AC
Accel
Venture capital firm · Founded 1983 · Active in 2026
Accel was founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz, and is one of the longest-running venture firms in tech. The 'Prepared Mind' philosophy — deep thesis work before each bet — has guided the firm for over four decades. Accel runs separate U.S. (Palo Alto), Europe (London), and India practices.
Signature bets include Jim Breyer's Facebook Series A, Slack, Atlassian, Spotify, UiPath, and Crowdstrike.
The 234 Accel Power Law outcomes ($100M+ revenue or $1B+ valuation).
Snapshot of where the outcomes are concentrated by country, sector, and stage entered.
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USA153
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India19
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UK9
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Germany8
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France8
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Canada6
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Sweden4
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Singapore4
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New Zealand2
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Australia2
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Finland2
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Ireland2
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Other B2B Software41
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Fintech40
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Cybersecurity32
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eCommerce & Marketplaces26
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Marketing23
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AI23
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Other21
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Transportation7
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Energy5
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Health Tech & Medtech4
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Edtech4
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Biotech & Life Sciences3
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Series B+91
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Series A92
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Seed34
Accel's 234 Power Law outcomes.
Where Accel's founders come from — and where they study.
420 founders across the 234 Power Law outcomes — split by country of origin, university attended, and the company they worked at before founding. Stanford University and Alphabet | Google are the deepest single pipelines.
Key people at Accel.
How does Accel stack up?
Accel in orange, your selection in blue and other colours. Pick from the global roster of 34 peer investors — scope by startup location or hit "Find similar shapes" to auto-pick the three closest. The funnel matrix mirrors the spider chart on the ranking page; the line chart shows each firm's share of unicorns minted in the selected startup location — peaks reveal vintage years.
Share of new unicorns per year
% of global unicorns minted that year, year by year · hover the chart to see which unicornsStage focus
Companies by entry stage and outcome tierSector focus
Companies per investor across the 10 highest-volume sectorsSentiment on X
What X is saying about Accel
An AI-synthesized read of the highest-engagement posts about Accel on X over the past 7 days. We rank by likes & retweets, ignore corporate channels, and surface the themes that broke out from real people.
Reading the room on X — pulling top posts and synthesizing themes…
Source: X recent search ranked by engagement (likes + retweets) · Synthesis by Claude · Cached for 1 hour
In the news
Latest news about Accel
Recent press, funding announcements, and portfolio moves mentioning Accel — pulled live from Dealroom's news feed.
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