After debuting a new $100 million big data initiative, Accel Partners is expanding its presence in another areas, though this time in a geographic region of the world. Accel is closing its third India fund, totaling $155 million, to invest in seed and early-stage opportunities in the region.
Accel previously launched two India funds. The most recent fund was launched in 2008 and totaled $65 million. Clearly Accel is doubling down on India and believes in a strong future in technology startups in the geographic area. Currently, Accel has 34 portfolio companies in India, including Flipkart, Myntra, Letsbuy, HealthcareMagic, Babyoye, and Exclusively.IN. → Read More
Accel Partners has steadily been making investments in infrastructure and companies looking to manage big data for the enterprise, including funding Cloudera, CouchBase, and even Fusion-IO. But there’s no doubt that more and more startups are launching to help businesses manage massive amounts of data as technologies like Apache Hadoop become more popular. Today, Accel is launching a $100 million fund dedicated to investing in entrepreneurs who are building disruptive big data companies.
This is actually the first dedicated fund to a specific vertical in Accel’s history as a venture firm. The fund, which is made up of Accel’s existing capital, will be devoted to funding innovation across entire “big data stack” from infrastructure (storage, security, management, etc.) to enterprise applications (business intelligence, collaboration, mobile, vertical apps, etc.).
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Braintree, an Accel-backed online payments provider, is announcing a new CEO today—payments exec Bill Ready. In July, Ready joined Accel as an Executive in Residence to bring his payments expertise to the firm’s portfolio companies and investment strategy.
Braintree, which just raised $34 million from Accel Partners, essentially powers and automates online payments for merchants and companies online. The company provides a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing, credit card storage, support for mobile and international payments, and PCI Compliance solutions. → Read More
Jim Breyer, a partner of venture capital firm Accel Partners, has been nominated for election to the board of directors of media conglomerate News Corporation, the company announced this morning.
Breyer will stand for election at News Corp’s annual meeting of stockholders on October 21, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. The company also said that directors Kenneth E. Cowley and Thomas J. Perkins – yes, that would be the founding partner of VC firm and Accel Partners rival Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – will step down from the board afterwards. → Read More
Accel Partners has made a major investment in Dealer.com, a company that provides SaaS marketing solutions to auto dealers. Accel partner Todd MacLean will join company’s Board of Directors as part of the transaction, which is estimated to be north of $30 million.
Based in Burlington, VT, Dealer.com sells a SaaS application that manages auto dealers’ web presence from start to finish. Features include SEO management, tools for online advertising, online video, social media, lead management, inventory marketing and performance analytics. The company works with independent dealers, franchises, ad agencies and more. → Read More
After adding online payments exec Bill Ready as an Executive-In-Residence, Accel Partners is shoring up another area of expertise with the addition of former Salesforce.com executive Chuck Ganapathi as the firm’s newest Entrepreneur-in-Residence. At Accel, Ganapathi, who was the creator of Salesforce’s “Facebook for the Enterprise” Chatter, will focus on developing a company in the social enterprise space.
Prior to joining Accel, Ganapathi served as Senior Vice President of Products for Chatter and Mobile at Salesforce.com, leading the company’s product development efforts in enterprise social networking. Not only was Chatter Salesforce’s first real foray into social, but the platform has been lauded as the company’s most successful product release ever. → Read More
Demand for private company shares declined in the second quarter versus the first quarter but was up sharply year-over-year, according to a new report released today by SecondMarket. The market for private company stock saw $112 million in transactions last quarter, versus $156 million in the first quarter, or down 39 percent sequentially. On an annual basis, however, it was up 120 percent over the second quarter of 2010, which saw $51 million in transactions. And the $268 million worth of transactions in the first half of 2011, was up 75 percent from the first half of 2010 .
