Arkam Ventures

For nearly thirty years, RRE Ventures has been a leading venture capital firm in New York with nearly $2.5B under management and +400 portfolio companies. With over 25 IPOs and dozens of trade sales through the years, there is a lot going on at any given time. Recent well-known companies include Datadog, Venmo, Braintree, DCG, Noom, Kindbody, Spring Health, Olo, and BuzzFeed, among many other category-defining businesses. We pride ourselves not only on investing in great entrepreneurs and delivering stellar returns to our LPs but also on being supportive partners to our portfolio companies and active members of the venture community.

WAV invests in early-stage companies developing solutions across a broad set of sectors including vertical SaaS, infrastructure, security, payments, embedded fintech, digital health, consumer marketplaces, typically with tech-enabled applications and solutions.

We founded Mosaic as optimists who see technology as a force for good, and believe that the startup ecosystem will positively impact society. Our passion is to partner early with inspiring, ambitious tech founders: renegades who reimagine the world and shape it their way. We also believe in Europe. Breakthrough businesses are starting and scaling here with increasing frequency, powered by unparalleled engineering talent across the region. Our Promise to Founders We are excited to join your journey as an ally. We recognize that venture capital would not exist without entrepreneurs like you, who put everything on the line. We are thrilled when you choose to work with us, and honored to support your dream coming to fruition. As your partner, you can expect the following:‍ Trust: We have faith in you, and commit to supporting the business for the entire journey with intellectual honesty and unbiased counsel. Long term perspective: Success is not built overnight; we are in it for the long haul. Venture capital is a business that rewards patience on all levels.‍ Boutique service:We are a small, highly collaborative team who all pitch in to help across the portfolio. We typically make just 5-10 new investments per year, and every relationship matters. Growth mindset:We are humble, curious, open and straightforward -- having learned from both mistakes and successes. As independent thinkers we often take a different view from the herd. We don’t claim to know everything, and our approach is inquisitive rather than prescriptive. Low friction:We appreciate the value of your time and commit to simple, transparent business and quick turnarounds. Thesis-driven Since the 1990s, we’ve enjoyed a privileged ringside seat alongside hundreds of tech startups in many industries and geographies. Some have been successful, a number super-successful and inevitably, others didn’t work out. From these experiences, we have developed a thesis-driven approach to investing, where we try to imagine how a given market will unfold in the next 5-10 years, and then look for certain horizontal industry and business characteristics. Momentum is nice but we don’t need to see “traction” or baked KPIs to build conviction. There are general characteristics of businesses we like to invest in: Big, addressable markets and/or uncharted whitespace Distinctive product: love, trust, early customer evangelists Business model innovation, i.e. disrupting the value chain A large potential future moat, beyond pure scale and scope. From network effects, technical leadership, or other sources. This helps us derive the consequent gross margins and unit economics Broad customer (and supplier) distribution, i.e. no concentration immediately adjacent in value chain Long tail of independent adopters. Bonus for bottom-up word-of-mouth We invest in ‘whale-hunting’ too, but typically prefer to invest when there is a handful of customers (or highly relevant sector experience amongst the founders) Capital efficiency. After our first cheque, we are aligned with founders/on their side of the table, so funding pays for people, not inventory/asset Thematic Focus We look to back businesses catalyzed by emerging technology that may create a new market from nothing, or else materially disrupt the status quo. The themes we focus on evolve, as successive waves emerge, grow in force, and eventually ebb away. Historically, this led us to operate and invest in a wide range of web and mobile applications including search, social, and digital media. We are comfortable in both B2C and B2B businesses and particularly drawn to marketplace and SaaS/subscription business models. Our track record includes investing in global category leaders such as Alibaba, Etsy, Squarespace and Transferwise. In our current fund, the themes we are focused on include: Machine Intelligence Future of Money Edge Applications Work OS Open Bazaars Human Empowerment We continue to reflect on the impact of the pandemic. We will feel its reverberations not just in public health, but also in almost every aspect of the wider economy, as it impacts jobs and industries in ways that are still unfolding. We believe it also will become an accelerator for many tech trends and sectors, including health, education, and may have a dramatic impact on retail and real estate. In particular, as new work behaviours emerge and opportunities arise, we are deeply curious to understand what forms of value will be created. Our Story Mosaic was founded by Simon and Toby who first met in the U.S. in 1995 at graduate school. We were lucky enough to work in leading Silicon Valley startups at the dawn of the Internet and since then, have collectively amassed over 50 years working in tech, split equally between operating and investing, across the US and Europe (and approaching half of that time working together!) We set out for Mosaic to bring a focused proposition to early stage investing in Europe, providing unique perspective, culture, and founder experience. In the six years since launch, and now we are proud to have created a firm with a strong operating philosophy and values based in trust, intellectual honesty, and integrity, and an amazing group of talented individuals to deliver on our promise to founders.

