Investing.com — Accel has raised $5 billion in new funds to continue backing artificial intelligence startups, the venture capital firm plans to announce Wednesday.
The firm will allocate $4 billion to its fifth Leaders fund, which focuses on writing large checks to late-stage startups globally. Accel also raised $650 million for a sidecar fund, which allows limited partners additional exposure to the firm’s biggest investments by selectively increasing the size of certain bets, particularly for existing portfolio companies, according to Accel partner Matt Weigand.
The California-based firm, founded in 1983, led Facebook’s Series A in 2005 and launched a growth-stage effort in 2008 to back companies including Spotify Technology SA (NYSE:SPOT) and Atlassian Corp (NASDAQ:TEAM). The new funds will increase the firm’s assets under management from $31 billion as of last year.
Accel’s recent investments have primarily focused on AI. Large funding rounds for AI startups have become more common, with financing for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI contributing to a record-breaking $250 billion in venture investments for US companies in the first quarter of the year, according to Crunchbase data.
Weigand said Accel plans to make 20 to 25 investments from its new $4 billion growth fund, with an average check size of about $200 million. He added that the firm expects its largest investments to grow bigger and plans to temporarily accelerate its investing pace.
Accel backed Cursor last June when the AI coding startup was valued at $9.9 billion. Earlier this year, Cursor was in talks to raise new capital at a valuation of about $50 billion. Accel also invested in Anthropic last year at a $183 billion valuation, less than half of the $380 billion valuation the frontier lab now commands.
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