In a bold move, Accel India promotes three Principals to Partners

Accel India Ventures has taken a significant step to increase its investment operations by promoting three Principals to the position of Partners.

With this the top deck of partners has increased from six members to nine, there are more people to manage the future investment requirements of the Indian arm.

Plus it also becomes one of the prime examples where top-level career growth takes place in the VC industry, instead of Principals and Presidents leaving to start their own ventures.

As Principals in Accel India Abhinav Chaturvedi, Prayank Swaroop, and Barath Shankar Subramanian lead investments, represented the VC on the companies’ boards, and participated in profits. Now as Partners they also have a vote in the decision making of what investment the firm goes through or not.

Accel India invests in early to mid-stage startups in five key sectors - B2B marketplaces, consumer internet, healthtech, fintech, and enterprise SaaS companies.

Chaturvedi has lead investments in all these segments except health tech, as per his LinkedIn profile. He headed the funding rounds in a total of nine companies including UrbanClap, Drip Capital, Coverfox, Stanza Living, and NinjaCart among others. He has also served as a board observer on some of these.

Swaroop, since he joined Accel as Senior Associate seven and half years ago, has been a crucial part of investments in 14 companies, out of which he served as a board observer on nine. These include Cure.fit, Fingerlix, CareStack, Bizongo, MySmartPrice etc.

Subramanian had first served Accel as an intern for four months in 2010, and had later rejoined the firm in 2012. He also in his over seven-year long job career at Accel had served as a board member on nine of the portfolio companies including Portea, PharmaCCX, SigTuple etc.

The US-based VC’s arm which has $1 billion worth assets under management, and gives out early checks worth below $2 million, Accel has recognised the immense contribution by these individuals henceforth.

Before these people joined the team of Partners, the six-member team - Mahendran Balachandran, Shekhar Kirani, Anand Daniel, Subrata Mitra, Dinesh Katiyar, and Prashanth Prakash - had approved investments in StreamSource, Moglix, NinjaCart, Hush, Facilio, Spinny in last six months.

This development was reported by ET.