In Full Blume | December 2023
In Full Blume | December 2023
Updates from the Blume team and portfolio companies
It’s nice to have you back here. Welcome to the year-end issue of In Full Blume, our monthly roundup of updates from the Blume team and portfolio. In this edition, we have not only all the great things that happened in the Blume ecosystem in December but also glimpses of the high spirits at our Delhi meet-up and a taste of year-end goodness from the Blume team. Let's dive in.
Omega Files: Blume Fund I declassified
ICYMI, we released Omega Files, episode 1 this week that declassifies and deconstructs Blume’s inaugural Fund I and Fund IA. Omega Files talks about what it took to build Blume’s inaugural fund, how we constructed the portfolio, attracted the best founders, how the fund has performed, and stories of our successes.
In his tweet, releasing the report, Karthik Reddy, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Blume Ventures, said, “We wanted to strike a balance between the two big truth parameters of the capital markets - Data and the Market itself - and blend some of the stories (the people are the most important part) in the second half of the report. Head is already spinning with ideas for the 2nd edition. For now, may the learning begin. (The J curve of a fund is more Jagged than The Rolling Stones…behold).”
You can download the report here.
Blume Fund I J Curve
Funding Spotlight
The festive cheer has arrived early for Blumiers!
We’re super proud to announce the historic Series D funding of our Fund 1 portfolio company, GreyOrange, which secured $135 million.
Along with the existing clutch of investors which includes Mithril Capital Management LLC, 3State Ventures, and Blume Ventures, the warehouse and retail automation company added Anthelion Capital to its cap table.
Speaking on the momentous occasion, Akash Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO, GreyOrange, said “As we scale, we recognize that keeping the needs of our customers at the center of our product and solution roadmap has proven essential for our customers. This Series D funding amplifies our commitment to leadership within the AI and robotics orchestration space.”
Karthik B. Reddy, co-founder and partner of Blume Ventures, remarked “GreyOrange is one of India's proudest deep tech exports. Despite a massive shift in how warehouse automation is being adopted in the US, they’re nimbly shifting their business model for the best of Fortune500 retail & commerce companies, which helps them gain customer confidence and win market share. We think it can be the first billion $ revenue company and are proud to further back GreyOrange's growth aspirations, along with our existing partners and Anthelion."
To know more, visit here.
Blumiers and Shakers
Olympic Gold Medalist Neeraj Chopra invests in Stage
Olympic gold medalist Neeraj Chopra made his debut in India’s startup ecosystem by investing in Stage (Fund IV company), a regional streaming platform. In Neeraj’s words, “My investment in Stage represents more than just a desire to rekindle the flames of our diverse regional dialects. We will embark on a journey together to reawaken dormant languages and empower every voice, ensuring that our cultural heritage thrives in its true form through this platform."
You can read more about Neeraj’s investment in Stage here.
WebEngage and IDfy featured in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 list
Identity verification services provider IDfy and marketing automation services provider WebEngage, both Fund I companies, were featured in the 18th edition of the Deloitte Technology Fast50 India list. The list recognizes the fastest-growing technology-enabled businesses in India based on their average revenue growth over a three-year period.
Find the link to the full list here.
Ultrahuman makes great strides: now in 100+ countries and listed as the Smart Ring of the year
Ultrahuman (Fund III Company) is now present in 100+ countries and is gearing up with its plans to make a global impact, co-founder Vatsal Singhal announced in a tweet recently.
Not only that but London-based publication Wareable listed Ring Air as one of its best smart rings of 2023. The publication said in its review, “We found that sleep tracking was largely reliable, with accuracy that took up well to its competitors.” Find the full coverage here.
Sprinto is certified as a great place to work again
SaaS platform for security compliances Sprinto (Fund III Company) has been certified as a great place to work by Great Place to Work India two years in a row. Sprinto’s fully remote operations make this recognition extra special.
Here’s the tweet from Sprinto’s founder, Raghuveer, announcing this feat.
ApnaKlub sets out to conquer the B2C market
ApnaKlub (Fund III Company), a B2B wholesaler e-commerce platform provider in the FMCG space, has stepped up its Kirana (retail) play in tier 2 cities. It has rolled out new brands, namely, Glenzo (a toilet cleaner), Apna Shine (a utensil cleaner), and Nutphat (a food brand). Glenzo and Apna Shine already have a run rate of more than INR 7cr. Read the full coverage by Forbes here.
LambdaTest enters into a partnership with Wipro
LambdaTest (Fund III company), a digital cloud testing SaaS provider, entered into a partnership with IT giant Wipro. This collaboration has the potential to enable Wipro’s enterprise customers to accelerate their release cycles by up to 70%.
More details in CEO and Co-founder Asad’s tweet here.
Healthify launches upgraded AI platform for health tracking, rebrands itself and announces a partnership with Swiggy
In a bid to redefine the wellness industry, Healthify, which was earlier HealthifyMe (Fund II company), announced the launch of Ria 2.0, an integrated health AI platform that provides coaching to manage stress, sleep, exercise, and meals. Healthify partnered with the food delivery app Swiggy to help its users obtain a healthy diet from within its app.
