Accel Closes $550 Million Venture Fund for Indian Startups

(Bloomberg) -- Accel has closed its sixth India fund with $550 million to invest in early stage startups, taking advantage of a booming market for technology.

The capital will be invested across “one of the most vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems in the world,” Accel said in a statement on Monday. The firm will focus on startups in social commerce, curated marketplaces and artificial intelligence for health care.

The Silicon Valley venture capital firm raised its first Indian fund in 2005. At the time, just 1 in 50 Indians had access to the internet and a small fraction had mobile phones, the firm said. Now nearly half the country is online and 150 million people make payments online.

Its most striking bet was an $800,000 investment in the country’s largest online retailer Flipkart Online Services Pvt, which it continued backing until Walmart Inc. took a controlling stake last year at a valuation of about $21 billion.

Several other startups in its portfolio have become “unicorns,” companies d at more than $1 billion. Those include food-delivery startup Swiggy, d at $3.4 billion, and software-as-a-service firm Freshworks, d at $3.5 billion.

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