Announcing #SeedToScale: A Platform to Fast-track Founders with Expert Insights and Community

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" - Old Proverb

When we started our journey in 2005 from a small office in Bangalore, there were 50M Indian internet users, and the combined market cap of Indian startups was $1B at best. But, like all of you entrepreneurs, we were dreamers too. We were confident that soon internet will be ubiquitous, consumers and businesses will transact online, and startups will power the tech ecosystem that touches all parts of our lives.

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Fast forward 15 years to today, India is a powerhouse in the global startup landscape and growing stronger each year. Armed with our experience, we are excited to contribute to that journey ahead, with our new initiative - SeedToScale.

Why SeedToScale?

At Accel, we have been extremely fortunate to partner with many category defining startups from their inception all the way to scale and exit. As a seed- focused fund, we started working with these founders when most of them worked out of a single bedroom or a home office. Over the past 15 years, we have learnt together with these 300 founders through their several ups and downs.
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Our biggest lesson through all these years is that it is essential to help the founders to lay the right foundation at the seed stage for their startups to succeed over the long term.

Through SeedToScale

Our aim is to share our insights and provide access to the startup community to every founder in India

Although we have worked closely with our portfolio founders, it pained us that we were only able to help a very small subset of the dreamers in India. Now, as over 3,000 startups are founded each year in India, we decided it is time to figure out a scalable way of helping as many founders as possible from their inception.
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We surveyed many founders and asked them how should Accel utilize its resources to empower them and three areas stood out:

• Make established startup building knowledge easily accessible to everyone
• Create targeted programs for catering to their individual needs
• Enable non-judgmental peer learning environment with experienced founders and investors

What is SeedToScale?

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. - Isaac Newton

Inspired by this timeless quote, we are extremely excited to announce SeedtoScale. Our aim is to fast track the journey new founders will traverse from seed to scale by benefitting from the combined wisdom of all founders who have been there and done that. We want to share highly-curated insights, networks and playbooks from founders, investors and operators of the Indian startup ecosystem.

Why Now?

As we look at the road ahead, we see the economy growing to more than $5T in the next decade, and the number of internet users growing past 750M. We see Indian startups not only playing a significant role in solving problems in India but also growing more ambitious and touching lives across the globe.
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“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” - Bill Gates

As tough as the environment looks this very moment, let us look at the decade ahead. We believe it is a great time to start up, and the SeedToScale platform is here to help you dream that outrageous dream and work systematically and smartly to achieve those dreams. After all, even the greatest of trees was one day, nothing but a seed. Dream Big!
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- Team Accel

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