Blume Ventures India Trust V

Ashish Fafadia leads the Fintech and Growth portfolios at Blume Ventures, supporting the growth and success of notable portfolio companies such as Slice, Purplle, Turtlemint, Jai Kisan, and Stellapps. He also spearheads fundraising initiatives for Blume's core, opportunity, and continuity funds across MENA, SE Asia, and India. An early member of Blume leadership, Ashish joined Sanjay & Karthik at Blume in 2012. He has been pivotal in mentoring and structuring Blume's platform team. He significantly contributed to the inception and expansion of Constellation Blu, a transaction and financial advisory firm seeded by Blume. A recognized thought leader, Ashish's insights are captured in Blume's Future of Money report and Fintech thesis. He actively contributes to industry dialogues through platforms like IVCA & PEVC CFO association, showcasing his extensive involvement in the venture capital ecosystem. A Chartered Accountant and Company Secretary by qualification, he has also been a visiting faculty and speaker at industry associations and premier business schools. He operates out of Mumbai. In the decade prior to joining Blume in its formative years, Ashish was a part of Timesgroup, Standard Chartered Bank, and State Bank of India.

I am greedy to be part of ambitious founder journeys, and help inflect them to greatness. The founders who select me to be part of their journeys, pick me to be their PMF coach, social media cheerleader, sparring partner, 11 pm friend, occasional drinking bud (or Kaffeeklatscher) and official podcast recommender, all in one. In turn, I offer a safe space for them to think aloud on their challenges, and help them get to a solution. I work with a range of founders across all sectors, though deep tech / deep science, climatetech and web3 is not my forte. My active portfolio includes LeverageEdu, Classplus, Uolo, Rocketium, Futwork, WizCommerce, Virohan, Vutto, DPDzero, and Ozi. I came to VC quite accidentally, when Karthik Reddy reached out to me to query if a role in VC would interest me. Today I wouldn't trade it for any other job in the world. The incredible variety of interactions across founder personalities and sectors as well as the ability to do well and do good, make it a special profession. In my previous life, I worked with The Times of India Group across biz dev, corp dev and strategy roles across their media and education verticals, where I was part of the founding teams at Times Music, Times Now and Bennett University. I am a father to two sensitive teenage girls with a deep interest in STEM. When we are not discussing science or pop culture at home with my freelance writer wife and me, I am usually reading and writing. I am also working on a very ambitious PMF playbook for founders that I have started sequentially releasing to the world.

Arpit is a Partner at Blume Ventures from Investment Team. He is amongst the most passionate people in India on enabling startups. He co-founded Headstart Network, India's largest startup community which touches more than 100,000 entrepreneurs annually. He also co-created India DeepTech, an industry alliance for promoting deeptech startups. He was named in the prestigious 40-under-40 lists by Equalifi (erstwhile AIWMI) in 2020. Before joining Blume, Arpit started Acadmic Ventures, a consulting firm for commercializing technology, sold High-Performance Computing at Tata CRL in Pune and wrote video codecs at Ittiam Systems in Bengaluru. He is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and NIT Trichy.