Early-stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures, which has backed more than 150 startups including Spinny, Slice, Grey Orange, Turtlemint, Carbon Clean and Servify among others, on Monday said it has elevated two of its senior members Arpit Agarwal and Sajith Pai to investment partners.
The announcement comes a little over three months after Blume marked the final close of its Fund IV in December last year. The Mumbai-headquartered VC firm raised $290 million from institutional investors for its largest fund to date.
Arpit and Sajith’s elevation to investment partners is an acknowledgement of their valuable contribution to Blume’s founder journeys and strong underlying portfolio performance, the VC firm said in a statement.
Agarwal joined Blume in 2014. His first investment for the VC firm came in Cashify in 2015. His areas of expertise include deeptech, healthtech and cleantech/EVs. He has played a key role in fostering a vibrant B2B/enterprise practice at Blume, the VC firm said. Prior to joining Blume, he was a founding member of the Headstart Network and the TLabs teams, the Times Internet startup accelerator program.
On the other hand, Pai joined Blume in 2018 after almost two decades at The Times Group, where he was involved in strategy and corporate development. At Blume, he has invested in companies across edtech, HRtech, B2B marketplaces, workforce enablement, and other consumer internet business models, said the VC firm.
Besides Agarwal and Pai, Blume Ventures' investment team includes Sanjay Nath, Ashish Fafadia, and Karthik Reddy. Nath focuses on cross-border SaaS while Fafadia and Reddy lead fintech and consumer/B2B internet, respectively.
Started by Reddy and Nath in 2010, Blume Ventures closed its debut fund in 2011 to raise Rs 100 crore and gradually increased the fund sizes taking the total managed capital to more than $250 million at present.
Currently investing from its fourth fund, the VC firm is looking to back 30-35 startups in total. It has already made a dozen investments from Fund IV.