For the first time, SecondMarket also ranked the top VC firms based on which ones have the most portfolio companies on its 100 most-watched list. → Read More
Accel Partners has been making major investments in a number of online payments companies, including Wonga, e-payments company Yapstone, and most recently, online payments company Braintree. In fact, payments is one of the main investment themes that Accel is targeting in its funding strategy. So it’s not surprising that the venture firm is staffing up on experienced talent to help find the next big thing in payments. Today, payments executive Bill Ready is joining Accel as an Executive in Residence.
Ready joins Accel from electronic bill pay provider iPay Technologies, where he served as President, and helped manage the company’s sale to Jack Henry for $300 million last year. Previously, Ready served as iPay’s Chief Financial Officer and worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. where he focused specifically on advising companies in the payments and financial technology sector. → Read More
Mega funds are back. Accel Partners closed two funds today for a total of $1.35 billion in new capital. The funds are Accel XI, which raised $475 million, and Accel Growth Fund II, which raised $875 million. Other VC firms with recent billion-dollar funds include Sequoia, Greylock, and Khosla is raising one as well.
It took less than two months to raise the $1.35 billion. The fundraising kicked off on April 26, 2011.The firm’s last fund, Accel X, was a $520 million fund and closed in 2007 → Read More
Accel Partners has a long, and well-known history of making solid investment bets on popular consumer facing web and mobile platforms, including Facebook, Groupon, Etsy, Trulia and Angry Birds. But the firm is also making significant movements in the enterprise cloud storage and infrastructure space with investments in Cloudera, Couchbase, Nimble, Springsource, Atlassian, and DropBox. The fact is much of the core infrastructure that is provided by many of these enterprise companies provides a foundation for consumer facing companies. Today, Accel is adding a seasoned executive in the infrastructure and storage industries with Kirk Bowman joining as a venture partner in the company’s Silicon Valley office. → Read More
Any seasoned investor knows that past performance is not indicative of future returns. That is as true with public stocks as it is with venture capital firms. But if someone were to ask you to rank the top VC firms today based on their probability of success, how would you do it? Remember, looking at past returns won’t help you.
Chris Farmer, a VC at General Catalyst Partners, has come up with a method which he calls InvestorRank. Just as Google’s PageRank orders search results based on how many links each page gets from other sites, InvestorRank looks at the connections between VC firms. Whenever two VC firms co-invest in the same deal, that creates a bond between them. If one VC firm follows another one in a later round, that boosts the rank of the earlier investor. → Read More
Accel Partners has invested $35 million in the crowdsource design service 99designs– a monster of a series A. Of course, 99designs is not your average early-stage startup. Born in Melbourne, Australia out of an older company called sitepoint.com, 99designs is bootstrapped, profitable and growing revenues at a rate of about 120% a year.
A few strategic angel investors also participated including Michael Dearing, Stewart Butterfield, Dave Goldberg and Anthony Casalena. Accel’s Andrew Braccia and Ryan Sweeney will join the board along with Dearing.
The growth helps explain why Braccia has been courting this deal since 2009. And he wasn’t alone. 99designs CEO Patrick Llewellyn says several VCs have been pinging the company, and until now, they’ve all been turned away. They all seem to find out about the company the same way: One of their portfolio companies uses the service to get a good, cheap logo. → Read More
Rovio, the Finnish entertainment media company who famously operates the Angry Birds franchise, has raised $42 million in Series A funding.
The round was co-led by Accel Partners and Atomico Ventures, the VC firm created by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, who will be joining Rovio’s board. ‘Super angel fund’ Felicis Ventures also participated.
Currently, Angry Birds is played by 40 million monthly active users. → Read More
Qriously, a service that lets brands measure location-based public opinion, has raised $1.6m in a new funding round led by Accel Partners. Amalfi Capital also participated, while the London-based startup is originally backed by Pacific Tiger Group.
