Accel, Prosus Team Up to Back Indian Start-Ups From Day Zero

Top investors Accel and Prosus have set up a new early-stage investment platform to fund Indian start-ups from day zero, according to a TechCrunch report. The partnership, announced on Monday, will target founders building solutions to serve the masses in the South Asian nation.

Notably, this is the first time that Prosus is investing in Indian start-ups at the formation stage. Both investors will pour money in a start-up during its earliest days. This will focus on various sectors across internet services, manufacturing, automation, and energy transition.

The partnership will expand Accel’s early stage founder program called Atoms X, which was launched in July. It supports “leap tech start-ups”, which means companies working on large-scale and systems-driven problems.

“We feel now the time is right for the Indian start-up ecosystem to move from adapting global businesses to creating Indian models that help India leapfrog its journey in becoming a developed country,” Pratik Agarwal, a partner at Accel told TechCrunch.

He added that start-ups building products for larger populations often face a funding gap at the early stage, as their long development cycles increase the risk of significant dilution before meaningful traction kicks in.

The collaboration will see Prosus mirro Accel’s investment in each start-up, with initial checks ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. Notably, this figure can increase over the time.

“We could both continue to do our own things in this space, but given how large the ambition is with these founders, and given how difficult a problem that they are trying to solve, it made all the sense for us to put our resources together,” Ashutosh Sharma, head of India ecosystem at Prosus told the news publication.

So far, the duo has co-invested in several new-age Indian companies such as Swiggy, Urban Company, BlueStone, and IPO-bound Captain Fresh. Their most recent investment is in edtech start-up called Arivihan, KGeN (former Nazara Technology CEO Manish Agarwal’s decentralized gaming platform) and CodeKarna (developer productivity start-up).

Separately, Prosus has invested in late-stage start-ups across the globe. Its key Indian investments include Meesho, Swiggy, and PayU. On the other hand, Accel has already supported more than 40 start-ups through its early-stage program called ‘Atoms’.