Blume Ventures to Invest in Pre Series A Kind of Rounds This year
Arpit Agarwal serves as a Principal at Blume Ventures. Blume is an angel and seed venture fund that backs startups with both funding as well as active mentoring and support. Arpit is a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Pragyan, academic ventures and headstart network foundation. He is an Alumnus of IIT B.
At BW Disrupt Dialogue Series event, Sujata Sangwan, Senior Correspondent, BW Businessworld interacts with Arpit Agarwal and asked Blume Ventures' future plans.
Excerpts from the interview:
What are the new investing trends for startup eco system?
I think what is happening in startup eco system is interesting. A lot of startups are being created for things which real India needs. There was a startup I met recently which combines multiple mobile networks into a single Wi-Fi and thereby, it allows villages in India, across the world, to be on a connectivity map. While there was not much connectivity on whatever exists is patchy. So, we are very happy to see that so much innovation is happening for the real problems in India.
Another startup that I recently saw, which transfers ECG to the clouds. Infect we have invested in the company, it is called “Tricog”. It also allows many more people to take ECG by making analysis available to hundreds and thousands of people every day.
In how many companies are you going to invest this year and in which sector? What will be the investment’s range?
Blume Ventures has been one of the most active investors. We have typically been doing more than 20 investments over our 6 years of existence. Probably, we will continue the similar pace this year as well.
What we clearly see is that there is an opportunity to invest into pre series A kind of rounds, where the startups are requiring about one million dollars of round. We will participate about half of it as much.
What qualities are you looking for in a startup team before making investment?
One of the very important thing is to know that every start up team should know that why they starting up. We are very often seen people starting up for no special reason. But just that they want to earn money or it is cool. I think that is a very wrong reason for starting up. It is very important for a start up to come up with a right reason, also it is important that the team is more balanced and having two techies who don’t understand much business or having two business with people who don’t have technology ability is probably not the right mix for a startup.
