Accel Partners Sets Up $550 Million Fund For India Investments

By Amit Chowdhry ● Dec 4, 2019
  • Accel Partners has set up a $550 million sixth venture fund for investments in India

Venture capital firm Accel Partners has raised $550 million for its sixth venture fund in India. Based in Silicon Valley, Accel Partners generally focuses on early-stage investments.

Accel originally launched its India operations about 15 years ago and it has made $1 billion worth of investments in the area since then.

In an interview with TechCrunch, India-based Accel partner Anand Daniel said that this fund will be used to focus on identifying and investing in seed and early-stage rounds.

Earlier this year, Accel closed a $575 million fund to make more investments in Europe and Israel.

Accel had some major wins in India. For example, Accel invested in Flipkar’s seed financing round of funding at a $4 million post-money valuation. And then Walmart ended up buying Flipkart for $16 billion.

Plus Accel also invested in Freshworks’ seed round of funding. And now Freshworks is valued at more than $3 billion.

In India, Accel has 9 partners and over 50 employees. And there are 44 startups that are in Accel’s portfolio, which are valued at more than $100 million. And Accel’s India portfolio has created $44 billion in market value, including Flipkart’s $21 billion deal.

Accel was originally founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. Executives at Accel include Daniel, Mahendran Balachandran, Luca Bocchio, Philippe Botteri, Andrew Braccia, Andrei Brasoveanu, Abhinav Chaturvedi, Ethan Choi, Miles Clements, Kevin Comolli, Sonali De Rycker, Ben Fletcher, Sameer Gandhi, Bruce Golden, Dinesh Katiyar, Shekhar Kirani, Amit Kumar, Daniel Levine, Ping Li, Luciana Lixandru, John Locke, Steve Loughlin, Arun Mathew, Cherry Miao, Subrata Mitra, Vas Natarajan, Harry Nelis, Nate Niparko, Maya Noeth, Seth Pierrepont, Prashanth Prakash, Amy Saper, Barath Shankar Subramanian, Prayank Swaroop, Ryan Sweeney, Matt Weigand, and Rich Wong.