Blume Ventures said on Thursday that it has elevated Ashish Fafadia as a partner, as the early-stage venture capital firm looks to invest from its third fund after announcing the first close recently.
In his new role, Fafadia, who was designated the chief financial officer previously, will oversee the overall finance function, including risk management, support fundraising and helping the investment team on portfolio firms that graduate to the growth stage, said Blume in a statement.
He will also assist companies during the exit process of Blume, it added.
Fafadia, who had joined Blume Ventures in 2012, led the structuring of early-to-growth stage investments, alongside the venture capital firm's co-founder Karthik Reddy. He also oversaw Blume's notable exits including TaxiforSure, which was acquired by Ola, Zipdial, which was bought by Twitter—both deals were struck in 2015—and recently Mettl, which was acquired by Mercer.
He was also part of the transaction that involved Blume's partial exit from cloud computing firm E2E Networks Ltd via a listing on the National Stock Exchange’s junior platform.
In 2013, he led the establishment of Blume’s platform and support services arm, Constellation Blu—a 40-member team providing a wide range of advisory services such as transaction support, regulatory and compliance services.
Fafadia currently represents Blume Ventures on the boards of Purplle, NowFloats, Slicepay and Turtlemint and oversees another half a dozen companies.
"My immediate areas of focus will include working on Fund I exits and taking Fund II portfolio companies to the next level,” said Fafadia, who was deputy manager at BCCL, which is better known as The Times Group and publishes The Times of India newspaper and operates television channels as well as a host of websites.
Earlier this month, Blume achieved the first close of its third fund at $40 million (Rs 293 crore), joining a list of venture capital firms that have reached fundraising milestones this year.
“Ashish has been instrumental in Blume's efforts to become one of the first homegrown venture capital firms to execute a platform-driven approach," said Sanjay Nath, co-founder and managing Partner, Blume Ventures.
Blume also said it has appointed Sajith Pai as director of research and analysis in Delhi in September as was reported by VCCircle in August. Pai was previously associate vice president at BCCL.
The venture firm will also establish a full-time office and team on the ground in Bengaluru, which it plans to complete by early 2019, it said.
Blume was co-founded by Reddy and Nath in 2010. Its other members include four principals – Avantika Vohra, Arpit Agarwal, Rohan Paranjpey and Sajid Fazalbhoy, and one associate and an analyst each.
