Accel announces new €602.6M early-stage fund; here’s how it plans to utilise this capital in Europe

Global venture capital firm Accel announced that it has raised a $650M (approximately €602.67M) fund to back early-stage startups in Europe and Israel. This is Accel’s eighth fund of this kind.

The firm invests in startups during their early stages, offering funding from $1M to $20M for seed and Series A rounds. Over the next three years, it plans to make around 30 investments in sectors including cybersecurity, enterprise software and AI.

In 2000, Accel opened an office in London and created a fund for supporting early-stage entrepreneurs in Europe and Israel. Back then, Europe’s tech scene wasn’t very developed, and some doubted its potential for big success. But Accel believed in talented founders worldwide. 

Now, nearly 25 years later, their decision to expand to Europe has paid off, as they’ve been part of many successful ventures.

Investing in Europe

Since 2005, Europe has seen its first unicorn (Skype), a decacorn in 2016 (Supercell), and a cloud decacorn in 2020 (UiPath), showing rapid growth. 

In 2023, European startups received $45B in funding, less than half the funds raised in 2020.

As per the data from Atomico, there has been a steady increase in the number of investors putting money into European tech companies. This trend peaked in 2021 and the first half of 2022, with a lot of investors coming from outside Europe, especially from North America.

However, in 2023, there was a decrease in the number of active investors, because fewer non-European investors were participating. Despite this slowdown, the number of active investors is still more than double what it was ten years ago.

Harry Nelis, partner at Accel, says, “When the market gets really hot, it attracts a few players who come. They end up being tourists rather than long-term residents and then they go back home. We are super excited to be investing [in Europe] right now. If some people have gone home, so be it.”

Accel has backed over 200 companies in 60 cities and 20 countries across Europe, including places like Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, and Serbia. Europe has many successful companies like Supercell, BlaBlaCar, and Spotify, which inspire new entrepreneurs.

“It’s a privilege to have partnered with so many exceptional founders on their entrepreneurial journeys, supporting them not just with our deep capillary networks in Europe and Israel but also working with our teams in the US and India to help them scale and win worldwide,” says Accel.

In 2021, Accel initiated its scout programme in Europe. Scouts in the “Starters” programme are provided with $200K each to discover, invest in, and nurture European startups with significant potential.

Brief about Accel

Accel was started in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. The firm invests money in new businesses and helps them grow. 

Some of the companies Accel has invested in include Some portfolio companies include Atlassian, Braintree, Cloudera, CrowdStrike, DJI, Dropbox, Dropcam, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, FreshWorks, Jet, Qualtrics, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, UiPath, and Vox Media.