Sopra Steria Ventures

When OMERS Ventures invests in you, you join a connected community of ambitious entrepreneurs around the world. You also become part of the broader OMERS family, a ready-made network dedicated to fueling your success. A startup superhighway: A shortcut to meaningful connections to drive your growth. A connected community: Assets like Hudson Yards, the Royal Exchange in London, Premise Health, Lifelabs, London City Airport, Bruce Power and the Port of Melbourne are all part of the OMERS family. Investment with a purpose: Our investments generate returns that pay the pensions of municipal workers including firefighters, paramedics and librarians. Our beliefsWe stay curious: The smartest people know they have a lot to learn. We ask questions constantly, so we’ll have the answers when our companies need them. We do our homework: We learn all we can before we sit down at the table. When we call you, we’re serious about your industry and company potential. We're always happy to hear from you: Whether it's good news or bad, we're here to listen and lend a hand. We were founded in Canada, so you can count on us to be nice no matter what. We’re networking engineers: We connect the dots between our network of people, assets and capital and our portfolio companies, building pathways between our partners. Family benefitsGrowth-based networking: We use our globally connected network of OMERS-owned properties, partners and scale infrastructure to help our companies grow faster. Global Scale: Our international structure means we might know the right people at the right places, around the world. OMERS offers entry into a global network of service area experts and potential partners. Tap into our powerhouse of procurement services, security expertise and property infrastructure. Long-term stability: We invest to win, and we’re prepared to play the long game. Our unique funding structure means we’re not bound by traditional fund cycles or pressure from partners. Our end goal is your success.

Technology exists today that can solve many of society’s greatest problems, but these technologies are often trapped in political stasis. The bigger the problem, the greater the value in solving it. Trust Ventures exists to find these solutions. Our ApproachFIND: We look for startups taking on society’s greatest challenges. We are building a portfolio that will bring progress to a range of industries held back by public policy barriers. FUND: We invest like a venture capital fund, but think like advisors. We don’t seek compensation for the strategic guidance we offer our portfolio companies - we succeed when they succeed. ASSIST: From building relationships to developing strategies to proactively head off regulatory challenges and advocate for change, we offer guidance to startups to help them level the playing field with larger incumbent companies.

adesso ventures invests via venture capital and tech for equity. Our portfolio start-ups have access to rare top developers and IT-experts from the very start. Thus, we ensure an early market entry as well as high software quality and scalability. Furthermore, we support recruiting and training software development teams of our start-ups to ensure a smooth transition of knowledge and competencies. ACCESS TO adesso INDUSTRIES adesso ventures introduces portfolio start-ups to adesso customers in their respective industries. Thus, start-ups are getting valuable market feedback to reach early product-market-fit and to expand their customer base.

We are focused on advancing Celestica's global strategy in key end markets and connecting portfolio companies to our services including new product introduction, design and advanced engineering support, as well as our global supply chain and manufacturing expertise. We focus on investing in Seed to Series C companies aligned with Celestica's core markets as well as other emerging markets with complex electronics.

Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV) is the first fund by Verod-Kepple Africa Partners, a joint venture between Verod Capital Management Limited and Kepple Africa Ventures. Launched in 2021, VKAV is a US$60 million pan-African venture fund investing in scalable, tech-enabled, post-revenue businesses bringing about transformative change by addressing difficult challenges across various industries on the continent. Our portfolio companies currently consist of Moove, NowPay, Koko Networks, Ceviant, Chari, Shuttlers, Nawy, Julaya, Chefaa, Cloudline, mTek, Zone, Tagaddod, WorkPay and Autochek. We are supported by a diverse group of prominent global institutional investors and family offices with extensive experience in investing in emerging markets.

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.