Angelic A.

Ludoc BSBA-BFM 4

VENTURE CAPITAL

Company Name: ACCEL (Formerly known as ACCEL PARTNERS)

Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an early stage and growth-stage American venture

capital firm that helps a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel works with startups in seed, early and
growth-stage investments. Accel Partners is perhaps best known for its prescient early  bet on Facebook.
But the venture firm has long been one of the most active venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and has
been the investor in prominent exits in industries ranging from big data to cybersecurity to home
automation. The firm has many branches, some of them in California, Palo Alto, San Francisco, London,
China, and India. This is done through an established partnership with International Data Groups. There
are 4 different independent legal entities even though the brand is one. There is Accel Partners
Management LLP, Accel London Management Limited in London, IDG VC Management Ltd (IDG-
Accel China) in Hong Kong, and Accel Management Co. Inc. in California

Accel is a venture capital firm that concentrates on the following technology sectors:

 Consumer
 Infrastructure
 Media
 Mobile
 SaaS
 Security
 Customer Care Service
 Enterprise Software
 E-commerce

Financing

In recent news Accel Company is rolling out a new $4 billion late-stage fund, just as certain rivals lose
momentum It wouldn’t be the first time that Accel has given money back to its investors amid market
turbulence. In 2001, Accel raised what was then its biggest fund ever a $1.4 billion vehicle only to reduce
the fund size to $950 million in 2002 after the tech market which first soured in the spring of 2000 failed to
bounce back and frustrated limited partners, or LPs, proceeded to make a stink.
LPs seem highly unlikely to push back this time around considering what happened next. Before cutting
back that $1.4 billion fund, Accel proposed splitting it into two $700 million funds: One to invest as planned
and a second, $700 million fund to begin investing in 2004. The LPs who voted against that idea and the
majority of them did are probably still kicking themselves.

Accel has seen some massive returns. It owned 24% of Slack at the time of its direct listing in 2019 and
reportedly returned $4.6 billion to its limited partners on that bet alone. Accel also owned 20% of
Crowdstrike when the company staged a traditional IPO in 2019, and even with tech shares tanking,
Crowdstrike’s market cap is currently $38 billion. Put another way, it’s easy to appreciate why Accel’s
investors signed up for this newest fund, even as their overall assets may have been hit hard by broader
market conditions.

Funding

Accel has raised $18.3 billion in total across 33 funds, the most recent of which is the $1.8 billion Accel
Growth Fund VI, was announced on June 29, 2021.

Investments

Accel invests in tech startups; they have funded technology firms such as Cloudera, Ethos, Jet.com,
Vectra Networks Inc. GoFundMe, Etsy, Supercell, Spotify, Lynda.com, Qualtrics, BrowserStack,
Egyptian Instabug, HopIn, CleverTap, Vinculum Group, FabHotels, Instana, Facebook, Slack, Dropbox,
Atlassian, Flipkart, Braintree/Venmo, Vox Media, and DJI. 

Accel focuses on investing in early seeding rounds and in growth stages. They have invested in many
seed and early stage investments such as Dropbox, Flipkart, Jet.com, Webflow, Cloudera, Slack, and
Dropcam. Accel growth capital investments are more focused on firms that are developed and need a
bigger amount of capital to grow. Some examples are Qualtrics, DJI, and Atlassian.

1,860 investments have been made by Accel. Tesseract raised €78.7M on September 7, 2022, marking
their most recent investment, and made 161 diversity investments. Their most recent diversity investment
was on Aug 22, 2022, when ModernLoop raised $9M.

There were 354 exits from Accel. The most prominent exits from Accel were those of Razer, Meta, and
Animoca Brands.