Blume Ventures Marks The First Close Of Fund III

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Mumbai, October 4, 2018 – India’s foremost homegrown early-stage venture capital firm, Blume Ventures, has completed the first close of its Third Fund. Reaching half of its $80 Mn target corpus and with commits from existing investors for another $20 Mn, Blume aims to achieve its final close over the next few months.

Fund III is reflective of the renewed confidence of Blume’s current LPs and some new anchor investors (from India, US, Japan and Asia) in the maturing Indian VC market, Blume’s emergence as a strong brand with top founders, and its robust fund performance.

The Blume General Partners continue to believe in backing the two distinct opportunity sets that India offers – domestic consumption and scaling (by consumers and SMBs respectively) and Indian engineering built for global markets.

Blume expects to invest 60-65% of Fund III in domestic-heavy sectors such as healthcare, financial services, travel, commerce and brands, jobs and education, and digital media & entertainment. The other 35-40% of the fund will focus on software tech (Cloud, AI, Analytics, SaaS, Verticals, and Blockchain) and deep tech (Agri, security, robotics, Iot) companies that can innovate and engineer with local talent pools and yet scale globally.

Karthik Reddy, co-founder and Managing Partner, Blume Ventures says “The larger fund, compared with our humble $20 Mn beginnings in Fund I, allows us to lead investments more emphatically for higher ownership, commensurate to the value-adding platforms that we have built and in time for fantastic founders that are emerging from the success stories of the first cycle in Indian startups. In Unacademy, HealthifyMe, Purplle, Railyatri, Turtlemint, Dunzo etc., we are seeing that we can build uniquely for the Indian market and Blume has an eye for such founders and market gaps before larger funds step in.”

“Blume is building an incredible track record and a global ecosystem of partnerships that is helping generate the first breakouts in Global B2B stories. The emergence of Grey Orange, Locus, Servify, Stellapps, Carbon Clean Solutions, Dataweave, Tricog and many more innovation-heavy early winners across Funds I and II gives Blume an upper hand today in driving the best founders to work with them and a repeatable product success story overseas”, adds Sanjay Nath, co-founder and Managing Partner, Blume Ventures.

The new fund will be invested across a more concentrated portfolio. With opening investment cheques of $500K-$1Mn, and the ability to commit larger amounts in future rounds, Blume is now signaling larger ownership and a longer and deeper commitment to winners.

Fund III will also fuel Blume’s further expansion into NCR and a new team build-out in Bangalore. The Bangalore office and team will support our already sizeable portfolio in Bangalore and further help identify and grow a Fund III portfolio.

About Blume

Founded in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath, Blume had raised its debut fund of $20 Mn in 2011, which was supplemented with an Opportunity Fund. A $60 Mn Fund II was raised in 2015. Blume has invested in over 100 companies, including robotics firm GreyOrange, online learning platform Unacademy, Mettl, Turtlemint, Cashify, Servify and more. Some of the key exits from Blume’s portfolio include Taxiforsure (acquired by Olacabs), Zipdial (acquired by Twitter), Promptec (acquired by Havells), Runnr (acquired by Zomato), Minjar (acquired by Nutanix) and E2E (partial exit with IPO listing on NSE Emerge).

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