Blume 2026 Perspectives | The Case for Atoms, Structural Shifts, and Young Founders

The themes I’m excited about for 2025 – 26 aren’t dramatically different from what energised me in the past year. The biggest opportunities continue to stem from India’s structural shifts: the long arc from informal to formal, unorganised to organised, unbranded to branded. That movement still creates room for both consumer and B2B businesses to flourish, and for Indian brands that learn from affluent India to use the country as a springboard to global markets. 

AI remains another major area of interest, particularly as a wedge for Indian founders to attack entrenched verticals in the West. A simple example is the rise of Voice AI and the way it can be used to bring down cost structures in industrial or operationally heavy categories.

But alongside the excitement around AI, I find myself drawn to what I jokingly call ​“natural stupidity” businesses! This is not meant pejoratively, but rather as a reminder that physical, atoms-driven businesses (the opposite of purely intelligent or AI-native models) remain vast, under-innovated spaces. 

One of the most interesting shifts in the ecosystem that I noticed in 2025 was in the venture ecosystem; much as founders a few years ago expanded abroad when India felt too small for the venture capital they had raised, VCs are now doing the same by backing Indian and sometimes even non-Indian founders globally. Peak XV, Z47, Nexus, and even Blume have all taken this path, setting up presence in the Bay Area, recognising that Indian talent today can build from anywhere for anywhere.

This widening aperture across the ecosystem hasn’t changed where we play, though it has sharpened how we pick. Our Fund V construction will look very similar to Fund IV; we’ll continue to play in the seed to pre-Series A range and blend formation checks on elite operators or second-time founders with traction checks on first-time founders showing meaningful velocity. 

That said, the past year did catch us off guard in a few ways. What surprised us in 2025 was the market’s willingness to back extremely experimental AI companies and, on the consumer side, gross-margin-negative service models, especially in quick commerce and QSR. It briefly evoked 2021, even if the overall market didn’t.

Beyond market dynamics, there’s a generational shift worth noting: the rise of the super-young founder, particularly in AI, deep tech, aviation, and space. This new cohort is strikingly confident and comfortable chasing large, frontier-tech problems. The only caution I’d offer founders is not to get swept away by the hype cycle. Yes, AI is a big opportunity, but so are atoms businesses, consumer brands, and deep-tech models outside AI. The real task is to build the company you genuinely want to build, not the one the herd expects you to build.