We’re thrilled to announce that our longtime friend, Amit Jhawar, is joining Accel as a Venture Partner. In this role, he’ll advise our companies and help make new investments.

We’ve gotten to know Amit over the last decade where he played a foundational role in building Braintree and Venmo (both Accel portfolio companies).

Amit joined Braintree in 2011 as COO & CFO when it was a 30-person, Chicago startup that had just taken a $32M investment from us (after ‘bootstrapping’ for a number of years). Since that time, Amit helped scale Braintree to a global payments player, acquire Venmo, and lead the company through its sale to PayPal in 2013.

Within PayPal, Amit has been running the Venmo business for the last few years. On Amit and team’s watch, Venmo has grown from 15k active users in 2012 to over 52 million today.

We’ve been fortunate that Amit has applied all his experience to informally mentoring a number of Accel founders of late, including the teams at Galileo and 1Password. So we’re excited to have him start working with us full-time.

Amit is particularly fluent in building API-based businesses (like Braintree) and consumer brands (like Venmo), growing teams outside the Bay Area (with Braintree and Venmo HQ’d in Chicago and New York, respectively), and of course, all-things payments. Plus—and most importantly—he’s a terrific person and leader that we’ve all benefited from knowing (and learned a lot from) over the last decade. We're sure that anyone who meets him in this new role will feel the same.

Please join us in welcoming Amit to the team!

—The Accel Partners

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