Recommitting to take the lead in helping our planet fight climate change

We are committed to doing our best to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Whether that is by taking bold bets on deep-tech ventures like Carbon Clean much ahead of the market, by supporting circular economy companies like Cashify and Spinny, or by learning and building deep expertise in Electric Mobility, we have often found ourselves to be the pioneering risk-taker in Indian VC investments in the climate sector. For over a decade, despite being a generalist fund house, we have believed in doing most things from first principles, which generally pays off. 

With the new wave of climate leadership by the Indian government and an emerging class of venture investors committing to build a supply chain of capital for Indian ClimateTech companies, we are convinced that India may be at an inflexion point. Companies seeded today will generate venture-class returns on a carefully picked ClimateTech sub-portfolio and develop technological capabilities for India and the world. It is no coincidence that four of the first 15 investments - BatterySmart, Vecmocon, ElectricPe and Aerem - in Blume Fund IV are in the ClimateTech theme, and all of these are off to a great start.

Key Addition to the team 

With this opportunity and commitment in mind, we have onboarded Mudit Narain. Mudit, who studied climate change and conducted research on its implications for India at MIT, joins us after a 15-year career at World Bank’s Energy practice, IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE, the Atal Innovation Mission, and the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to Government of India. He has been part of several landmark studies at MIT and the World Bank and helped develop an award-winning initiative to support deep tech start-ups for Indian defence called iDEX. Mudit has been at the forefront of technology and policy and intimately understands technology, markets and institutions. We are super kicked to have him with us. 

Commitment towards conducting and publishing more research 

With Mudit, our ClimateTech research coverage has expanded in scope and depth. Blume is increasing its engagement with deep tech startups and looking to make early-stage investments in promising technologies with the potential for significant emissions reductions in transportation and logistics, industrial decarbonisation, Agritech and food chain, emerging consumer consumption patterns, and many more. We are going deeper into technologies and broader into mitigation-relevant sectors. We recently published a revised and expanded EV Primer last week. My colleague Venkatesh published our overview of the Circular Economy the previous month, and we are actively working on areas linked to Green Hydrogen, battery technology, alternative proteins and others. We will also engage with prominent Indian and global research labs to identify technologies with the potential for considerable emissions mitigation and support them early. 

Launch of a community initiative 

The Blume ClimateTech ecosystem is increasing. Given India’s advantages across sectors, it is spread across 5-6 top cities. We are committed to doing four-six Blume ClimateTech Mixers in the next 12 months, and would love to hear from you and host you at one of the events.