Accel India announces $550 Mn sixth fund to invest in seed, early stage startups

In India's venture capitalist landscape, there are few firms that have earned a reputation of being an early identifier of high-potential firms and making large exits out of those. Fourteen-year-old venture capital firm Accel India is one of them.

The VC firm has over 40 startups in its portfolio, that are now valued at more than $100 million.

That is not all. There are several more bets on the way as it has announced the closure of its sixth fund with a corpus of $550 million - almost a $100 million larger than its previous fund.

With the latest fund, Accel India plans to keep betting on seed and early-stage startups.

"The opportunity ahead is significantly bigger than when we started in 2005: India can now digitally identify 1.3 billion people, has 600 million internet users and 150 million online transacting customers with a national payments platform that processes $20 billion a month," said Accel Partners in a blog post.

Apart from infusing funds, the VC firm actively helps startups in product and scale thinking, brand and digital marketing, organizational scaling and culture, and financial metrics.

In India, Accel is one of few VC firms, which has managed large exits. In the consumer space, Flipkart was one of its early bets, where it started with an $800,000 investment and went on to invest $100 million, for which it raked in close to $1.4 billion when Flipkart was acquired by Walmart last year.

Other Unicorns in its portfolio include Swiggy and UrbanClap. In the B2B space, Accel's notable investments include Freshworks, Blackbuck and Ninjacart.

Accel, which largely prefers to be the founder's first partner, claims to be the first institutional investor in more than 85% of all their investments. Some of the startups where it was one of the first investors include Acko, BookMyShow, Bounce, BrowserStack, Clevertap, Curefit, Moglix, Ninjacart and Urbanclap.