Accel raises $3.5 billion to invest in emerging global AI startups

Accel, a global venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley, London and Bangalore, India, has raised $3.5 billion in new funds for early-stage investments across the world.

The firm, which has backed artificial intelligence companies including Anthropic, Cursor and Perplexity, has raised four separate funds dedicated to backing young startups in a moment when the AI race is upending the fundraising market. A $1.35 billion global expansion fund will be set aside for larger early-stage rounds and rapid follow-on investments; $800 million will target US investments, primarily in Silicon Valley; $800 million will be deployed in Europe and Israel; and $550 million in new funds will be invested in India.

“Companies raise more money, more quickly, earlier in their company life than ever before,” said Accel partner Harry Nelis, who is based in London. “The exciting bit is that there’s massive opportunities, but the scary bit, or the flip side, is we work with larger amounts and the risk is still pretty much the same.”


Nelis said Accel has kept its early-stage fund sizes relatively modest when compared with many other firms, but its global expansion fund will help it invest in some of the larger rounds by splitting the investment between a core fund and the later-stage vehicle. The firm’s new India fund is $100 million less than its predecessor, but its Europe and US funds have both grown from $650 million to $800 million.

Over the past two years, Accel has expanded its investments from AI-native startups across the application and infrastructure layer, into more deep tech sectors, from material science to manufacturing, according to Steve Loughlin, a firm partner who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Other VC firms have also been embracing the same kinds of investments, led by a conviction that AI can help renovate complex industries in ways that traditional software did not.

Last year, Accel joined a $300 million seed round in an AI scientific discovery platform called Periodic Labs that valued the company at $1.3 billion. Periodic Labs is one of a handful of startups that have raised capital under the “neolab” umbrella, a type of nascent startup that accepts massive amounts of capital at inception to fund ambitious research projects.

Other AI startups that have raised large seed rounds include Thinking Machines Lab, which was founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati and is an Accel portfolio company, and Safe Superintelligence Inc., which was started by former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

“You can’t really construct a fund of just those types of deals,” said Loughlin, of billion-dollar seed-stage startups. The investor said that the vast majority of Accel’s early-stage investments are in startups where it can get a meaningful ownership stake in exchange for its check.

Part of Accel’s pitch to AI entrepreneurs is its global footprint and how it can be used to help companies expand — whether it’s boosting a US startup’s engineering resources in India, or wooing a founder based in Israel within hours because of a partner’s proximity to the region. The firm is also attempting to build connections with the best Silicon Valley talent by launching a no-strings-attached, in-person residency program for aspiring founders that’s located next door to its San Francisco office.The fundraising haul comes at a time of change for the firm, which was founded in 1983.

One of its most prominent early-stage investors, Daniel Levine, who backed Scale AI and Vercel, will no longer make investments for Accel in this fund or future funds, an Accel spokesperson confirmed. Despite stepping back from his role, Levine remains a partner and will continue to serve on his board seats and support his existing investments.

Additionally, the firm has accelerated its pace for its later-stage investments, recently raising $5 billion in capital for that purpose, as Bloomberg News previously reported.