Our Team Is Growing

We are happy to announce three new additions to our exceptional team. In the eleventh year of our existence, we have now entered a new phase of growth. Our companies are mature (three unicorns and many more soonicorns already!) and our brand identity has recently been upgraded to reflect our growing ambitions. So, it was time we hit the pedal on hiring to grow our team as well. 

The first strategic hire we’d like to welcome to our team is Gautham Sivaramakrishnan who joins the Market Networks function in our Platform. A CA by qualification, Gautham covered 12 states last year alone visiting startup hubs. Since our inception, we have been pioneers of the ​“full-stack VC” approach and actively incorporated a Platform lens to our value addition efforts. Our partners have been playing these roles in individual capacities for the last decade – we have now reached a point where we wanted to bring in specialist support to help drive market relationships, strategic partnerships and GTM strategies for our founders. We experimented with different formats since 2018 and have now settled on an approach that will allow us to focus our efforts on our companies based on their lifecycle (early/​growth) as well as a broad area of function (consumer/​enterprise). Gautham joins us to drive Market Networks for many of our consumer and growing companies, by unlocking access to primarily financial partnerships, platforms and services that will help propel these companies further. Since Blume’s initial years, Blume has been actively building communities and helping our portfolio companies find the right connections that get the job done. Gautham will help us continue our efforts to connect the dots, unlock opportunity and engineer serendipity for our portfolio. 

As our second strategic hire, we are thrilled to ​“welcome back” Mitul Mehta to the Blume fold. Mitul was instrumental in helping setup the foundation of Blume’s platform services 9 years ago by jointly founding Constellation Blu, our transactional and legal advisory unit for our companies, together with other partners. Mitul has worked closely with other Blume partners and senior team members to build and manage legacy investment vehicles and put our founders first every step of the way. Mitul comes on board at Blume to help us strengthen and grow our Finance and Legal teams, bringing a seasoned, diligent and values-driven lens to his next stage of growth with the Blume family. With this structure, Alok Mehta who has been managing our Financial Operations and Investor Relations jointly for the past few years will shift his focus entirely to building a stronger framework and function for supporting our Investors who are one of our key stakeholders. 

Our third key strategic hire as we start 2022 is Vikram Gawande. As we continues to innovate and evolve our support for the ecosystem, we have made a conscious decision to grow together with some of our key companies and continue to extend our support to them as they scale to greater heights. We are in the nascent stages of providing value-added services for our Growth companies and are very happy to have Vikram Gawande join us in this function to help manage and drive growth for our late-stage portfolio. Before joining us, Vikram donned multiple roles – he was the co-founder of UrbanPro, ran a hospitality business in Pune, and also been an investor with Nirvana Ventures. Vikram and Blume go back many years, having been co-investors in Zopper. We are excited to have him support the partners and our Capital Networks function in taking Blume companies to the next level.