Through its SDK offered to mobile app developers, Qriously lets advertisers display questions instead of traditional mobile ads so that they can measure sentiment in realtime but also based on a user’s location. Those advertisers could be ad agencies, marketers, research companies and eventually small businesses – Qriously wants to “democratize mass insight”, says Christopher Kahler, CEO and co-founder – while app developers get a kick back via a pay-per-answer model rather than pay-per-click or transaction. → Read More
In case you missed it, being a super angel is officially passe. The new hotness is having a late-stage growth cash. Sequoia Capital is doing it. Andreessen Horowitz is doing it. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is doing it. Accel is doing it. Hell, even Chris Sacca is somehow doing it.
Greylock is the latest to officially join the club, with news today of an expansion to its current fund, bringing the total to $1 billion– almost double its original $575 million size. The firm will be able to invest up to $200 million per deal. But other than having more cash on hand, not much else at Greylock is changing. The firm has been doing growth deals already, most notably Pandora, which has filed to go public and the recent Groupon mega-deal. → Read More
GetJar, the independent, cross-platform app store provider, this morning announced that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management and longtime backer Accel Partners.
I caught up with founder and CEO Ilja Laurs at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to talk about how his business has grown since the last time I did a video interview with the charismatic entrepreneur, now almost two years ago. → Read More
A Chicago-area startup that sells natural consumer goods online, Abe’s Market, closed a $3.4 million series A investment the company announced today. Accel Partners led the round, joined by the company’s earlier investors, Index Ventures and several angels.
Abe’s Market calls itself the equivalent of an online farmer’s market, and focuses on selling non-food category natural products like beauty, bath, baby or cleaning items, though it also sells some packaged comestibles… → Read More
Data center automation is a hulking $14 billion segment of the enterprise IT industry dominated by hulking giants like IBM, HP (through its $1.6 billion Opsware acquisition), BMC (through its $800 million BladeLogic acquisition in 2008), and VMWare. Companies often have thousands of servers, both physical and virtual, that need to be managed, and on top of that they are trying to keep track of virtual machines on Amazon’s EC2 or Rackspace. A new enterprise startup called ScaleXtreme is tooling up to attack IT systems management from the cloud.
It is backed by Accel Partners, which took its entire $2.5 million series A round last August, and its two co-founders have some serious enterprise startup chops. CTO Balaji Srinivasa was the principal product architect for BladeLogic before it was sold to BMC. CEO Nand Mulchandani founded and sold several enterprise startups in the past (Oblix to Oracle, Determina to VMWare), and was also the CEO of OpenDNS and an EIR at Accel. → Read More
Andy Dunn is part Indian and part European. He’s tall and slender, but he has surprisingly meaty thighs. As a result, he could never find pants that fit well. European cut pants were too tight but when he tried to wear American cut pants he felt like he was swimming in billowing fabric. And if he spent all day shopping to find great pants, he didn’t feel great afterwards. “If I spent a Saturday shopping, I felt like I misspent my time as a man,” he says.
So while at Stanford Business School he and Brian Spaly started Bonobos- a company that makes pants that fit. In their first year they sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in pants, mostly to classmates out of the trunk of their cars. There was another sign of success: Girls in bars starting grabbing Dunn’s butt for the first time. As a single guy in his early 20s, that was an important data point. → Read More
In the venture business being ahead of your time can be almost as bad as being late to a market. But the other great thing about the venture business is there are exceptions to every rule. Craig Donato is hoping that Oodle is the exception to that one. He’s spent more than ten years building a social classified company, powering the marketplaces for Oodle.com, MySpace and Facebook and growing to more than 14 million unique users. It’s backed by some of the smartest investors on the Web like Reid Hoffman and David Sze from Greylock, who both invested in Facebook and LinkedIn so they know a thing or two about the social graph.
Now one of Facebook’s other hot venture capital investors, Accel Partners, has funded Yardsellr which claims it’ll be the “eBay of Facebook;” meanwhile Groupon’s runaway success has made everyone reevaluate social shopping. So what does all that mean for Oodle?
For one thing, the company isn’t slowing down. → Read More
