Blume Ventures looks to raise USD 60 million by May

Blume Ventures, a leading early- stage seed and pre-series A venture capital fund, is expected to make a first close of its second fund by May, targeting a total corpus of USD 50-60 million.
"We will make a first close of our second fund by May and are looking to raise a total of USD 50-60 million," Sanjay Nath, co-founder and Managing partner, Blume Ventures, told PTI today.
"With our first fund, the starting size of majority of investments was between USD 200,000-250,000. With the new fund we will look at a starting size of USD 500,000-750,000 and take it up to USD 1-2 million in series-A funding," he said.

"The capital for the second fund is being raised from institutional investors, as well as family offices and strategic corporations."
More than 75 per cent of the current portfolio of Blume Ventures is Internet and mobile technologies, while the remaining is what is known as "deep technologies", said Nath.
These include areas such as information technology, robotics and embedded software.

Nath indicated they will continue to target the pre- Series A phase of investment where they have built relations and a strong ecosystem. "The space above us has established players; there is a lot of overseas interest in late stage capital. We would like to dominate the early-stage segment."

Along with the early seed capital pumped into startups, the fund also brings in an ecosystem of advisors and portfolio mentors.
Recently, Blume made notable exits from two startups, taxi aggregator Taxi For Sure (acquired by Ola) and mobile marketing platform Zipdial (brought by Twitter).
They continue to work with other startups including cloud-based hotel management system Hotelogix, warehousing automation venture Grey Orange Robotics, and online payment collection platform Instamojo, among others.