Blume Ventures, India’s homegrown venture fund, has announced the close of its Fund IV at over $250 million, bringing the firm’s asset under management (AUM) to over $600 million.
Blume said in a statement that it has received emphatic support from all its previous supporters, and its Fund IV investors include some of India’s finest family offices, global family offices, sovereign wealth funds (India and overseas), and emerging market fund of funds.
The firm said the oversubscription on the $200 million target and the support from both existing and new investors is a testament to the track record that continues to grow stronger.
According to the statement, Blume Fund IV will be managed by its 15+ member investment team led by Sajith Pai, Arpit Agarwal, Ashish Fafadia, Sanjay Nath and Karthik Reddy.
Investing in 30-35 companies across different technology verticals, Blume will discover and nurture another generation of industry-defining companies built in this cycle.
“We are grateful to our anchor supporters and new believers who have emphatically backed Blume IV. Whether building domestically or for global markets, the best founders and limited partners (LPs) would like to work with a fund that can be considered world-class, which has spurred us to keep institutionalizing and bolstering our platform, team and capabilities,
“Thanks to an increasing reality of initial public offering (IPO) and merger and acquisition (M&A) exits, there is a resurgence of 2 tims founders and operators, as well as higher quality first-time founders. We’re excited for Blume to become the preferred seed partner of choice for both categories,” Blume Founder Sanjay Nath said.
Blume was established in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath. The firm is now over 35 professionals; the leadership team has grown to 10, and they collectively grow and mentor a roster of young emerging stars on the team.
Blume focuses on early-stage, innovative technology-led startups. It backs entrepreneurs either building to solve large impactful Indian problems or taking the best of Indian innovation to global markets.
The diverse mandate extends from edtech, fintech, health, commerce and consumer internet in the former to robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to software as a service (SaaS) and enterprise software in the latter category. These themes have been consistent through Blume’s 12 years of existence.
Launched as a “Superangel” fund in 2011, Blume raised $20 million in Fund I and invested in over 60 startups, pioneering the idea of home-grown micro venture capitals, with domestic investor participation playing an important role in each of its funds.
The first fund vintage has many winners that are incredibly stable after a decade of persistence. These include Purplle, Grey Orange, Turtlemint, Carbon Clean, Exotel, Cashify, Zopper, Webengage, and IDfy.
Blume raised successor Funds in 2015-16 and 2018-19, growing to a $60 million Fund II and a $102 million Fund III, maturing into a fund with increased reserves to deploy into the best breakout companies.
The Blume stars born from the 2015 to 2020 era are Unacademy, Slice, Spinny, dunzo, Classplus, Servify, Lambdatest, Koo, Locus, Healthifyme, smallcase, Euler, Jai Kisan and Pixxel, amongst others.
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