their success.

This led to the birth of the Blume Founders Fund (BFF) program.

BFF aims to forge long-term relationships with exceptional founders, leveraging Blume's platform strength and network while maintaining its distinctiveness from our Core Investment program.

The program's mission is to ensure we continue building on relationships, which we consider our key superpower.

Referred to as BFF, this fund operates separately from our core investments and typically invests between $50k and $250k in companies with a strong connection to Blume. This connection may stem from the founder being an alumnus or a CXO of a portfolio company, having received mentoring from our founders, or having developed a rapport with Blume over time. While we deeply value the founders, the program does not allow for follow-on investments.

In Fund III ($102M fund), we allocated 1-2% of the fund to the BFF program, backing 30 companies with checks ranging from $25k to $100k.

What has changed? With Fund IV ($292m), we continue to build on the program and have carved out 2-3% of Fund IV, enabling us to provide slightly larger investments of $50k to $250k in pre-seed/ seed/ pre-Series A startups. In exceptional cases, BFF invests in startups that align perfectly with our investment thesis but may have missed the opportunity for a core investment. These investments function like grouped angel investments, ‘internally sponsored’ and ‘externally championed’ by a senior leadership member at Blume. Each partner owns these ‘relationships’ and is available as a mentor, with me managing the program and supporting the startups daily.

As a BFF portfolio company, founders gain exclusive access to our network, which includes BlumeBook (our in-house resource book), learning and development sessions, partnership with Constellation Blu (our legal/finance/tax partner) & Metamorph (our hiring partners). They are also entitled to a unique startup pack of discounted offers, and, importantly, connections and guidance from our esteemed leadership team. The greatest value of being part of the BFF program lies in the access to the Blume portfolio and the Blume founder network, becoming part of the strongest founder communities in the Indian ecosystem.

The BFF program enables Blume to add value to talented founders - tying back to the vision - ‘May a thousand founders BLUME’.