Blume Ventures, a VC firm which invests in early-stage startups, has announced the close of its second fund at $60 million. The firm had earlier planned to raise around $40 million, but increased the fund size later.
Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner of Blume Ventures has said that they have raised $60 million. He further added that while the round is technically closed, paperwork is still remaining.
For this second fund, the firm has raised funding from some domestic family offices and founders of companies as well as a few companies. However, the name of the investors has not been disclosed.
From the total $60 million, $40 million came from overseas investors. The firm has received around $8 million from Japanese investors. About $10-12 million came from American investors, including ICONIQ Capital, an investment adviser which helps manage the fortunes of Silicon Valley billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg.
Here, the one-third of the total money that has been raised, comes from domestic investors including IIFL Wealth Management Ltd and the government’s India Aspiration Fund, administered by the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI).
Blume Ventures, which was founded in 2010 by Kathik Reddy and Sanjay Nath, had raised Rs. 100 crore at the time, for its debut fund in 2011. In 2015, the firm marked its first close of the fund at over $30 million. From the first fund, it invested $100,000-250,000 in each portfolio firm.
Now, from the second fund, Blume Ventures is looking at signing larger cheques. Commenting on this, Kathik said:
This time, we will have 40-45 investments. We have been investing for the past 18 months and almost half of the fund has already been deployed.
The early stage VC firm will continue to invest in the domestic consumption and SME story as well as its belief in the Indian engineering prowess.
Blume Ventures initially invests in the range of $50K – $250K into early-stage tech-focused/tech-enabled ventures. Further, the firm provides follow-on investments to their portfolio companies, ranging between $500K and $1.5 million.
The firm has made around 81 investments in around 63 companies, including the likes of education startup Unacademy, WebEngage, warehouse automation startup GreyOrange, Runnr, among others.
Recently, the VC firm invested an undisclosed amount in RailYatri — a startup that provides real time information regarding trains in India through its mobile app. Last month, it also invested in Unocoin, a Bitcoin trading startup’s $1.5 million funding round.
