Early Stage Investor Accel Adds Three Indian Partners

Accel India, a global venture capital fund with investments in Flipkart, Freshworks and Swiggy, is planning to expand its partnership team in order to intensively focus on early-stage technology startups.

The VC fund has promoted three executives from principals to partners position. With this promotion of Abhinav Chaturvedi, Prayank Swaroop and Barath Shankar Subramanian, Accel will now have nine partners. Other Accel India partners are Mahendran Balachandran, Anand Daniel, Shekhar Kirani, Subrata Mitra, Prashanth Prakash and Dinesh Katiyar.

“The next 10 years, our thesis of going early will still hold true which takes this kind of bandwidth and because these are early-stage companies we do need to spend time,” Accel India partner, Prashanth Prakash told ETtech.

These promoted executives will now be responsible for making independent investment deals, either as a part of Accel’s fundraising cycle or through limited partners. A limited partner is a business partner whose liability is limited to the amount of their investment.

Accel currently has a $450 Mn India fund with 70% of its investments falling around or below the $2 Mn mark. The VC fund majorly invests in consumer internet, enterprise software, financial technology, business-to-business and healthcare.

Accel entered India in 2008 with the acquisition of Erasmic Venture Fund and has since backed hundreds of companies like BookMyShow, BlackBuck, BlueStone, Flipkart, FreshDesk, Portea, Power2SME, Swiggy, UrbanClap, among others.

During Flipkart’s acquisition by global ecommerce giant Walmart, Accel took a $800K cheque as Flipkart’s first institutional investor. Another Accel-backed startup Mubble was acquired by an enterprise solutions provider OBOPAY in late 2018.

According to a recently released Bain & Co report supported by the Indian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (IVCA) entitled ‘Perspectives on Indian VC Ecosystem, 2018’, the VC landscape in India is in a maturing phase with a shift in focus from the number of deals to the quality of deals. There has also been a secular increase in round sizes across investment stages over the past three to four years.

Other venture funds in India include Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India), Kalaari Capital, Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners among others.