With already 75 startups under its fold, venture capital firm Blume Ventures now plans to raise around $100 million in funding to expand further. The fund-raising process will start with the dawn of the new year and Blume hopes to close it by middle of 2019.
Blume Ventures is already one of the leading investors in India at this time and their portfolio of startups includes such popular names as Ola, Cashify, Runnr and so on. Blume prefers to fund tech startups and it has a few exits also, to be fair. Notably, Taxi For Sure, Zipdial and Promptec were some of the 10 companies Blume Ventures had invested in earlier, but pulled out later to choose alternate ventures with better potential.
Blume typically picks up $500,000 to $1 million ticket-sized investments and the fresh finances that it manages to raise will go into funding 35 to 45 new startups in addition to follow-on funding requirements in deserving cases. On the anvil is also an incubation program that will be revealed in due course. Most of these details have been disclosed by Sanjay Nath, co-founder of Blume Ventures.
As regards the funding of Blume Ventures itself, the company has received two tranches of funds (I & II), of $20 million and $60 million respectively. Some of the verticals Blume has chosen to invest in through these funds, include Edtech, Robotics, Healthcare, IoT, Big data and analytics, Ecommerce, Fintech, and Logistics.
Apart from a few companies mentioned earlier, startups like Unacademy, GreyOrange Robotics, Tricog, and Zipdial were also beneficiaries of funding from Blume. Again, as indicated, the VC has exited from some of them as well. Some of these ventures have gone on to achieve their objectives and even beyond.
The long-term vision of Blume Ventures appears to be somewhat linked to the Make in India, Startup India schemes of the current government. Sanjay Nath claims that they insist on the startups they choose to fund, should find ways to innovate and develop local technology to solve India’s unique problems. To cite an example, he has referred to the air pollution issue in the country’s capital and he looks forward to startups coming up with realistic ideas to tackle this menace. Blume will readily fund such ventures.