Early stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures will soon hit the road to launch its third and largest fund worth $80-100 million, Managing Director Sanjay Nath told BloombergQuint in an interview.
The firm’s investment strategy for the third fund will remain the same as earlier, as it backs consumer internet and business-to-business companies, added Nath. It will focus on logistics, payments and robotics, boost investment in health and will explore areas such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality.
“Consumer opportunity in India is huge but we are also seeing founders thinking beyond business-to-consumer, and are looking at newer areas like deep tech and hardware,” Nath added.
The VC firm is looking to increase the ticket size for investment in startups from the new fund. “This time we are looking to increase the ticket size from $500,000-1 million,” he said, adding that company will continue to back startups in the early stage.
Blume Ventures has backed around 75 startups, including Robotics startups GreyOrange, MockBank , RailYatri, RoadRunnr, ReGlobe, Tookitaki, Purplle, Zopper and NowFloats, among others.
The Mumbai-based venture firm plans to start marketing the fund by the end of this year, will start raising funds in the first half of 2018 and is looking to close it by early 2019, Nath said.
Blume Ventures started about six years ago with a tiny $20 million fund founded by Nath and Karthik Reddy. It closed its second fund, Blume Ventures India Fund II, in October last year at $60 million, and has emerged as one of the most active seed-stage investors in the country. Nath added that they still have dry powder left to back a few more startups from the second fund.
We are looking to close a bunch of deals from the second fund by the end of this year. But we have to have a view on the next fund, the fact is India is back again, a lot of deep tech innovation is happening, quality of founders is higher, so you would want to be active in the market. Sanjay Nath, Managing Director, Blume Ventures
