Accel has raised around $650 million for its eighth India fund, regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.

The VC firm’s eighth fund was of $650 million in March 2022. The company has backed various start-ups, including unicorns, like Flipkart, Urban Company and Acko.

Recently, Accel had exited food and quick commerce delivery firm Swiggy, where it had tendered 10.5 million shares in the offer for sale (OFS). The VC firm earned a whopping 35x return on its investment on Swiggy.

Accel’s new fundraise comes at a time when the VC firm’s two portfolio companies – Swiggy and Blackbuck (Zinka Logistics) – went public. Swiggy’s $1.35-billion IPO was one of the largest for a new-age company in 2024.

Accel was also an early investor in Flipkart. The company had retained its 1.1 per cent stake after US retail major Walmart acquired the company. It had exited Flipkart in 2023 generating cumulative returns of around $1.5-2 billion, according to a news report.

Recently, Accel backed FirstClub, a start-up by former Flipkart executive Ayyappan R, which raised $8 million in seed funding. Before that, it had invested in Simplismart, an end-to-end MLOps (machine learning operations) platform for generative AI models.

In the recent times, VC firm Stellaris Venture Partners, an early backer of Mamaearth and Whatfix, has closed its third $300-million fund.

On the other hand, firms like Peak XV Partners has trimmed the size of its fund. In an unusual move, venture capital fund Peak XV Partners reduced the size of its $2.85-billion fund by 16 per cent, or $465 million, as it looks to deploy capital more judiciously and return uninvested monies to its sponsors or limited partners (LPs), amid a buoyant public market.

According to Tracxn’s ‘Geo Annual Report – India Tech – 2024’, India was the third-highest recipient of funding, following the United States and the United Kingdom.