Accel Partners Further Strengthens Investment Team

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Accel Partners, the global venture capital firm, today announced that Kobie Fuller has joined the firm as Principal. Additionally, John Locke has been promoted to Principal. Both will focus on supporting and continuing to build the firm's growth-stage efforts and portfolio companies.

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Accel Partners' commitment to hiring and cultivating the best and brightest investment team remains a core part of the firm's longevity and success.

Kobie Fuller has more than 10 years of experience in funding and building software companies, and adds highly specialized marketing technology expertise to Accel's investment team. At Accel he will help identify and work with entrepreneurs who are building category-defining companies.

"Kobie has a unique operating and investing background that perfectly matches our approach at Accel," said Ryan Sweeney, general partner, Accel Partners. He has helped scale teams and companies during phases of rapid growth as both a CMO and successful growth investor, and I'm very excited to announce that he's now part of our team."

Most recently, Kobie spent two years as the Chief Marketing Officer of REVOLVE clothing, a leading online retailer, where he built the marketing team and instituted automation and analytics across his department. Prior to that, he spent nearly a decade as an investor focused on identifying, funding and building leading software companies, such as Exact Target, Monetate, Instructure and Loyalty Lab. He was a founding member of OpenView Venture Partners, where he helped lead the initial fund formation and raised over $240 million in committed capital. Prior to OpenView, Kobie was an investor at Insight Venture Partners. Kobie graduated from Harvard University.

John Locke has been an integral member of the investment team at Accel since 2009. Over the past 4 years he has focused on growth companies and has played a critical role in many of the firm's investments including, but not limited to, Capital Access Networks, Rovio (Angry Birds), LightSpeed and Tenable. Prior to Accel, he was an investor at both Housatonic Partners and Summit Partners. John is a graduate of Princeton University.

"John continues to impress the entire partnership with his work ethic, dedication to the firm, and his demonstrated ability to identify great entrepreneurs and disruptive new market opportunities," said Jim Breyer, general partner, Accel Partners. "He embodies our prepared mind investing philosophy and applies a disciplined and informed approach to investing. We are grateful to have him on our team and I personally have enjoyed directly working with John as his career has progressed at Accel."

Accel Partners' growth-stage investment effort is currently comprised of 15 dedicated investment professionals, and focuses on proactively finding outstanding entrepreneurs operating rapidly expanding, bootstrapped technology companies. Notable Accel growth investments include: Atlassian, NextG Networks, Groupon, Braintree, Rovio, Facebook, Qualtrics, lynda.com, Nimble Storage, Dealer.com, 99designs, OzForex, Etsy, Squarespace, Cloudera, Airwatch, and others.

About Accel Partners

Founded in 1983, and managing over $9.6 billion in capital, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally in companies from early to growth-stage using dedicated teams and market specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London, and Bangalore, as well as in China via its partnership with IDG-Accel.

Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful technology companies, many of which have defined their technology categories, including: AdMob, Agile Software, Alfresco, Angry Birds (Rovio), Atlassian, BBN, Bonobos, Braintree, Brightcove, Cloudera, ComScore, Diapers.com (Quidsi), Dropbox, Etsy, Exclusively.in, Facebook, Flipkart, Fusion-IO, Gameforge, Groupon, Imperva, Infinera, Interwoven, JBoss, Kayak, Lookout, lynda.com, Macromedia, metroPCS, MoPub, Myntra, NextG Networks, Nimble Storage, Polycom/PictureTel, Playfish, Portal Software, Qualtrics, QlikTech, Rapt, Real Networks, Redback, Responsys, Riverbed, Spotify, Squarespace, SunRun, Supercell, Trulia, UUNet, Veritas, Walmart.com, Wonga, XenSource and Zimbra.

For more information, please visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com or find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.

SOURCE Accel Partners