In Full Blume: HR's due fo a raise, Atomicwork and Rocketium funding rounds & our new section!
In Full Blume: HR's due fo a raise, Atomicwork and Rocketium funding rounds & our new section!
Updates from the Blume team and portfolio companies
It’s nice to have you back here. Welcome to In Full Blume, our monthly roundup of updates from our team and our portfolio.
Let’s see what’s in store in this edition:
A new Blume thesis on the future of HRTech.
A recap of Blume Fintech summit.
Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath on the Blume podcast!
And six Blume portfolio companies made it to Forbes Asia’s 100 Companies to Watch list.
We’re Looking at The Future of HRTech
In a post-COVID world, talent attraction and retention have become increasingly competitive across the globe, leading organizations to expand beyond borders. As a result, the HR function has become a driver for growth in businesses. This has led to an explosion of new technology in the HR space, with new sub-divisions emerging as the scope of work grows in complexity and importance.
Today, organizations worldwide recognize the integral role that effective HR operations and HRTech tools can play in achieving strategic objectives. With increasing innovation and interest in the HRTech space, the time is ripe for a thesis on this topic.
Presenting our new drop: Blume’s Radhika Agarwal and Nachammai Savithiri joined forces to author a comprehensive thesis on the future of HRTech.
Divided into five sections, the report dissects the field of HRTech to understand what makes for a strong product in this space, identify opportunity areas, and uncover rewarding insights for HRTech startups building from India for the world.
Read the full report here and share your insights.
Funding Spotlight
Takeoff Time
Atomicwork, the San Francisco and Bengaluru-based B2B SaaS startup, has raised $11Mn in its seed funding round, which was led by Blume Ventures and Matrix Partners. Also participating in the round were Storm Ventures, Neon Fund, and prominent angel investors from Silicon Valley and India. Co-founded in September 2022 by SaaS veterans Vijay Rayapati, Kiran Darisi, and Parsuram Vijayasankar, Atomicwork aims to utilize the funding towards product development, AI engineering, and marketing activities.
On the AI “rocket”ship
Congratulations to Rocketium, the innovative creative automation software startup, on securing $5.3 million in new funding led by Tenacity Ventures, with participation from returning investors Emergent Ventures, 1Crowd, and Blume Ventures.
Rocketium's cutting-edge generative AI technology is breaking new ground, developing models that can be trained for different brands based on their previous creative content, brand guidelines, and performance. The company’s focus on AI now lets users can customize their content creation with Rocketium's generative AI tools by specifying the channel, objective, and tone of their content.
We are thrilled to see Rocketium's continued success and are excited to see what groundbreaking innovations they will bring to the field of creative automation in the future.
Blumiers and Shakers
Six for Six
We are thrilled to announce that our companies have done it again! This year, we have six outstanding companies recognized in the prestigious Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list.
This impressive feat is a testament to the unwavering commitment and sheer brilliance of our founders, who continue to push the boundaries of innovation and redefine success in their respective fields. Forbes has recognized our companies for their groundbreaking work in targeting underserved markets and leveraging new technologies, and we couldn't be more proud.
So without wasting any time, let’s meet our stars:
Hotelogix: Co-founded in 2008 by Aditya Singhi and Prabash Bhatnagar, the startup revolutionized the hospitality industry with its hotel management software, which helps automate hospitality services like housekeeping and checkout besides integrating with IoT devices for a seamless guest experience.
Tookitaki: Founded in 2014 by Abhishek Chatterjee, the regulatory technology startup’s AI-powered platform helps banks and other financial services prove identity and prevent money laundering.
ApnaKlub: Founded in 2019 by Shruti, ApnaKlub empowers mom-and-pop shops across rural India with a wholesale distribution app offering over 1,000 products from 300 brands.
Stellapps Technologies Private Limited: With the aim to digitize India’s dairy supply chain with IoT devices, the startup works with 3 million farmers and also developed MooOn, a wearable “Fitbit for cows” to monitor livestock.
IDfy: Founded by Ashok Hariharan in 2011, the Mumbai-based startup helps companies conduct background checks with their identity verification software. They do over 60 million verifications every month, and their clients include Amazon, Uber, and Zomato.
Kaleidofin: Providing digital wealth solutions to India’s underbanked and unbanked population, the fintech startup allows users to apply for online bank accounts, debit cards and credit health checks, and a peer-to-peer payments app called KaleidoPay.
New Blume Podcast Episode
On the third shiny episode of the Blume Podcast, Karthik Reddy sat down with Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO of Zerodha, to talk about building and scaling an online brokerage firm without any external capital. In this no-holds-barred conversation, Nithin touched upon the importance of building trust and word of mouth for a financial product and why he remains proud of Zerodha’s self-sustainability. Lots to take away from here, including the secrets to building a sustainable business and how to ride the compounding flywheel. Listen to the full podcast here and read the transcript here.
Recapping Blume Fintech Event: 2023 Edition
On August 31, we hosted the Blume Fintech Summit, a closed-door conference that brought together thought leaders, industry pioneers, ecosystem stakeholders, and founders of some of India's most exciting fintech companies.
The event featured panel discussions and keynote addresses from pioneers of the insurance, banking, and fintech sectors. Highlights included Karthik Reddy's conversation with Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT Foundation, on the evolution of India's Digital Public Infrastructure, as well as discussions on the differences between new-age fintech and conventional BFSI companies and the future of fintech in India.
Blume's Ashish Fafadia led a conversation with Slice's Rajan Bajaj and Divyesh Dalal from DBS Bank on the collaboration and competition among fintechs and banks. Additionally, we heard from Blume founders Ashok Hariharan of IDfy and Ranjith Mukundan of Stellapps Technologies Private Limited, as well as Peeyush Dalmia from McKinsey & Company.
Women in Leadership
At the recently concluded Economic Times Women Leadership Awards 2023, Blume’s Karthik Reddy, who was a part of the jury, reflected on the venture capital industry lagging behind traditional businesses when it comes to backing women entrepreneurs and closing the gap of gender representation, speaking at length about the industry biases that prove challenging for women founders. Watch the entire conversation here.
Pitch Perfect
Blume’s
Pai joined Padmaja Ruparel, co-founder of IAN and Sr. Managing Partner of IAN Alpha Fund, on #StartupSchoolbyGoogle to share insights on the secret to perfecting a compelling elevator pitch.The Reality Behind the Startup Glamour
Don’t miss STAGE’s Vinay Singhal busting some myths about the long, arduous journey of building a startup on The Neon Show podcast. The show’s host, Siddhartha Ahluwalia, dubbed Vinay as “one of the most resilient founders” he ever met. In the episode, Vinay offers a peek at the rugged tenacity of small-town entrepreneurs and the extreme resilience that startup founders need to channel in order to pick themselves up after failures. As Vinay so eloquently put it: “The age of the storm will always be shorter than yours, so stand tall!” Listen to the entire conversation here.
In Your “Community” Corner
This edition of In Full Blume has packed in more for you. 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. This section will showcase the sessions we conduct and the ideas that emerge when great minds come together.
Manoj Agarwal’s Tips to Scale Companies
In our latest video, DevRev’s co-founder Manoj Agarwal breaks down the factions and sub-factions that a founder must consider while building a company, as well as accounting for complexity while scaling. He also answered key questions like the ideal division of responsibilities and the right way to manage organizational history. Whether you're a new founder or a veteran, this video offers an essential guide for mastering the art of scaling. Listen to Manoj’s firsthand insights here.