Find out more about HealthifyMe’s recent upgrades here here.
ElectricPe opens virtual and physical mobility centers
In a bid to simplify EV ownership, ElectricPe (Fund IV Company) has opened virtual and physical mobility centers that provide its customers with services ranging from vehicle purchase, charging, financing, insurance, and registration.
Find more details here.
Blume Ventures, in collaboration with Treemouse and Meta, launches the definitive XR Report at Meta’s Gurgaon office
Karthik Reddy launched the comprehensive report along with Sandhya Devanathan, who heads Meta India. The report showcases the plethora of opportunities that Extended Reality, a term that includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, presents itself in India.
You can download the full report here.
Bain & Company and Blume Ventures launch “India Electric Vehicle Report 2023”
Blume, in partnership with Bain & Company, launched an exhaustive dossier on the Indian EV landscape: India Electric Vehicle Report 2023. With EVs estimated to cross 40% penetration of the market by 2030, up from 5% currently, the report delves into identifying key focus areas that would need to be addressed to unlock this unique $100 billion opportunity.
Find the full report here.
In Your “Community” Corner
The Blume community team (with Deepika Jain and Sarita Raichura at the helm) is hard at work curating the best sessions for our portfolio founders to help them learn, build, and network better and perhaps ease (even a little bit) the arduous journey of building amazing products. The community team ensured that the Blume ecosystem ended the year on a high note by organizing the Blume Bash in Delhi NCR in collaboration with Google.
The event was more than a celebration; it showcased the rising talent and entrepreneurial spirit in NCR. The discussions and networking over drinks and dinner were inspiring, pointing towards a future of collaboration.
This demonstrated how our community is not just growing but thriving, with each interaction paving the way for innovative partnerships and shared successes. The energy in the room was palpable, a testament to the collective drive and ambition that characterizes our region.
In Full Blume Bonus Round: Our 2023 recommendations!
We asked our Blume colleagues what they read, watched, and listened to in 2023 that they would want others to enjoy as the Earth slowly spins away from 2023 into 2024. Here’s what they said. Open up your favorite note-taking app. You wouldn’t want to miss a thing!
Read
Text is a huge part of the creative commons at Blume. So, unsurprisingly, we have many great submissions here. We’ve divided this section into Books, Articles/Transcripts, and Reports.
Books
The Ride of a Lifetime, a riveting account biography of Disney’s Bob Iger, was Vikram Gawande’s favorite book this year. He looks at Growth Investments at Blume.
“It has good takeaways on people skills, reorganizations, and negotiations.”
Perhaps one of the most popular writers of our time, Morgan Housel’s second book, Same As Ever, ended up as a top-shelfer for Rohit Kaul, who leads Marketing at Blume.
“The book talks about the things that do not change over years, decades and centuries. It has interesting mental models to process our environmental stimuli and how to keep the main thing, the main thing.”
Nikhil Gulati and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer’s The People of the Indus was one of the most-loved books for Alok Mehta, who leads Investor Success at Blume. Why did he choose this? “There aren't too many graphic novels coming out of India, and that too on a subject such as the genesis and growth of the Indus Valley Civilization,” he explains.
He’s not done yet. 1857, which is a translated account of Vishnu Bhatt's travels to North India during the first war of independence, “is a unique, in-person account of that era and the revolt itself,” which made it unputdownable for Alok.
History clearly seemed to rule the roost at Blume, as Mudit Narain, who is a part of the climate tech investment team, suggested Dethroned by John Zubrzycki “to anyone interested in the era of Indian independence, a catalytic and pivotal time in our country's history.” and especially advised economics students to go through Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, which is quite the star on Instagram Stories and Twitter threads, became Nachammai’s book of the year. She is a part of the Consumer Investments team at Blume.
“This warm book about a time-traveling cafe is the perfect winter read and goes great with a cup of hot coffee/ hot chocolate,” she says. She also recommended The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff as “a lovely light read” about rural Indian women with a game plan like no other.
Sajith Pai, Partner at Blume, spent time reading old fiction this year, and his favorite fiction book of 2023 is a tie between Vivek Shanbagh's 'Ghachar Ghochar' and 'Roman Stories' by Jhumpa Lahiri, one of his favorite writers. Sajith says, “Jhumpa Lahiri's book is a collection of stories set in Rome, featuring nameless immigrants and locals, but richly wrought out, each wrestling with unrooting, alienation, and the uncertainties of memory. Broadly similar themes to her earlier fiction but brought afresh in a new geography.”
His favorite non-fiction book is also a tie. He says, “a tie between 'Papyrus', a look at the origins of books and book culture by Irene Vallejo, and Pulak Prasad's 'What I learned about Investing from Darwin' on his rules for public market investing and how it resonates with ecology & biological principles (fascinating for the comparison and glimpse into public market investing).”
Here are some of the other books suggested by Blume team members (clearly, we read a lot).
Ria Shroff Desai: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano and The Woman Who Climbed Trees by Smriti Ravindra.
Joseph Sebastian: Niall Fergusson's (somewhat apologetic) biography of Kissinger and Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari.
