Accel , the VC firm that has been involved some of the biggest deals in the most recent tech boom — startups backed include Facebook, Supercell, Dropbox, Deliveroo, Slack and Atlassian, Spotify, Flipkart and many more — has appointed a new partner, Luciana Lixandru.
Her rise at Accel — she was previously a principal investor — speaks to the evolution of the 30 year-old firm. Originally from Romania, and now based out of London, Lixandru is only the third female partner at Accel. (One other, Sonali De Rycker, also happens to be based out of London; and the other is Tracy Sedlock, the COO out of Palo Alto; another female partner, Theresia Gouw, left in 2014 to found Aspect Ventures.) She also, at 32, ties with one other partner, Nir Blumberger, as the youngest.
Lixandru focuses on consumer internet, marketplace and software companies, and she is very much on the hunt for new deals (no Brexit impact here, she told us in an interview).
She has been at the center of some of Accel’s more interesting investments out of London in her last five years with the firm.
They include Deliveroo, the food-delivery business that focuses on a smaller group of hip eateries and competes (fiercely) with the likes of Uber Eats and Amazon Restaurants among the newer guard of delivery startups, but also Just-Eat and others that have been around for years.
