Palo Alto-based Accel is an early and growth-stage venture capital firm that helps a global community of entrepreneurs. In a recent development, the VC announced the close of three funds totaling $3.05 billion to back early-stage startups and grow capital for companies that are more mature.
To be specific, Accel announced its 15th early-stage US funding at $650 million, seventh early-stage European and Israeli fund also worth the same and sixth global growth-stage fund worth $1.75 billion. With the investment, Accel intends to back 20 to 30 companies per fund with the average investment ranging from $50 million to $75 million from the growth fund and $75 million to $100 million from the global Leaders fund.
The VC firm is eyeing to invest in companies outside of Silicon Valley and has an office in London too. With a worldwide investment plan, the company has already backed several global companies and includes Slack, CrowdStrike, and UiPath among several others in its portfolio. Having said that, here are 10 winning companies in the UK that have received investments from Accel.
Hopin
Founder/s: Johnny Boufarhat
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: £446M
Hopin is a London-based virtual and hybrid experiences platform, which lets attendees learn, connect, and interact with people all over the world. The Zoom rival became a double unicorn last year amidst the pandemic as the concept of virtual events caught the trend while travel and in-person events were cancelled all over the world.
Notably, Accel has been investing in Hopin consistently with the latest investment from the VC being in November 2020. The virtual event provider bagged $125 million (nearly £94.3 million) Series B funding in a round led by existing investor IVP. New investors including Tiger Global, Coatu and DFJ Growth also took part in the funding round alongside returning investors Accel, Salesforce Ventures, Seedcamp, and Northzone.
Monzo
Founder/s: Tom Blomfield, Jason Bates, Paul Rippon, Jonas Huckestein, Gary Dolman
Founded year: 2015
Total funding: £534M
London-based Monzo is a digital-only bank platform and marketplace that allows customers to access a range of products and services. This bank is targeted at people who want to get things done in a click. The platform is focused on building the best current account in the world and ultimately works with a range of other providers so that it can be an intelligent hub for your entire financial life.
In December 2020, the challenger bank secured £60 million in funding from new investors including Deliveroo and Stripe investor Novator, Kaiser, and TED Global and existing investor Goodwater and Accel along with a slew of investors.
Snyk
Founder/s: Assaf Hefetz, Danny Grander, Guy Podjarny
Founded year: 2015
Total funding: £587M
Synk is a London-based cloud-native application security leader. In March this year, the company closed $300 million (nearly £215 million) in a Series E funding round and reaches a valuation of $4.7 billion. This investment round was co-led by Accel and Tiger Global along with participation from a slew of existing investors and new investors as well. Snyk will use the investment to serve the fast-growing global demand for the company’s Cloud Native Application Security Platform.
Tessian
Founder/s: Edward Bishop, Thomas Adams, Tim Sadler
Founded year: 2013
Total funding: £95M
London-based Tessian is a cybersecurity company that uses machine learning to automatically predict and eliminate advanced threats on email caused by human error. Tessian bagged $65 million (nearly £46 million) in a Series C funding round led by March Capital, a VC firm that had backed cybersecurity unicorns alongside existing investors including Accel, Latitude, Balderton Capital, and Sequoia Capital and new investor Schroder Adveq. With this, its valuation is now $500 million (nearly £353 million).
Tessian wants to use the investment to accelerate its mission of quantifying and preventing human risk in global enterprises and empowering people to do their best work without security getting in the way.
Causal
Founder/s: Lukas Köbis, Taimur Abdaal
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: £3.3M
Causal is a London-based startup that lets you build financial models effortlessly and share them with interactive, visual dashboards that everyone will understand. The Microsoft Excel alternative lets users build their models out of variables, which they can then link together in simple plain-English formulae. This makes it easy to understand and quick to build as well.
In April 2021, Causal secured a $4.2 million (nearly £3 million) funding in a seed round, thereby bringing the total funding to $5.5 million (approx £4 million). The round was led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain, and others. Causal will use the investment to grow the engineering team and take the product to market.
Weaveworks
Founder/s: Alexis Richardson, Matthias Radestock
Founded year: 2014
Total funding: £44M
London-based Weaveworks is a GitOps-powered Kubernetes platform provider. The company helps infrastructure and platform teams build and operate their own Kubernetes application platform whether in the cloud, at the edge, or on-premise. The platform is built on open-source and is designed to work along with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and simplify the adoption of Kubernetes on AWS.
In December 2020, Weaveworks raised $36.7 million (nearly £31.5 million) in a Series C funding round led by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ericsson, Orange Ventures, SonaeIM and Telekom Investment Pool (TIP) and existing investors Accel, GV, and Redline Capital. It was announced that the investment will be used to enhance its platform and accelerate market expansion.
Deliveroo
Founder/s: Will Shu, Greg Orlowski
Founded year: 2012
Total funding: £1.3B
Deliveroo is an online food delivery service that allows users to order restaurant meals using the web and mobile. The London company allows users to order food from local restaurants. Deliveroo has supported the three sides of its marketplace throughout the pandemic by investing to support local restaurants through targeted marketing campaigns, reducing onboarding fees, increasing the speed of payments, developing new services such as Table Service and charging 0% commission on Pick Up orders.
While Deliveroo raised $180 million (nearly £132 million) in the latest funding round in January this year, Accel along with Index Ventures, DST Global, and a slew of other investors pumped in $385 million (nearly £280 million) in the food delivery company back in 2017.
Primer
Founder/s: Gabriel Le Roux, Paul Anthony
Founded year: 2020
Total Funding: £20M
Primer is a London startup that enables e-commerce merchants and online payments facilitators to consolidate their payments services stack and connect third-party services seamlessly.
In January 2021, Primer raised £14 million Series A funding in November last year led by Accel and existing investors SpeedInvest, Balderton, and Seedcamp along with RTP Global. Back then, it was announced that the funds will be used to expand business development efforts globally and scale its remote-first product and engineering organisation.
ITCH
Founder/s: Jonny Gould, Adam Gould, James Cox, Charlotte Harper
Founded year: 2018
Total funding: £12.3M
Based out of London, ITCH is a subscription-based pet wellbeing startup. The company is on a mission to energise and inject personality into the staid flea prevention market with a monthly flea and worming home delivery service. ITCH offers a quicker, cheaper, and more convenient alternative for preventing flea infestations, worming issues and generally providing preventive care for pets, the platform also provides calming treats and skin, joint and dental product add-ons.
Late last year, ITCH secured £7.25 million in early-stage investment from Accel Partners and Seedcamp. It announced that the funds will be used to expand into the pet insurance sector and launch into the US, expand into the pet insurance sector, and fuel further development of its data platform.
Humio
Founder/s: Christian Hvidtved, Kresten Krab
Founded year: 2016
Total funding: £23M
London-based Humio provides a live observability platform, which enables data aggregation, exploration, reporting, and analysis from a range of sources. Its data storage and in-memory search/query engine technologies provide customers cost-competitive log management and analysis solution, all while requiring significantly less hardware and engineering resources. Early last year, the log management software company Humio, which has been acquired by Crowdstrike, bagged £16 million in a Series B funding round led by Dell Technologies Capital and existing investor Accel.
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