Early-stage VC Blume Ventures elevates CFO Ashish Fafadia to partner

Blume Ventures, an early-stage venture capital (VC) entity, has elevated Ashish Fafadia, a longtime leadership team member, to the position of partner.   

Blume invests in start-ups from seed fund to Series-A stages. It is currently in the midst of raising an $80-million (Rs 5.9 billion) third fund. 

Last month, Blume had also inducted Sajith Pai as director of research and analysis in Delhi. Further, it will establish a full-time office and team in Bengaluru, where a sizable portion of its current portfolio is based, by early 2019.  

Fafadia was formally chief financial officer and also had a key role in growth investments. In his new role, he will oversee the overall finance function, including risk management, support fundraising and help the investment team on the portfolio that graduates to growth stage, as well as all companies that are headed to exits for Blume.

A key member of Blume since 2012, he had led structuring of early-to-growth stage investments, alongside Karthik Reddy. Further, he had oversight for all transactional complexity, including notable exits like Zipdial by Twitter, TaxiforSure by Ola, Promptec by Havells, E2E's partial exit on NSE Emerge and Mettl by Mercer. 

In 2013, he led the establishment of Blume's platform and support services arm, Constellation Blu. This was a 40-member team providing a wide range of advisory services, such as transaction support, regulations & compliance support, and, since 2016, talent management for portfolio companies.   

"Ashish has been instrumental in Blume's efforts to become one of the first home-grown venture firms to execute a platform-driven approach," said Sanjay Nath, co-founder and managing partner.

At present, Fafadia represents Blume on the boards of Purplle, NowFloats, Slicepay and Turtlemint and oversees another half a dozen companies. 

"One of the key motivators that had attracted me to Blume was the founders' desire to rethink the VC space. This helped us execute a platform approach to help our diverse and growing base. My immediate areas of focus will include working on Fund-I exits and taking Fund-II portfolio companies to the next level," he said.

As for Pai, he will also lead Blume's investments in media & entertainment, parts of e-commerce and education & skilling. He was earlier with BCCL (Times Group), where he served as the associate vice-president.