India's Blume reaches $40m first close on early-stage fund

Blume aims to close Fund III by the end of the year, with a target of $80 million. The commitments received so far include both current LPs and new anchor investors from the US, India, Japan, and other parts of Asia.

Blume closed its previous fund at $60 million in 2016, up from the INR1 billion ($22 million) that it raised for its first fund in 2012. With the expanded corpus from the third fund, the firm plans to invest more capital and take larger stakes in portfolio companies. It will write initial checks of $500,000 to $1 million, with the ability to commit larger amounts in follow-on rounds.

Since its founding in 2010 Blume has backed over 100 companies and made a number of exits, mostly through trade sales. The firm sees its investments falling into two main themes: domestic consumption driven by India’s growing middle class, and Indian engineering built for enterprise users in domestic and global markets.

Companies in the former category include online education platform Unacademy, fitness lifestyle app operator HealthifyMe, and Cashify, an online marketplace for used smart phone and electronics. The global enterprise opportunity is served by the likes of e-commerce robotics systems developer GreyOrange Robotics, customer experience management software producer Servify, and logistics and supply chain software firm Locus.

It will commit up to 65% of the new fund to the domestic consumption story, including healthcare, financial services, travel, education, and digital media. The rest will focus on software and deep tech opportunities such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, security, and robotics.

“Blume is building an incredible track record and a global ecosystem of partnerships that is helping generate the first breakouts in global B2B stories,” said Sanjay Nath, a co-founder and managing partner of the firm. “The emergence of GreyOrange, Locus, Servify, and many more innovation-heavy early winners across Funds I and II gives Blume an upper hand in driving the best founders to work with us.”

Blume has also joined Draper Venture Network (DVN), a global alliance of VC investors formed by Tim Draper, as its member for India. The alliance gives Blume’s portfolio companies access to DVN’s global network for collaboration and support, while providing DVN’s other members with access to India’s technology sector.

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• Topics
• South Asia
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• Blume Ventures
• TMT