Blisce

Born in San Francisco and Paris, Partech is one of the most active tech investors in the world, bringing together capital, operational experience, and strategic support for entrepreneurs at seed, venture and growth stages. The current portfolio includes 200+ companies in 38 countries, of which 14 are valued at more than $1B: Alan, Bolt, Cazoo, Jellysmack, Made.com, ManoMano, Merama, People.ai, Rohlik, Sorare, Toss, Wave, WorldRemit, Xendit.

We invest in unstoppable founders who have the ability to understand today the problems of tomorrow, defining the future of consumption with a clear mission: upgrading our lives. We admire brands that encourage responsible innovation, diversity, transparency and positive change. We guide founders by providing top operational and strategic support, working side by side in true partnership. Our community and expert network is endless, and we make sure you get what you need. We understand the power harnessed by the brands that modern consumers love: a compelling mix of seamless products & experiences, engaging content and a true sense of belonging, all enabled by data and technology. We specialise in the intersection of Community, Branding, Innovation and Technology. And we do this by combining art, science and intuition, secretly noticing details that no one else sees, operating with purpose and empathy, with the aim to build a more human digital-lifestyle future. We back globally ambitious founders operating across Europe, UK and the US; helping accelerate their growth via our unique access to major markets, including Asia. We promote investments leading/co-leading Series A (+/-) and co-investing in later-stage rounds.

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.

