The venture capital firm Accel announced that its newest $650 million fund. The eighth in India and Southeast Asia will concentrate on working with early-stage entrepreneurs to develop disruptive, category-defining companies that have a significant impact.

Accel, the company that has invested in businesses like Flipkart and Swiggy, will continue to collaborate with entrepreneurs in the fields of manufacturing, fintech, consumer brands, and artificial intelligence (AI) through this fund. Subcategories of emphasis have been identified by the firm for each of these themes.

‘Enterprise AI’ refers to the platforms that make use of agentic technologies, large language models (LLMs), and small language models (SLMs) to enable enterprise AI use cases. Another area of focus is “Services-as-Software,” where AI startups make better automation offerings by utilizing India's extensive IT services capabilities.

Moreover, “Vertical AI” concentrates on entrepreneurs utilizing India’s AI talent pool to incorporate AI into use cases that are specific to a given vertical.

Accel plans to focus on “Bharat” startups that serve the wealthiest 30% of households in India's Tier-2+ regions in the consumer segment. ‘India Native’ companies cater to the rising need for better service quality from Indian customers, and ‘aspirational brands’ try to take advantage of Gen Z’s expanding disposable income.

“We are sticking to our ‘prepared mind’ strategy and carefully selecting themes that have a lot of promise for the upcoming ten years and beyond. This entails creating thorough investment themes around prospects that we think will have an influence on both the domestic and international markets in India”, according to Accel Partner Barath Shankar Subramanian.