Arpit Agarwal: Prisoners of Geography, Why We Sleep, and Story of Your Life.
Dhagash Shah: Subscribed by Tien Tzou and Market Cycles by Howard Marks
Articles/Transcripts
“I’ve far too many podcast transcripts that I’ve consumed, so rather than picking a specific one, I will call out the shows themselves - The 'Dwarkesh Patel Podcast' is very good, Colossus's 'Invest Like The Best' is consistently good (as is 'Acquired') and 'Lenny's Podcast' features some really good guests. I’ve been learning a lot from different episodes of these podcasts.” remarked Sajith Pai, who prefers reading podcast transcripts over listening to podcasts. He says that podcasts have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any business content!
Rohit gave a glowing review of This is Water by David Foster Wallace, which was actually a Commencement Speech at Kenyon College and was later repurposed as a transcript.
“Rarely do I come across write-ups that I can interpret in a new way every time I read them, but this was one of them. The core thesis here is that, like fish in water who don't know that they are surrounded by water, we are becoming oblivious to things happening around us and how we should become more focused (David says that this means becoming well-adjusted). Sadly, David ended his life too soon; otherwise, we would have read many more such gems from him.” he said.
Reports
Tesla Decade by Worm Capital seemed to be Dhagash Shah’s favorite read of the year. Unsurprisingly, he works at the Growth Investment team at Blume. Ankush Bhutra, who works in the finance team, had a good time reviewing the IPEV Valuation Guidelines.
Watch
We all love snuggling in our rajais (Sorry, Mumbaikars) and watching some comfort movies and shows. Here are a few of them:
Movies
Everything Everywhere All At Once, Oppenheimer, and the recent Malayalam movie Kaathal were Joseph Sebastian’s 2023 standouts. He covers the fintech sector at Blume.
While Arpit Agarwal, Partner at Blume Ventures, dived into Minnal Murali, Arrival, and RRR, Ankush recommends watching OMG 2, Pursuit of Happyness, and The Intern as a great way to spend time with your loved ones during the year-end break.
TV Shows
“Succession’s last season was HBO at its best,” quipped Joseph. The writer of this article seems to concur. Dhagash recommended Billions, a distant cousin of Succession, as his show of the year. Of course, no offense intended to the fans of Billions.
King of Stonks, inspired by real-life events of corporate fraud in Germany, was Rohit’s pick as it “brings to bear the undercurrents of human greed in the most visceral way.”
Sajith mentioned that Slow Horses on Apple TV Plus has been his standout English series for the year. Farzi (Vijay Sethupati is sooo good, he says), Guns and Gulaabs, and Class (a remake of the Spanish hit Elite) are his picks for his top series.
The Crown had significant takers, too. “The sixth season covers the death of Diana and its aftermath, and they’ve covered these sensitive topics quite carefully,” says Mudit Narain.
Nachammai says “I will never not recommend this historical drama that offers an inside view into the life and pressures of the Royal Family of England.” She also suggested the ‘brilliant historical drama’ Rocket Boys and the feisty season two of The White Lotus.
Listen
Audio content has been having a bit of a dream run lately, and with good reason. Blumiers shared their favorite podcasts, audiobooks, and music.
Podcasts
To start things off, Ria Shroff Desai, who leads People and Culture at Blume, suggested Friendship IRL, as it was “very helpful for those of us millennials navigating friendships after moving countries/cities/geographies and trying to build communities.”
She also spoke highly of This is Uncomfortable as it was “a guide to discussing the gray areas, having important but uncomfortable discussions and posing questions to yourself.”
Empire, known for its unparalleled depth and subject matter, which is incidentally a history podcast, too, was high up on the charts for Rohit and Joseph.
Joseph added, “The brotopia that is the All-In Podcast is a guilty pleasure and so is its Indian offspring - Nikhil Kamath's WTF Is?”
Fun fact: Blume’s co-founder and partner was a guest on one of the episodes on WTF Is?
Here are some of the other podcast recommendations:
Arpit: Krishnamurthy Foundation podcast
Vikram: Acquired Podcase’s episode on Lockheed Martin
Mudit: Thomas Gladwell's Revisionist History
Nachammai: Acquired Podcast’s episodes on LVMH and Costco. Dissect Podcast, a serialized music podcast that will help you appreciate the music you love in more layers.
Audiobooks
The sole audiobook recommendation was A Promised Land by Barack Obama. “It's a lot easier to listen to than read, especially because he is narrating it.” admitted Joseph.
Music
The woozy genres of dream pop and shoegaze were something that Sajith discovered for the first time this year.
Bloom by Beach House
“Beach House was my most listened to band. Their album, 'Bloom' (yes!) and the song 'On the Sea' is my most listened to. In fact, Beach House was the background music for much of Indus Valley Annual Report work.” he quipped.
Nachammai says, “Considering this is Taylor Swift’s year: Midnights/ 1989 (Taylor’s Version) - Taylor Swift. And since Deep Purple were in India this year - Child in Time - Deep Purple.”
“Flotten by Tingvall Trio has become my new default speaker testing track.” concluded Joseph.