Blume Ventures closes maiden round of Fund III at $40 Mn, eyes final close early 2019

Blume Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm, made the first close on its third fund at $40 million. This is half the amount of its fund corpus which stood at $80 million. Further, it’s still looking to raise $20 million more from both existing and new investors in next few months.

The VC plans to invest 60-65 per cent of this fund in domestic-heavy segments such as healthcare, travel, commerce, financial services, brands, education, digital media, and entertainment. Remaining 35-40 per cent is to be invested in innovation-driven software tech.

Blume Venture focuses on pre-series A and series A rounds in startups. With the new fund company plans to increase the stake up to 15-25 per cent in its existing portfolio companies.

The ticket size for the cheques written by the venture capital initially lied in $100-150 thousand range after the first round, and later increased to $250-500 thousand in the second round. With the third round, this ticket size is expected to go up to $0.5-1.25 million and will be invested across a concentrated portfolio.

The company had started with a seed fund I in 2011 with an amount of about $20 million and had closed the second fund with the second and final close in October 2016 raising $60 million in total (second fund).

The VC has invested across 128 companies with 41 leads. Some of its major portfolio companies are Unacademy, Milkbasket, Servify, Rizort, Rocketium, Spinny etc. It also has made 12 exits so far including big names like TaxiForSure.com, Runnr, Chillr, Zenatix amongst many others.