Accel Partners raises $100M for second Big Data fund

Venture capital firm Accel Partners has raised an additional $100 million fund for investment in Big Data companies. This follows a previous fund with a similar corpus. Accel has also added Anthony Deighton, CTO of QlikTech Inc., and Shlomo Kramer, CEO of Imperva, to the Big Data Fund Advisory Council.

Christened Big Data Fund 2, it will support entrepreneurs who are using the technology platforms built in the first wave of Big Data startups to create data driven software (DDS), the VC firm said in a Press statement.

DDS will automatically harness data from a variety of sources, analyse the same and present real-time insights to business end-users (for instance, HR recruiters, sales representatives, IT managers, business analysts, etc.).

"We are seeing an accelerated rate of innovation in Big Data, with the newest generation of entrepreneurs re-imagining ways to extract the most value out of it and fundamentally change the way we work and process information," said Ping Li, partner at Accel Partners.

Accel Partners has already funded a number of companies building data infrastructure platforms and DDS. These include Cloudera, Couchbase, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Opower, Prismatic, QlikTech Inc., RelateIQ, Sumo Logic and Trifacta.

It could not be immediately ascertained whether the new international fund will also look at investing in India, as Accel has a separate India-focused fund. We have sent an e-mail query to the company spokesperson for further details and will update the news when we have more information.

Accel India, which operates from Bangalore, raised its third India fund in late 2011, with a corpus of $155 million. Accel India III is nearly two-and-a-half times bigger than its predecessor, Accel India Venture Fund II, which raised $60 million in 2008. Its total asset under management is around $235 million across three early-stage funds.

Accel, one of the more active VC firms in India, has struck four deals since January this year. There are three investments in the internet space besides another investment in Mumbai and Silicon Valley-based ScaleArc, a database infrastructure software developer. Earlier, Accel had also backed data analytics firm Mu Sigma.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)