Bridgestone India, part of Bridgestone Group a in tyres and rubber providing solutions for safe and sustainable mobility, has partnered with Blume Ventures, India’s home-grown venture, to leverage the start-up eco-system of India in the mobility solutions space. The partnership with Blume Ventures is aimed at joining the “Start-up India” initiative of the Government and partnering with the eco-system for nurturing innovation and start-ups in the mobility space.
Bridgestone India decided to partner with Blume Ventures which backs entrepreneurs who are either building to solve large impactful problems in India or taking the best of Indian innovation to global markets. The diverse mandate extends from EdTech, FinTech, Health, Commerce and Consumer internet in the former to Deep-Tech, AI to SaaS and enterprise software in the latter category. Blume focuses on early-stage, innovative technology-led start-ups. This fits into Bridgestone’s interest in creating a vibrant mobility solutions space in India.
“Bridgestone India’s partnership with Blume Ventures will deepen and widen our innovation strategy and will nurture our leadership role in the introduction of new mobility services. The corporate venture partnership will allow us to accelerate our strategy of exploring new and disruptive models in the mobility eco-system. As a partner, Bridgestone brings its global leadership position to the Indian market and to India’s growing start-up space.”, said Parag Satpute, Managing Director Bridgestone India
Sanjay Nath, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Blume Ventures said “We are grateful to our anchor supporters who have emphatically backed Blume. Whether building domestically or for global markets, the best founders and LPs would like to work with a Fund that can be considered world-class, which has spurred us to keep institutionalizing and bolstering our platform, team and capabilities. Thanks to an increasing reality of IPO and M&A exits, there is a huge resurgence of founders and operators. We’re excited for Blume to become the preferred seed partner of choice for both these categories.”
Bridgestone India has constantly contributed towards enhancing mobility solutions. In 2020 the company invested in Fleeca India Pvt. Ltd. a start-up that provides solutions to Fleet Operators to increase efficiencies of their tyre usage. In April 2022, the company inaugurated a first-of-its-kind Mobility Solutions Institute in India that will enable stakeholders to enhance their knowledge of tyre technology and related mobility solutions. Over the last few years Bridgestone globally has emerged as a leading mobility solutions provider. These solutions include smart sensing tyres that capture and transmit critical data on the health of the tyre. In the last few years, Bridgestone has invested in its Digital Garage, an open innovation platform, where it has built new capabilities in data collection from sensors and RFiD, platforms and analytics.