Accel, Prosus Launch Atoms X to Back India’s LeapTech Startups

News

1. California’s Genspark Enters AI Unicorn Club with $200 Million Round

2. OpenAI Taps Intel’s Sachin Katti to Build Compute Backbone for AGI

3. Flipkart Brings Voice-Led Wholesale Ordering to WhatsApp with Sarvam AI

4. Varun Berry Steps Down at Britannia, Rakshit Hargave to Take Over

5. OpenAI Issues Warning on AI’s Acceleration From Inside the Fast Lane

6. Intel Eyes Deeper India Play in Chips, AI

Venture capital firm Accel has partnered with Prosus Ventures, the investment arm of Dutch tech investor Prosus N.V., to launch Atoms X, an expanded early-stage founder program aimed at backing India’s most ambitious deep tech startups.

Part of Accel’s broader Atoms initiative, Atoms X will focus on what the firms call “LeapTech” startups, or ventures that apply scientific research, advanced engineering, and frontier technology to solve long-term, high-complexity problems. 

These are companies that require significant conviction before commercial validation and often take years to mature.

Target sectors include advanced manufacturing, clean energy, and artificial intelligence-driven automation. 

The program is designed to support ideas that could eventually reshape entire industries. Selected startups will receive initial seed funding between $100,000 and $1 million, with the potential to scale up to $2 million in co-investment from both Accel and Prosus.

India’s growing technical talent, scale, and R&D ecosystem make it a fertile ground for such work, building on the country’s earlier waves of innovation, from digital infrastructure such as UPI and Jio to a push toward local manufacturing, according to Accel.

For Prosus Ventures, Atoms X marks its first collaboration of this kind globally, engaging with entrepreneurs at the very earliest stages of company-building, when ideas are still nascent and traditional venture funding is often hard to access. 

Through this partnership, Prosus will provide long-term mentorship and operational support in addition to patient capital.

Since its launch in 2021, the original Atoms program has backed more than 40 startups, over 30% of which have raised follow-on funding. 

With Atoms X, Accel is expanding its scope to support what it calls “impossible ideas,” or projects that may appear too risky or ambitious at the outset, but that hold the potential to fundamentally alter how industries operate.