Accel raises another $500M to invest in Europe and Israel

The firm now has $2.5 billion under management for those two regions

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Less than a month after it raised $2 billion across two funds, early-stage venture firm Accel Partners is back already with even more funding.

The firm has raised another $500 million, it has been confirmed to VatorNews. The new funding will be earmarked for investments in Europe and Israel, and will be called Accel London V.

Founded in 1983, Accel has grown to be one of the premiere Silicon Valley investment firms. It's portfolio includes Atlassian, Braintree, Cloudera, Dropbox, Dropcam, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, MoPub, Slack, Spotify, and Vox Media. In a list of the top 100 active venture capitalists, Accel had six of them. 

Accel had raised Accel London IV, a $245 million fund, back in 2013 and some of its recent investments in Europe have included Finnish mobile game developer Supercell; Russian classified advertising site Vito; London-based food delivery company Deliveroo; French ride-sharing service BlaBlaCar; and German online price comparison company Check24.

Accel will use the new fund to make early-stage investments, with a focus on marketplaces, software-as-a-service and new enterprise companies. It will also invest in developer tools for big data analytics.

Investors in Accel London V include charities, U.S. university endowments, pensions and sovereign wealth. Accel now has $2.5 billion under management in Europe and Israel.

Venture capital fundraising in 2016

Venture firms in the United States raised $12 billion in the first quarter of this year. Not only does that equal an increase of dollars by 59 percent year-to-year, it's the best fundraising quarter since Q2 of 2006, when $14.3 billion was raised. 

The news wasn't all good, though: the funding was raised across 57 funds,  a 17 percent decrease year-to-year. That breaks down to 43 follow-on funds, a 10 percent decrease from Q1 2015, and 14 new funds, a 33 percent decrease.

On a quarter-to-quarter basis, the amount of dollars more than doubled, from $5.5 billion, and the number of funds jumped 12 percent. 

Other big funds raised so far this year include Founders Fund. which raised $1.3 billion for its sixth fund, the largest fundraising commitment of the first quarter.

They also included General Catalyst, which raised an $845 million fund, and Battery Ventures, which was able to raise $950 million, in February. In March, Lightspeed Venture Partners raised $1.2 billion across two funds.

The largest new fund reporting commitments during the first quarter of 2016 was from 1955 Capital, which raised $200 million for the firm’s inaugural fund.

The fact that firms are still getting such big checks in a down market explains why deal sizes are actually going up. 

VC investments were down 18.5 percent quarter-to-quarter in Q1, but while the number of companies getting money is way down, the number of dollars actually were not affected. There was $30 billion invested in the quarter, down only 6 percent from Q1 2015, but also up 13 percent from Q4 2015, when $26.6 billion was invested.

As such, the median deal size increased from $1.6 million in Q1 2015 to $2.3 million in Q1 2016.

VatorNews reached out to Accel for confirmation of the new fund and we will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: venturebeat.com)