Storied investors Accel and Prosus have launched a new investment partnership to back Indian startups from day zero, targeting founders building large-scale solutions with the potential to serve the masses in the South Asian nation.
Announced on Monday, the collaboration marks the first time Prosus is investing at the formation stage. Both firms will co-invest from a startup’s earliest days, with a focus on companies addressing systemic challenges across sectors such as automation, energy transition, internet services, and manufacturing.
India, the world’s most populous country with over 1.4 billion people, is seeing rapid growth in its digital economy. The country has more than a billion internet users and over 700 million smartphone users, making it the second-largest smartphone market after China. The Indian government-backed platforms such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Aadhaar have created a digital infrastructure that enables startups to build and scale services quickly. Yet much of India’s startup activity to date has focused on adapting global business models, with fewer companies tackling large-scale domestic challenges. The Accel–Prosus alliance is looking to change that.
The partnership expands Accel’s early-stage founder program, Atoms X, launched in July to back what the firm calls “leap tech” startups — companies working on large-scale, systems-driven problems.
“We feel now the time is right for the Indian startup ecosystem to move from adapting global businesses to creating Indian models that help India leapfrog its journey in becoming a developed country,” said Pratik Agarwal, a partner at Accel, in an interview.
He added that startups working on population-scale solutions often struggle to raise sufficient early capital, given their long gestation periods and the risk of heavy dilution before reaching meaningful traction.
“Hopefully, we are bringing a lot more early capital to them at the right time so that they can make substantial progress without going through several rounds of false starts before they make progress,” he told TechCrunch.
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