Accel, a global venture capital firm, has raised a $650 million early-stage fund dedicated to supporting founders in India and Southeast Asia.

“Accel’s latest fund, its eighth in India and SEA, will build on its commitment to partnering with early-stage founders to build disruptive, category-defining businesses that create meaningful impact,” said a press release.

With this fund, Accel will continue to partner with founders in AI, consumer brands, fintech, and manufacturing.

The firm has identified sub-categories of focus within each of these themes:

“India is at an inflection point. Over the next decade, we are poised to add more to our GDP than we have in our economic history. The surface area of the opportunity for Indian founders to build and scale businesses that deliver large-scale impact is huge,” said Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel. 

“Digital adoption is accelerating across urban and rural India, and founders are poised to solve real-world challenges and create solutions of global relevance. We believe the next wave of category-creating companies will come from those who can combine innovation with a deep understanding of customer needs.”

Accel has made substantial investments in companies across sectors such as Amagi, Acko, BlackBuck, BlueStone, BrowserStack, Cult.fit, Flipkart, Freshworks, Swiggy, Urban Company, and Zetwerk.

Accel is also the first institutional investor in 80 per cent of its portfolio companies.

According to Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel, “India’s startup ecosystem is increasingly becoming the driving force behind the nation’s economic progress, with VC-backed companies surpassing $50 billion in public market capitalization. Indian founders have built resilient and enduring businesses which have been embraced by the public markets. As India’s GDP and public market cap grow, we expect large outcomes from disruptive businesses led by bold and visionary founders.”

In recent years, Accel has launched some key initiatives to make a founder’s journey as frictionless as possible and fuel the ecosystem’s growth. The firm’s open-source content and community platform, SeedToScale, democratizes company-building knowledge with actionable insights from successful founders, operators , and industry leaders, according to the release.

Accel’s early stage scaling program, Accel Atoms, now in its fourth iteration, has supported 36 startups to date that have collectively raised over $200 million.

In the past two years alone, Accel invested in over 27 AI start-ups in India or by Indian-origin founders, the release said.