G Squared is a global venture capital fund manager that deploys a differentiated investment strategy to deliver access and exposure to some of the world’s most exciting growth-stage technology companies. We serve as a transitional capital provider to our portfolio companies and leverage structural inefficiency in an endeavor to methodically construct portfolios that offer elite access to value creation in private markets. Founded in 2011, G Squared is aligned to a fundamental shift: venture-backed companies are staying private longer and longer. As a result, those companies need both primary capital to fund their continuing growth and transitional capital to provide liquidity to early investors, current and former employees, and other shareholders. Positioned at the crux of this liquidity access challenge, G Squared invests in primaries and secondaries, and leads and structures employee tenders – partnering with portfolio companies throughout their lifecycles using a fundamentally different approach to traditional VC firms. We invest in companies that are tackling big problems, shaking up industries, and challenging the status quo. G Squared funds have invested in over 150 companies, including household names like Airbnb, Bombas, Bolt, Coursera, Instacart, Lyft, Spotify, Toast, and Turo, as well as companies which we believe to be the next generation of disruptors including airSlate, Anthropic, Brex, Fanatics, Lambda, Monzo, PandaDoc, Tipalti, and Wiz. G Squared is headquartered in Chicago and has offices in San Francisco, Zurich, and Miami.

We understand the importance of digital solutions and how they enable business to move forward. Our portfolio companies are pioneering the kinds of advances that transform the ways businesses and consumers interact. Why partner with us?Tap into our loyal network of global customers and partners to help you grow and scale your business. 70% of total investments have partnerships with American Express business units. Work closely with our dedicated team of experts to develop innovative strategies and execute pilots.

