Venture capital fund has announced the first close of its fourth fund – Blume Fund IV – at $105 million. The company stated the final close of the fund closer to the $200 million mark.
With Fund IV, Blume will continue to invest in its core strategy — pre-Seed to pre-Series A technology startups across India as well as consumer internet, SMB marketplaces, and global opportunities in software and enterprise technology being addressed by Indian founders.
The first close of Fund IV exceeds Blume’s Fund III corpus, which was at $102 million (2018-19). The historic AUM at Blume was approximately $300 million (60 percent in its core seed funds and 40 percent in continuity funds). This will grow to over $500 million by March 2022 when Blume proposes to achieve its final close of Fund IV.
Blume said the larger Fund IV gives the team the ability to participate longer through the lifecycle of its portfolio companies, and its target of $180-$200 million allows it to back companies deeper, while staying true to its ‘conviction capital’ investment philosophy.
Ashish Fafadia, Partner at Blume, said: “We are grateful to our existing anchor LPs for renewing their confidence and belief in Blume with their strong and emphatic participation in our First Close. In addition to overseas institutional investors, domestic wealth management platforms and family offices that have backed us, our LP base also includes unicorn operators and seasoned founders who mentor and advise our portfolio founders on critical challenges of building, scaling, hiring and growth.”
The company added – “It is closely followed by a stream of fast growing category leaders who are all speeding towards the unicorn milestone – Spinny, Slice, GreyOrange, Purplle, Dunzo, Servify, Turtlemint, Classplus, and Exotel are farthest ahead today. We are confident of seeing many of these becoming category-defining publicly listed companies.”
