Accel Partners is one of the big names in the VC world and has played a critical role in nurturing and promoting Indian startup companies. Accel has especially had a special hand in creating some of the most successful Indian unicorns.
Today Accel took another big step in its continuing quest to strengthen Indian startup industry. It announced a pre-seed funding program for early stage startups. Named as Accel Atom, the VC major will invest $250K as non-dilutive capital in startups that will eventually get selected in this program. The non-dilutive capital will be invested through uncapped convertible note, which implies that the shares won’t be converted into equity shares until the next round materializes.
Accel has said this newly launched program is even willing to backup startups that have not even launched products or have zero revenue.
Accel Atom comes with a big mentor team that will obviously be mentoring the startups that will be selected in this program. The mentor team will include the who’s who of the Indian startups. Some of these big names are Freshwork’s Girish Mathrubootham, Spinny’s Niraj Singh, Zetwerk’s Amrit Acharya, Bookmyshow’s Ashish Hemrajani and Cleartrip’s Hrush Bhut.
The Accel Atom program will be headed by Prayank Swaroop who is a partner investor at Accel.
Its must be noted that Accel’s rival Sequoia runs a similar program called ‘Surge’ for early stage startup. Founded in 2019, Surge is currently running its fifth cohort.
As mentioned above, over the years Accel has supported startups that have went on to become members of coveted unicorn club. The Accel backed unicorn startup include names like Urban Company, Swiggy, Zenoti, Chargebee, Moglix and Zetwerk.