Accel Partners, the venture capital firm which has backed Facebook and Groupon, has announced the launch of its global $100 million Big Data Fund which will invest in “innovative entrepreneurs seeking to build category-defining companies at every layer of the Big Data stack.”
Accel Partners will manage its Big Data Fund across global offices in the USA, the UK, China and India.
Accel’s Big Data Fund will look to invest in next-generation storage and data management platforms besides software applications and services such as data analytics, vertical applications, mobile, etc.
“Big Data consistently drives innovation across our existing portfolio companies today and with the Big Data Fund, we are empowering a new set of entrepreneurs to be able to catch this wave. As Big Data platforms like Hadoop and others continue to gain rapid adoption and become more mainstream, we are seeing an exciting wave of next-generation business applications emerge,” said Ping Li of Accel Partners.
“These new applications – whether they address business intelligence or mobile or collaboration – will harness Big Data to deliver unique value and business insight to enterprises and end-users. Big Data is the future of IT and we believe Big Data will drive the next-generation of multi-billion-dollar software companies,” added Li.
Accel has allocated money for this initiative from its existing funds, including its latest venture capital and growth funds, a Wall Street Journal article has stated. It has also said that Accel India’s Subrata Mitra will look at investments in the country using this fund. Accel India, in its earlier avatar of Erasmic, has invested in Chicago-based data analytics firm Mu Sigma.
