Accel in India

We are deeply saddened by the passing of our colleague Akhilesh. Akhilesh joined Accel in October 2025 with a focus on deep-tech. In a short time, he built a meaningful body of work and earned a special place in the deep-tech community, and a more special one among us who worked alongside him. He was generous with his time, quick to believe in people, and unfailingly kind. He brought energy and laughter into every room. We feel his absence. The outpouring of grief from founders, investors, and friends describes exactly the person we knew. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends. Rest well, Akhilesh.

This report tracks something worth noting from an Indian perspective: a unicorn doesn't stop mattering once it's built. It keeps producing, in the founders it trains and the startups that follow. 322 unicorns across Europe and Israel have generated over 2,300 new companies this way, raising more than $42B.

People don't eat the same way every day. They want healthy food on Monday, pizza on Friday, and biryani on Sunday. Six months into building EatFit, @ankitnagori27, Founder & CEO of @the_curefoods, realized the opportunity wasn't just health food. It was understanding how India actually eats. That insight changed the trajectory of Curefoods. In the latest episode of #InflectionPoint, Ankit reflects on the decision to look beyond a single category and what happened next. @prashanthp • #AccelFamily

Our 2026 Founders Factory report is now live! Europe and Israel's startup ecosystem has entered a new phase. Employees from 322 VC-backed unicorns have gone on to found more than 2,300 startups across the region, raising over $42B and creating a self-sustaining ecosystem where talent, experience and capital compound with each generation of founders. At the same time, AI is accelerating this momentum, creating a new generation of companies that are scaling from zero to unicorn status in record time. In this year's report, produced in partnership with @dealroomco and @RevelioLabs, we explore: ➡️ How more than 2,300 startups have emerged from Europe and Israel's unicorn founder factories ➡️ How AI is creating Europe’s fastest-ever unicorns, with 1 in 5 new unicorns since 2023 reaching a $1B valuation in under 2 years ➡️ Which European startup ecosystems are creating the most founder factories, with London producing more than any other city while Sweden’s founder factories generate nearly 3 times more startups per unicorn than the European average ➡️ How the archetype of Europe’s newest unicorn founders is changing, with today’s founders more likely to come from Big Tech and academia Read the full report here ⬇️ accel.com/founder-factory

Key takeaways: ✅ Define the outcome before you price it. Outcome-based pricing only works when you and your customer agree on what success looks like. ✅ Build the GTM motion around buyer segments. Different customers need different sales motions, budgets, and levels of support. ✅ Test for willingness to pay the right way. Don't ask customers what they'd pay. Ask the price at which it feels too cheap to trust, and the price at which it feels too expensive to consider. The gap between those is your range. ✅ Let the human equivalent start the conversation, not end it. If a person were doing the work, how would you pay them? That points you toward a model, but AI scales nothing like a human, so pressure-test it against your actual marginal cost before you commit. ✅ Know whether you're solving for penetration or premiumisation. Each requires a different strategy, operating model, and set of metrics. ✅ Measure re-acquisition rates. If former customers keep coming back, you may be paying CAC twice to paper over a retention problem. Worth separating the genuine churn-and-return from demand that was always going to be episodic. @_pagarwal • @akhi_agarwal • @simonkucher (2/2)

On Monday, we brought together founders, operators, and strategists in Bengaluru for a full day on unlocking profitable growth: what pricing and growth strategies look like for startups building in AI. The last decade rewarded companies that grew fast and figured out the margins later. That trade-off is getting harder to make. AI is reshaping cost structures, capital is more expensive, and the question that boards are now asking is not how fast you grew but whether that growth actually holds up to unit economics. Pratik Agarwal, Partner at Accel, and Amit Kumar, Managing Partner, India at Simon-Kucher, hosted the day alongside academics from @IIMAhmedabad, leaders from @Google, and operators who've shaped pricing at some of India's most successful startups, from @Swiggy, @Razorpay, @Sprinkl, and @Flipkart. (1/2)

Read more here: economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/funding/q…

Modern satellites generate a lot of data every day. But getting that data back to Earth is becoming a bottleneck. Satellites still mostly talk to the ground over radio. But radio has limits: only so much spectrum to go around, too much traffic competing for it, and short windows to send during each pass. The result is a growing backlog of valuable data waiting to come down. QOSMIC (@QOSMIC__Space) is building the answer. The company is replacing traditional radio links with laser-based optical communications, enabling satellites to transmit data back to Earth at significantly higher speeds and capacities. By developing both optical ground stations and optical communication terminals for satellites, they are building a complete end-to-end optical communications stack. In under a year, founders Shreyaans Jain (@Jain_Shrey_), Rohit Ramakrishnan (@RohitKR79), and Aloke Kumar (@aalokelab) proved their optical communications stack over a 10-kilometre link on the ground. They showed the full chain working outside the lab: pointing the beam, locking on, tracking the target, and moving data at high speed. @mbaccel • @_pagarwal • #AccelFamily

The images in this tweet break down the full playbook and what the best teams are doing differently. (3/3)