Bold. Brave. Brilliant. Brazen. The founders we back are all this, and more. They are unreasonable, they are crazy ambitious, obsessed with solving hard, gnarly problems. Problems whose solutions transform lives and impact society. And, it takes a revolutionary founder, and a transformational company to solve these problems, and effect change. We back these transformational companies, and their revolutionary founders early, and remain lifelong partners. How does Blume evaluate early stage startups? In our framework, we look at three criteria to evaluate startups – size of market or opportunity, team quality and finally, investability or probability of the next round of capital. Our approximate weightage for Opportunity : Team : Investability is 40 : 40 : 20. Let us double click on these three criteria. Market size or opportunity: Pick too small a market and even the best team can’t build a large scalable business. The best founders know how to reshape a market opportunity and build solutions to fit the largest of the market opportunities. That said, one has to begin with the aggregate opportunity being very large. For example, are Ola and Uber a ride hailing app or a large scale urban transportation business? The market size expands 5-10x when the latter is applied. At Blume, we try to find a portfolio balance between founders who can chase a large market opportunity domestically or build a tech-led differentiated product for global markets (which increase Founding teams: These are the most important variables for us or even most VCs at our stage. In every decision, once the other two factors are seen as a go, the clincher element in a yes/no decision boils down to the founding team – their expertise in solving for this space, as well as the integrity, mission, passion and persistence that one can gauge at this early stage of business. Investability or probability of next rounds of capital: The reality of how the later stage funding market is shaped to take risky bets in the ecosystem is important to consider while funding, especially in young and concentrated ecosystems like India, and that’s why we attribute 20% weightage to this element in India. We force ourselves to evaluate how much capital may be required to build to exitable scale and how challenging it is to raise that capital. As the funding ecosystem matures, we may shrink weightage of this in the future. Great founders overcome all of this but if we can select such that we have better odds at the starting point, why not? The above framework helps us shortlist but finally, it is a (increasingly improving) trained gut call that ends up building out the portfolio. What is Blume's investment criteria? Blume prefers ventures that have achieved some degree of customer validation, where the product is already launched in market and we are getting customer signups and feedback. We do make exceptions on the above for seasoned operators and second-time founders, but typically with first-time founders, we do not do idea stage or pre-MVP investments. If you are a B2B startup or an ecommerce / consumer transaction play, an annualised revenue rate (or revenues) of $375k (₹3cr) and above is a good milestone to reach out to us. If you are a marketplace startup, then reach out to us when you are nearing or have crossed a monthly GMV of ₹50 lacs a month. If you are a consumer app that isn't monetising yet, then ping us when you near or cross MAUs of 25k / DAUs of 5k. The above are broad guidelines, and not hard rules. We do make exceptions. If in doubt, reach out! How much does Blume invest? We are a seed / pre-Series A fund. While we are fairly flexible on the investment quantum, typically we have seen our investments range across from $1.5 to $3m (₹12 to 24 crs). We do optimise however for a stake of anywhere from 12 to 20%. These stake requirements reflect the depth and extent of support we provide to the startup – from fundraising and hiring to business development etc. We also anticipate the rounds of dilution that every successful startup will undergo, and the desired holding that we need to hold at the point of exit. Does Blume invest in international startups? We invest in startups that are Indian at heart or origin, but are willing to conquer the world market if needed to build scale. About a third of our portfolio is of this nature – taking Indian engineering skills to build products for global markets. Unfortunately, We DO NOT invest in startups that are international and have NO strong Indian connection / founders. We are also strong believers that to invest as a ‘generalist tech VC’ as we are, we need to be more and more focussed on a particular geography. We need to see as much of the available annual pipeline to know that we’ve truly picked 10 great founders / startups to invest in. We have no such advantage when we are looking outside the country; which is why we stay away from the temptation of looking at pipeline from international markets. What kind of sectors does Blume invest in? With our new Fund, our fourth since inception, we are looking to invest about 60-65% of the new fund in domestic-heavy sectors such as healthcare, financial services, commerce and brands, jobs and education, and digital media and gaming. The other 35-40% of the fund will focus on SaaS, and DeepTech (including CleanTech, manufacturing, blockchain) companies, typically in B2B, that can innovate and engineer with local talent pools, and yet scale globally. Does Blume have a preference between B2B and B2C? We like both. India is a consumer market that is poised to explode, as people move to the digital economy to spend an increasingly larger share of their wallet’s purchasing power. That makes it attractive to build a strong consumer proposition in India. And thus our B2C portfolio. We are also now very good at taking our science and engineering skills in software and other areas, and building commercial applications at scale, often for the global market. These constitute the majority of B2B ideas in our portfolio and we like this space a lot. Where do I send my pitch? How do I reach out to Blume? We get anywhere between 4,000 to 5,000 ideas pitched to us annually, across the team, across all formats. This includes referrals, cold mails, DMs on social channels etc. We have given up counting :) We invest in about 10-12 of these per year. As Blume has grown, we've looked at the empirical data and discovered that the vast majority of our investments were referrals from our contacts in the ecosystem. You can count the exceptions to this rule with one hand in every cycle, and still have a few fingers to spare! These referrals come from our own founders we have backed, other founders who know that we will do right by their angel investments and our extensive set of friends, investors and well wishers in the ecosystem. The exceptions, while not impossible, are indeed rare. Ceteris paribus (all things considered), you are better off reaching us through a trusted common friend. In a highly networked startup ecosystem, it is not that hard to reach us through the strongest possible mutual connection. But if that is not possible, do reach out to us cold. Your email will certainly be read, even if it is not always responded to. We have ensured that our internal systems catch every pitch - cold or warm or hot. When writing in cold, a considered and researched mail (much like a quality college application) is the only way to attempt such a reach out. Please check out the team page, find the best person in the Investment team who has invested in and / or covers the sector you're building in. Do check out their social profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter) to access their contact info. Our email ids are not hard to guess as well! Preferably write to one person at a time, in the firm. The above are good principles for you irrespective of which firm you approach / pitch to. Nothing works better than a warm, referred introduction - it always gets the rightful attention. Please note that we have done away with a pitch form, or a common email id. From our experience, we found that the volume of inbound traffic was indeed high, but not always relevant, and thus almost impossible to assign a resource to just monitor these inbound gates.