We were founded on the belief that technology would transform every industry in the world - and that brilliant, ambitious founders would sit at the heart of this change. We're squarely focused on helping these founders succeed. How we helpInvestment: First and foremost, we invest in people, and focus on building relationships with empathy and alignment. We partner with remarkable founders and work to ensure they've got the strategic insights and help they need across multiple rounds. Talent: Our founders tell us that scaling teams is the most challenging part of leading high-growth companies. We have a dedicated team that can help diagnose, design and build the foundations of each startup's talent engine, tailored each time. Community: You're not alone in your founder journey. Building a business is made easier with friends and well-connected allies - a resource we have plenty of. Join a peer group who will be kind, honest and interested in your journey. Frequently asked questions Whether you're curious about our terms or timeframes, below is a good overview of how we do things. What's the 101 on Square Peg? Square Peg is a global investment firm on a mission to empower exceptional founders. With investing teams in Sydney, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and Singapore, Square Peg invests in emerging technology companies across the internet economy. Square Peg today manages US$3 billion in assets across its venture capital, opportunities and global listed equities funds and in addition has delivered material realised returns of US$0.6 billion. Since 2012 we have invested in over 50 companies including Fiverr, Canva, Rokt, FinAccel, Tomorrow and Airwallex. Through our venture, opportunities and listed equity funds, we invest in tech companies from the pre-seed stage to the post-IPO stage. What stage do you invest in? Globally, our sweet spot for a new investment is Seed-Series A. We have always been an early-stage investor, and were seed investors in companies such as Canva, Zeller and Tomorrow. If you’re wondering if you’re ‘too early’ for Square Peg, the answer is you’re not - as an example, we met and invested in Ben and Dom from Zeller just weeks after they founded the company. What's the investment process? The investment process is designed to help us understand your business, learn about your vision and give you the time to get to know us. If we have a long-standing relationship or you’re at the very early stages, it can take just a few meetings to reach an investment decision. If you’re raising a large round and we haven’t met before, it can take longer. While we like to make swift investment decisions, we encourage founders to take their time getting to know investors - it’s a decade-long decision, so a few additional weeks of diligence is likely well-spent. This is how you’ll experience an investment process with us: We’re often introduced to founders via email. This email hopefully includes a compelling deck that explores their idea. When reviewing the materials the founder sent, we look for a few things: a unique insight about an important problem in a big market, a bright vision, and a world-class team with the ambition to go after it. At this stage, we’ll determine whether the business fits our investment philosophy and ensure it’s not directly competitive with any of our existing investments. The first meeting will be 45 minutes to an hour and may happen online or in person. We encourage the founder to do most of the talking and hope we spend the time exploring the insights of their team and specifics of their business. We may meet a few more times to explore any remaining concepts and give the founder plenty of time to ask questions about how we partner with founders and ensure they’re comfortable. You may meet other members of the investment team at this stage. To receive a term-sheet, you’ll meet the global investment team for a one-hour conversation. The team will have already read a detailed briefing note on your business and be prepared with questions they hope you’ll answer. Though high-stakes, this meeting is friendly and conversational. Once the meeting ends, the investment team will vote whether to approve the investment - this means two ‘yes’ votes from the partnership. The Investor you’ve worked closely with will be in touch that evening to discuss next steps. In anonymous feedback from our founders, we’ve been told we run a quick, transparent and collaborative investment process. Founders have often remarked that the investment process helped them to deepen their understanding of their business. For all founders who meet the team, we aim to ensure this is your experience, too. Do you invest globally? We invest in companies founded in Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia and Israel. Most of our portfolio companies expand from the regions in which they were founded to grow in markets overseas. Examples from the portfolio which have taken this journey include Canva, Fiverr, Airwallex and Rokt. Our funds are structured so that we have complete flexibility to invest between these regions. What do you invest in? First and foremost, we invest in people. We believe that founders with a compelling vision who surround themselves with talented and mission-driven people can change the world. We’ve seen founders such as Mel from Canva, Micha from Fiverr and Jack from Airwallex build extraordinary companies, and we could never have predicted that design, digital services or borderless finance would be some of the most important problems to solve this decade. We founded Square Peg on the belief that technology would transform every industry in the world - and that we can’t predict the future of creativity, industry or ingenuity. So, we’re comfortable being a generalist technology investor, with founders at the centre of our universe. Historically, we have invested heavily into fintech, consumer internet, SaaS, edtech and healthtech, with significant and notable exceptions outside of these themes. Take a look at our portfolio to learn more about the kinds of companies we invest in. How much do you invest in a new company? The smallest first cheque we’ve written was USD$100k, and our largest first cheque was USD$35m. Usually, most first-cheques are $5-$10m, but we’re happy and able to go smaller or bigger. Do you have strict ownership requirements? As a general rule, somewhere between 10-20% ownership is the most common outcome of a venture investment partnership. In practice, we approach all fundraises with a long-term mindset, which means we’re willing and able to lead and participate in rounds where the fundraising dynamics are different to this standard. What’s important to us is ensuring that the founders and our team are deeply aligned and that the company is well-positioned to go after the mission that drives their team. One of our core values is anchor to optimism - optimism that the company and founders will be successful - which means we are far more focused on long-term outcomes and options than short-term percentage holdings. Who are your Limited Partners? Our investors, or 'LPs' as we call them, are a diverse group of superannuation funds, high-net-worth individuals, team members and family offices. We’re grateful to include world-leading industry pension funds such as HostPlus and AustralianSuper as long-term investors. We are fortunate to have investors whose approach to venture capital investing is aligned with our own: ambitious, committed and long-term. How do I approach the team about an investment? Most founders who we’ve invested in connected with us via someone in our network: our portfolio founders, angel investors and VCs we've co-invested with, our LPs, and community leaders in each ecosystem. On occasion, we have also invested in founders who emailed us cold (Mike from ZeroCo, we’re looking at you).

We started with the ambition to build the firm where we would want to go work every day. Smash Capital began as our startup. Our culture is extremely entrepreneurial. While our ambition is to build a generational firm and to grow our organization considerably, today we are enjoying the advantages inherent in a small team. We take advantage of our speed, real-time communication and flat organizational structure every day. We are hyper aware of the critical contribution of every member of our core team, and we encourage everyone here to think like an owner. Our founding team includes builders and creators who didn’t love the venture capital “product” we were offered as founders. We approach founders with enormous respect and a bit of awe at the enormity of what they attempt to do - the overwhelming personal stakes, sacrifice, belief and commitment they demonstrate in their life’s work. When most choose touch football, founders choose tackle. We work very hard; the founders we work with work harder. We believe in the power of creative constraints. When brainstorming a list of potential names for the firm, we limited ourselves to one syllable, spelled like it sounds, so a then 7-year-old could say where their parent worked. The inspiration for the name Smash came from the sound of a collision in a comic book: BOOM SMASH POW. We value, respect, and partner daily with the biggest and best-known competitors in our industry. They and we know we are a little different. We know that our most important core competency every day is finding and winning great deals. But we know that our lasting mark is in helping great people and great companies succeed over time. That’s how our investors grade our performance and how we grade ourselves.

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.