Accel Partners' India Arm Raises $450 Mln, Here's How it Plans to Allocate ItSectors that could benefit from Accel India's new round of funds

As we close this year, Accel Partners has raised its fifth India-focussed fund with a corpus of $450 million. Accel, whose India investments include companies like Flipkart, MuSigma, Zenoti and Freshdesk, will now have total assets under management in India to over $1 billion.

Speaking to Entrepreneur India, Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel Partners, said that with its latest fund, the firm is actively looking to invest in technology entrepreneurs across sectors such as consumer, enterprise/SaaS, financial technology, India B2B (business-to-business) and healthcare.

"We continue to focus on early-stage companies for investment. We are excited to continue the work of supporting extraordinary Indian entrepreneurs, and are grateful to these entrepreneurs for letting us be their partners in their quests to build the next wave of category-defining businesses and a profoundly better and brighter," Kirani added.

Emerging from a year of lull

In 2016, due to a mix-bag of events such as valuation mark downs by global firms, the ecosystem felt the pinch of investors becoming more cautious about funding. Accel raising its bar in India goes to prove that global investors continue to remain optimistic about Indian entrepreneurs and technology.

"Global investors that Accel works with are bullish about India as a market, from overall growth perspective, mobile penetration, and entrepreneur eco-system," Kirani said.

Some of Accel's global investments include residential solar installer SunRun, Etsy, Slack and Spotify.