Homegrown VC Blume Ventures overshoots target to close fourth fund at $250 mn

Homegrown venture fund Blume Ventures has marked the final close of its fourth fund at $250 million, oversubscribed from the original target of $200 million. The new fund, named Blume Fund IV, takes the firm’s total assets under management (AUM) to over $600 million. 

The Mumbai-based early-stage investor counts Indian and global family offices, sovereign wealth funds (India and overseas), and emerging market Fund of Funds among the Limited Partners for its latest fund.  

Blume says it backs start-ups that build solutions for large, impactful Indian problems across sectors such as edtech, fintech, health, commerce and consumer internet and innovations emerging from the country which have global market opportunities across robotics, artificial intelligence, software as a service (SaaS) and enterprise software domains. 

The 12-year-old venture fund was established in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath. The fourth fund will invest in 30-35 companies across different technology verticals and will be managed by a 15+ member investment team led by Sajith Pai, Arpit Agarwal and Ashish Fafadia along with its founders. 

“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 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 IPO and M&A exits, there is a resurgence of 2x founders and operators, as well as higher quality first-time founders,” Sanjay Nath said. 

Originally launched as a “Superangel” fund, Blume went on to raise $20 million in Fund I and invested in over 60 start-ups. Leading companies from the first fund vintage include online cosmetics retailer Purplle, warehouse automation company Grey Orange, insurtech start-up Turtlemint, and recommerce marketplace Cashify. 

It raised successor funds in 2015-16 and 2018-19, growing to a $60 million Fund II and a $102 million Fund III. A handful of unicorns were born out of these two funds including edtech firm Unacademy, fintech start-up Slice, and used car retailing platform Spinny. Delivery start-up dunzo, edtech firm Classplus, device management firm Servify, application testing firm Lambdatest, and spacetech start-up Pixxel are among its portfolio from Fund II and III. 

Blume also manages ‘Continuity’ funds including secondary funds (Fund I winners), opportunity funds (Fund I and II winners) and other Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs).
 

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