Accel India has raised $550 million sixth fund for Early Stage Startups

Venture capital firm Accel Partners India announce the final close of its 6th India-focused fund of $550Mn fund on the 2nd of December adding that it would exclusively focus on seed and early-stage Indian start-ups.

In 2016, Accel invested in e-commerce giant Flipkart and food aggregator Swiggy with its $450 Mn fund. Later on in May 2018, Walmart acquired 77% of the company. Before it, the firm continued backing Flipkart which increased its stakes to 81.3% giving Accel India an ideal exit from the Indian E-commerce Giant. Apart from this Accel Partners has also the first investor in software-as-a-service (SaaS) Unicorn Freshworks in 2011 with $1 Mn investment. This month, Accel was a part of Freshwork's $150 Mn Series H Funding round, increasing the start-up’s valuation to $3.5 Bn. Before Accel, it was lead by Sequoia Capital and CapitalG.

Coincidently, Accel Partners also started its investment journey with Swiggy with a $1 Mn seed funding round and the company currently valued at $3.4 Bn. Accel India's portfolio includes around 50 companies which include Acko General Insurance, logistics start-up BlackBuck, online ticketing platform BookMyShow, bike rental start-up Bounce, health and fitness start-up Curefit and home service start-up UrbanClap.

Accel is a US company founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz in California. It started its first investment fund in 2005. The company states that back then, only one in 50 Indians have access to internet services and even mobile phones' ownership was at the nascent stage.

Now, the company stated that the opportunity ahead is greater from where they started in 2005. India can now digitally identify 1.3 Bn people, has 600 Mn internet users and 150 Mn online transacting customers with a national payment platform that processes $20 Bn a month.

The company further added that it expects India's digital infrastructure to accelerate further. It highlighted that the rapid growth spurt in India is not just limited to mainstream sectors like food delivery, digital payments, and e-commerce but has also positively impacted sectors like agritech, education, insurance, logistics, healthcare, real estate, and manufacturing.

In its press statement, the company highlighted that Indian tech start-ups have created $100 Bn enterprise value and will increase the GDP in the next decade, the start-ups will end up creating a higher value in the future.