Blume Ventures announces the first close of their new Opportunity cum Continuity Fund.

Mumbai, 21st June: Blume Ventures continues to innovate and evolve. Today Blume Ventures announced the first close of their new opportunity fund, Fund 1Y. This is Blume’s third growth fund, and they have already raised INR 200Cr of the INR 400Cr target with visibility for the remaining corpus. This new fund comes soon after the close of a massive US$ 290 Mn Fund IV last year in a market perceived as adverse to fundraising, demonstrating the high trust Limited Partners (LPs) place in Blume Ventures and its strong performance as one of India’s largest home-grown funds in the last decade.

Fund 1Y is backed by a high-quality LP base, with existing LPs in Blume Ventures’s other funds participating again. Blume Ventures’s Fund I LPs have started seeing meaningful capital being returned, and having seen one complete capital cycle, many of them are confidently returning as investors in this new Fund 1Y.

Blume Ventures raised a similar-sized Opportunity Fund in 2021, which bought out strong performers from Fund 1, and a majority of the portfolio’s underlying metrics have grown at 35%+ CAGR, resulting in follow-on rounds even in this market. Blume Ventures also raised Opportunity Funds in 2018 and 2022 solely for doubling down on their investments in category leaders such as Exotel, Grey Orange Robotics, Smallcase, Slice, Unacademy, and WebEngage. As a part of this Fundraise, Blume Ventures will invest part of the capital from this new Fund 1Y to buy out strong winners such as Intrcity, Cashify, Carbon Clean, and Zopper from their legacy Fund I and allied investment vehicles and use the remaining to invest in the existing winners of their other funds.

Blume Ventures has pursued a unique Growth Investing strategy, where they use these Continuity Funds to hold and compound returns on their winning positions for longer tenures by pursuing one of the following objectives:

• Buy out stakes of winning companies from Blume Ventures’s legacy Funds at pre-validated price points discovered by follow-on investors and hold on to these positions as they brace up for a path to profitability and eventual public listing.
• Invest additional capital into break-out businesses on the back of follow-on investors, thereby continuing to create effective ways for their LP base to participate in high-quality businesses.

Commenting on the development, Vikram Gawande, Vice President, of Growth Investments, Blume Ventures, stated, “We have a fabulous set of winners in our portfolio, and I am glad that we have been able to raise additional capital to stay invested longer and go deeper in our winners. We believe in the power of public markets and are confident that businesses such as Purplle, Zopper, Cashify and others in this portfolio are well entrenched on the path. “

Karthik Reddy, Co-founder and Partner, Blume Ventures, added, “It’s a global practice for Fund Managers like Blume to provide exits to the existing LPs by finding new investors who can buy out a combination of assets from the original Fund. Blume is one of the first VCs in India to have executed this structure with the new investors also being onshore. The current environment and our unique strategy allows us to balance the interests of our current and incoming investors and hold the best of our companies for another 3-4 years before eventual public listing and create wealth for the local ecosystem. It's a win-win solution for all involved.”