Accel is very upbeat about the money it will invest in India. In fact, the Silicon Valley-headquartered company has just announced that it has raised $550 million for its sixth venture fund in the country.
For Accel's efforts in India, where it started investing 15 years ago, the latest venture is a significant amount of capital on top of a $1 billion investment it has shelled out through all its previous funds.
In a recent interview, Anand Daniel, a partner for India's Accel operations said the venture capital fund will continue to focus on identifying and investing in seed and early-stage startups.
But the company realized that it needed more money to be able to participate actively in its portfolio startups' later-stage funding series. Monday's announcement follows a similar push by Accel in Europe and Israel, where a $575 million fund has been closed.
Growing investments
"We have specifically made growth investments in businesses that are growing well, such as Swiggy, UrbanClap, Blackbuck, and Bounce. Via Series B and Series C stages, we continued to support them," he added.
One of the world's most successful venture capitalists, Accel's resume in India is quite impressive, as in many other markets. It took part in the e-commerce company Flipkart's seed financing round, which was then valued at $4 million.
Last year, Walmart purchased a majority stake for $16 billion in Flipkart, which helped the retail giant's net income to grow more than $1 billion.
Accel, which has nine partners and a total of over 50 members in India, has also invested in the SaaS Giant Freshworks seed round, now valued at more than $3 billion, and food delivery startup Swiggy, also valued at $3 billion-plus.
Huge transformation
The venture capital entity said that 44 of its India portfolio's 100 startups have a market value of over $100 million each. Accel's portfolio firms have a total market cap of $44 billion.
When Accel started its first fund series in India back in 2005, everything was very different, Daniel said. "Only 1 in 50 Indians had internet access and mobile phone ownership was still in its infancy." Yet, Daniel said, the company "firmly believed that India was on the cusp of a big change."
According to Accel, the opportunity is now greater than when it started in 2005. India can now digitally identify 1.4 billion people, has 600 million internet users and 150 million online clients with a national payment system that processes $20 billion a month, Accel said.