Here is what the room agreed on: 1/ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐲𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐝. They walk in already informed, and the window to differentiate is the first call, not the pitch deck. 2/ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲. Even OpenAI and Anthropic still run pilots. 3/𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐏𝐎𝐂 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡. How you structure, price, and close it is what separates the deals that convert from the ones that stall. 4/ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭. New technical roles are doing what entire sales floors used to do: one fills the pipeline, one lands the deal. 5/ 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐝, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲. The model that's working: open on outcomes, close on the platform. Land first, even at cost. Logos and data compound, early margin doesn't. 6/ 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐝, 𝐭𝐨𝐨. The founder is still the strongest first channel. For India-origin companies, the path to global success runs through a world-class Indian reference first. (2/3)

The GTM playbook for AI companies is still being written. Last week, we got in a room with some of the people helping define it. Shekhar Kirani (@skirani), Partner at @Accel, sat down with Barathram A, Partner at @McKinsey, who advises frontier labs, hyperscalers, and AI-native companies on building commercial motions, and Varun Anand, Co-founder of Clay, who built one of the defining GTM platforms for AI-native sales teams and had to develop the methodology while shipping the product. (1/3)

Read our Advanced Manufacturing Report here: events-in.accel.com/advanced-manuf…

This week, India's deep tech ecosystem took the global stage at Bharat Innovates 2026 (@BharatInnov2026) in Nice, France, a national initiative by the Ministry of Education to showcase the country's most promising ventures in this space to the world. Prashanth Prakash (@prashanthp), Partner at @Accel, was at the event and on the sidelines, had the opportunity to interact with Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@PMOIndia). He also moderated a panel on navigating global defence supply chains and where startups fit in building resilient defence ecosystems. The conversation surfaced a clear conviction: deep tech startups are no longer on the periphery of defence, they're central to it. Building sovereign capability, the panel concluded, comes down to focused investment on specific regions with existing supply chain advantages, and embedding advanced technology into universities so the next generation learns on real infrastructure, not just in theory. Five of the startups we're proud to back are doing exactly that. @RekiseMarine, @ND_Aerospace, @Fabheads, @DetectTechAI, and @SigTuple were among the ventures handpicked to represent India at Bharat Innovates this year. Swipe through to learn more about these startups.

For years, I’ve seen founders live through moments when the plans have failed & the (most pertinent) question is: what now? "Down But Not Out" stays in those moments. Grateful to @anadianant,@avinashraghava for shaping it with me, all the founders that trusted us with their life stories. Out 26 June. @gskush79 @raghugnandan @AneeshBReddy @pothash @ravipratap @kishoreNatarjan, KK (Ninjacart), Mukesh (Zopsmart), Sanjay (Tejas), Akash Gupta (GO)!

Read more here: techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/pra…

In tax, law, finance, government, and healthcare, AI still cannot guarantee its answers are correct. A doctor still reads the diagnosis. A lawyer still checks the contract. A tax accountant still signs the return. Not because AI cannot produce an answer, but because when it is wrong in a high-stakes domain, it cannot be held responsible. That is AI's accountability gap. And @PramaanaLabs is building the fix. Pramaana applies formal verification to these domains at scale, converting complex knowledge like tax codes, clinical protocols, and financial regulations into a formal language that machines can reason over with mathematical certainty. The system either returns a machine-checkable proof that an answer is correct or shows exactly where the reasoning breaks. If it cannot prove an answer, it will not provide one. What makes this particularly compelling is the team's proximity to the problem. Ranjan Rajagopalan (@ranjan_vittal), Krishnan Raghavan (@krishnan_rag), and Sanjay Ganapathy Subramaniam spent years building AI systems at Google Maps, Glean, and Google DeepMind, confronting firsthand the challenges of accuracy, reliability, and trust that they are now setting out to solve. Partnering with Pramaana Labs to take AI from probably right to provably right. @prashanthp • @anagh_prasad • #AccelFamily

The legal team at Accel has been named PE & VC In-House Team of the Year at the @ALB_Magazine India Law Awards 2026. This team is at the centre of how we operate. They help us navigate complexity, move with confidence, and get the important decisions right: a new investment, a fund matter, a regulatory question, or support for a portfolio company. When a startup needs to close a round, resolve a structuring question, or get a hard call right under pressure, this is the team that makes it happen. ⁠Congratulations to a team whose impact and judgment is felt across everything we do and everyone we back.

Read more here: accel.com/news/unlocking…

Cross-border payments still run on infrastructure built decades ago. Settlements take days, costs remain high, and businesses are forced to pre-fund accounts across countries, leaving $4 trillion in working capital sitting idle globally. OpenFX (@openfx_) is addressing this by using stablecoins as a settlement layer to enable near-instant FX conversion across any currency pair, 24x7, eliminating the need for traditional intermediary banking networks. Read this blog by Manasi Shah and Shekhar Kirani (@skirani) on why we continue our partnership with OpenFX, and our conviction in rebuilding the rails global business runs on. @prabhakar2reddy • #AccelFamily