Blume Ventures, an investor in startups such as edtech unicorn Unacademy, warehouse robotics firm GreyOrange and beauty marketplace Purplle, has marked the first close of its fourth fund at $105 million (Rs 780 crore).
The early-stage venture capital firm is expected to make the final close at around $180-200 million by March next year, Blume said in a statement.
The target corpus for the new fund is nearly double the size of the third fund that had marked the final close at $102 million in February last year.
The new fund -- Blume Fund IV -- will stick to its core strategy of betting on technology startups at the pre-seed to pre-Series A technology startups. It will continue to invest in startups across consumer internet, small and midsize business (SMB) marketplaces and Indian founders-led software and enterprise technology companies that have the potential to go global.
Ashish Fafadia, partner at Blume, said the venture capital firm's existing anchor Limited Partners (LPs) helped in the fund's first close.
Blume's LP base includes overseas institutional investors, domestic wealth management platforms, family offices as well as seasoned entrepreneurs, added Fafadia without disclosing their identities.
Founded in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath, Blume closed its debut fund in 2011 at Rs 100 crore (around $20 million). It closed its second fund in October 2016 at $60 million and the third fund last year.
The firm has backed more than 100 startups including TaxiForSure (acquired by Ola) and ZipDial (bought by Twitter). Its investments from the third fund include those in edtech startup Classplus, online aggregator of primary healthcare services HealthAssure, fashion rental and styling platform Stage3, SaaS-based browser testing platform LambdaTest, and agri-focused Jai Kisan.
Last year, Blume Ventures got its first unicorn in its portfolio after Unacademy raised $150 million (Rs 1,094 crore) in a funding round led by SoftBank at a valuation of over $1 billion.
This year has seen venture capital firms announce fundraising milestones in the wake of high investor interest in the Indian startup ecosystem that has already seen the creation of 37 unicorns this year compared with just 11 in previous calendar year. Multiple venture capital firms including Chiratae Ventures, A91 Partners and Stellaris Venture Partners have upsized their fund targets this year.
Earlier this week, VCCircle reported that WaterBridge Ventures marked the final close of its second fund at $150 million, higher than the originally targeted $100 million.
