Wix Ventures

Founded in 2007, Ridge Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund investing in experienced founders redefining how the world interacts with software. We back companies delivering advanced technologies, new distribution models and incredible user experiences to market. Our approach - fast, flexible and founder-focused - creates the right relationship from the word “go” helping companies become market leaders quickly. Alignment matters. Here’s the proof: Krux, MindMeld, Sapho, Minted, Braze, ThirdLove, Fastly, for starters. Ridge Ventures was formerly IDG Ventures USA. Our PrioritiesPeople Matter: We refer to teams we back as “The Ridge Familia” for good reason. We have deep respect for the people who call themselves founders. No matter how innovative the technology or massive the TAM, we prioritize character. We think founders should prioritize character as well. Patience, transparency, and follow-through matter; so does remembering it’s about partnership, not control. At Ridge, no investment terms are sacred because we know that it’s the best founders that deliver long-term success, not the best deal terms. Shared Passion: We are passionate about the decades of enterprise innovation and growth that lie ahead. We are equally passionate about helping experienced founders build massive enterprise software companies. As a focused fund, each investment we make matters. We only back companies where our excitement equals (or at least comes very close) the founder’s. This alignment helps drive quick investment decisions and is a key predictor of long term collaboration. Company building is hard work. Shared passion makes it possible. Revenue-Focused: Nailing product market fit and scaling revenue systems are all that matters. Full stop. We have helped build hundreds of companies from seed to billions in outcomes, forging deep buyer relationships along the way. These form the basis of our 100+ company-strong Ridge Revenue Network, with CXO’s from all corners of the Fortune 500. We thoughtfully connect founders to customers to crystallize market fit and drive early revenue. We’ve even been known to write customer intro commitments into our term sheets. Building Revenues Over Hype We are fanatical about substance over hype and backing experienced entrepreneurs building revenue-first enterprise software companies. As late Seed and early Series A experts, typically writing checks in the $2-7M range, we believe in flexible terms that align our incentives, and a transparent process to reduce your fundraising distraction. We approach our investments with the long view at the forefront, knowing well that company building is anything but a straight line. We back experienced entrepreneurs who trust their own vision and voice, and want venture support rooted in mutual trust that serves them as people-first, founders second.

Vertex Ventures is a venture capital firm who makes high-conviction Seed/Series A investments in SaaS and infrastructure software startups. We invest in only a few new companies each year, allowing us to concentrate our time and capital on a small portfolio. Our initial check sizes range from $500K to $10M, and we continue to support companies as they scale. Who we back: Having been founders and operators ourselves, we are inspired by practitioners - entrepreneurs with deep technical or market experience across software infrastructure, SaaS, data, developer tools, security, and fintech. How we help: We have the experience, resources, focus, and network for the early-stage journey. Even though one or two of us might be your closest confidantes, the benefit of our partnership is that we help you build your company and improve your odds of success -- be it in the form of potential hires, customers, or business partners. Why Vertex Ventures? Personalized Talent Programs The success of any company depends exclusively on having the right people. We help bring in great talent - from your first Account Executive to a Chief Revenue Officer - and we help implement strategies to retain great talent by building a healthy and inclusive culture. Our industry-wide best practices are tailored based on a founder's individual needs and a company's ethos, thus establishing a strong foundation as you grow. Support beyond capital through our platform Vertex Ventures is an upstart venture capital team in a world filled with staid, stalwart funds. Phone calls, dinners, webinars, you name it. We give you the support, network, and resources so you can focus on building your company, your idea, and your team. From hiring your first account executive to helping win customers, we’re partners along your entire journey. No BS transparency Our founders appreciate our no BS approach to coaching and counseling. Whether we’re two days into our partnership or two years, we’ll tell you what we think. We tell you why we’re excited, where there’s risk, where there’s potential, and where we need to pivot. Ultimately, we’re not telling you what to do. It’s up to you to take the driver's seat, make those decisions, and grow from a technologist to a visionary leader.

As a Zone for Great Minds, from our Limited Partners, Management Team, our Partners, to the startup founders we invest, ThinkZone gathers Great Entrepreneurs who have Great Visions, to create Great Values for the society, and the capability to make their visions come true. Non-cash Investments We provide startups with non-cash investments via our ThinkZone Accelerator, the accelerator program with the largest scale of support value in Vietnam. 3-month mentoring & coaching Fundraising support Partnership connection with big corporates $300,000+ support packages value in terms of sales & marketing, cloud services Cash Investment ThinkZone Ventures focuses on Seed to Series A tech startups from diverse verticals, with investments size up to $3,000,000. We also invest in accelerator-stage startups via ThinkZone Accelerator, with investment size ranging from $50,000 to $100,000.

We invest across consumer and enterprise and have partnered with thousands of inspiring entrepreneurs over the past two decades. We have a track record of backing great entrepreneurs at the earliest stages. Since 1999, Redpoint Ventures has partnered with visionary founders to create new markets and redefine existing ones. The firm invests in startups across the seed, early and growth phases. Redpoint has backed over 465 companies with 140 IPOs and M+As, including 2U, HomeAway, Heroku, Netflix, PureStorage, Twilio and Zendesk, and incubated market disruptors like Android. In total, the firm manages $4 billion across multiple funds. Redpoint is based in Menlo Park and has offices in San Francisco, Beijing and Shanghai.

Differential invests in solutions that will transform the way businesses operate and succeed in tomorrow’s markets. AI-Powered Business As the world of software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues to evolve, we will see the emergence of a new class of solutions driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. These cutting-edge models will be tailored to address the unique challenges and needs of both individual users and entire industries, helping to alleviate pain points and drive innovation. Advancing the ML Tech Stack While Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) is still in its infancy, organizations seeking to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning on a large scale will need specialized tools and solutions to streamline their workflows and keep costs under control. Evolution of Engineering and Infrastructure As coding and computing processes become increasingly complex, distributed, and intensive, new technology will emerge to better manage the many challenges that arise in these new environments and keep projects running smoothly. Responsible Data Management and Information Analysis The astronomic increase in data and availability of raw, unfiltered information available on the internet has created a social, regulatory, ethics, and security crisis. As regulatory pressure and complexity continue to mount, enterprises will be required to take a more proactive role in protecting their customers' and users' data, ensuring that it is handled ethically and securely.

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.