Early-stage VC fund Blume Ventures has disclosed investments in four startups, made during the span of January-June this year. The developments have been mentioned in a quarterly report although it does not specify any investment details.
The fresh investments, which were first reported by MediaNama, include Framebench,, Idfy and 23spaces.
Framebench is a Cloud-based service for designers wherein they can store their designs, share with clients and review. The service also enables them to make calls and chat with clients. A free trial of the service is available by invitation. The startup has been co-founded by Rohit Aggarwal and Vineet Markan, both alumni of BITS (Birla Institute of Technology and Science). Blume said its co-investors for this startup include Maneesh Bhandari and the Ladsariya group.
Glamrs, which is yet to go live, is a content-plus-e-commerce portal for beauty products and tips. “Interact with tons of content online through reviews, expert tips, ratings, how-to videos, demos and features, exclusively created by our experts,†says the website. Delhi-based Glamrs has seen Blume co-investing with Anil Chopra and Sanjay Kamlani of Mumbai Angels and other independent angel investors.
Idfy is an interactive B2C platform, which enables users to create profiles, upload their identity documents and use Idfy’s ids for identification purposes in various tasks, such as renting a house, applying for a job, etc. The portal follows a freemium model wherein it does verification of the bios for a fee. It also aims to replace the paper documents that one carries all the time with one curated online space for all identification documents. It also offers standalone verification for PAN card details, work experience, educational qualification, address and reference verifications for different fees. It has been founded by Hatim Baheranwala and Ashok Hariharan.
23spaces is an application development company and although the products/apps are not yet live, it is working on several apps like Focal (to discover and organise curated information), Polo (travel-related content sharing) and Bookish (an app trying to make use of information in books). Out of the three, Focal is in Alpha testing stage whereas Polo is still in ideation.
Blume Ventures, started by Sanjay Nath and Karthik Reddy in 2010, has closed many investments this year. Although sector-agnostic, it seems to have a focus on Internet and consumer companies. Earlier investments of Blume include mystery shopping site RedQuanta, gaming startups HashCube and Rolocule Games, maternity and baby care products e-tailer CherishMaternity and product review platform Reviews42, among others.
In an earlier interview with Techcircle.in, Nath stated that the strategy of Blume is to work in a co-investing model to mitigate risks of early-stage investments.
(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)