The Indian startup ecosystem has grown much over the past year, thanks to contributions from both established and upcoming startups. Indian startups raised a record $39 billion last year with record numbers of unicorns and IPOs. With the unicorn club getting bigger by the month, it is high time that startups across India have access to proper funding and investors. This is where early-stage VC firm Accel comes in, and now, it has launched its seventh India fund.
The size of the fund is a gigantic $650 million, the second-highest ever raised by a VC firm for the India and Southeast Asia region. The first place continues to belong to Sequoia Capital with its fund of $1.35 billion in 2020 to invest in opportunities in India and Southeast Asia.
This also tops the $550 million fund back in 2019, and today, the global VC firm has commitments worth over $2 billion in the region.
Accel is a well-known name in the venture capital segment, having backed high-profile names such as Facebook, Flipkart, Swiggy, Freshworks, Spinny, Vedantu, Moglix, Browserstack, and others. Its portfolio firms are valued at more than $100 billion in all, and 16 out of 18 unicorns have seen Accel coming as their first institutional investor.
Going forward, Accel will continue to invest in firms in the consumer tech, global (Saas), healthcare, and e-commerce sectors, and double down on web3 and B2B marketplaces. With the new fund, it aims to be more aggressive in the region, and the first set of checks of the seventh fund are expected to be wired within weeks. According to Anand Daniel, partner, Accel India, as much as 90% of the latest fund corpus will be deployed in the early stages.
Daniel added that they will dip into Accel’s global pool of capital of around $4 billion- $4.5 billion available across its growth funds.
In a first for Accel, the new fund will also invest in Southeast Asian tech startups, following in the footsteps of Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed India. The proceeds from the funding round will see investments being made primarily in seed and Series A rounds.
In a statement, Accel said that India, the world’s second-largest internet market, today has 200 million digitally transacting consumers, a number that is slated to grow to 500 million in the next five years. “As we look towards the next decade, we expect digital adoption in India and Southeast Asia to only accelerate. We see this trend playing out not only in categories like financial services and e-commerce, but also across core sectors like agriculture, education, insurance, logistics, healthcare, real estate, and manufacturing.”
