Jake Flomenberg and Nick Mehta Join Accel Partners as Principal and EIR

SILICON VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Accel Partners, a leading global venture capital and growth equity firm, announce the addition of Jake Flomenberg and Nick Mehta to their Palo Alto office.  

Both Jake and Nick are joining the Accel Partners team as the firm increases its footprint in the Big Data space. In November, Accel announced the $100M Accel Big Data Fund (http://www.accel.com/bigdata). Accel Partners' growing portfolio of Big Data investments includes Cloudera, Code 42 Software, Fusion-io, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Qualtrics, QlikView, and Vigilent amongst others. More recently, Accel's Big Data Conference drew hundreds of attendees to hear from speakers with past and present big data experience (http://www.accelbdc.com).

Jake Flomenberg -
Jake, formerly a Director of Product Management at Splunk, brings deep knowledge of enterprise software and the emerging Big Data market as well as operational and product strategy expertise to the firm. At Accel, Jake will focus on Big Data, cloud computing, SaaS, and storage technologies. He is part of the team responsible for Accel Partner's Big Data Fund which aims to fund transformative early stage and growth companies throughout the Big Data ecosystem.

"Jake's experience helping shape the product vision at some of the leading Big Data players will further strengthen our understanding of and reach in these areas. We are thrilled to have him join our team," said Ping Li, Partner at Accel. "Jake is truly on the forefront in terms of understanding how innovations in the Big Data market will change how business is done and how businesses compete."

"I am thrilled to join Accel Partners with its team of proven investors and track record of success," said Jake Flomenberg. "I am hopeful that my experiences will help us identify and build a new crop of category-defining, data-driven, and data-enabled companies."

Prior to Accel Partners, Jake was Director of Product Management at Splunk where he was responsible for Splunk's user interface and user experience as well as Splunk's Big Data strategy. Previously, he worked at Cloudera where he helped the founding team tackle a broad array of sales, marketing, and product issues. Jake holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science, Electrical Computer Engineering, and Economics from Duke University, an M.S.E in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Nick Mehta -
Nick joins Accel Partners from leading cloud email archiving and e-Discovery provider LiveOffice, where he was CEO from 2008 through 2012. Nick brings to Accel Partners a wealth of leadership experience in the areas of SaaS, cloud computing and Big Data, as well as extensive history in cost-effective enterprise go-to-market models. At Accel Partners, Nick will work with the team to identify breakthrough companies in enterprise applications and infrastructure.

"I'm very excited to join Accel Partners as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence," said Mehta. "SaaS has had a big impact on enterprise software, but I think we're just in the first quarter of the game. New, cost-effective, go-to-market models like freemium, evolving application form factors like mobile, and redefined Big Data architectures are creating huge opportunities for disrupting incumbent SaaS and software vendors, as well as defining new categories altogether. Accel Partners has been a pioneer in freemium, Big Data, and mobile, and I look forward to collaborating with them."

"Nick is a great addition to the Accel team," said Ping Li, Partner at Accel. "He brings a wealth of operating experience across diverse software and cloud sectors."  Previous Accel Partners Executives and Entrepreneurs-in-Residence have included: Amr Awadallah and Jeff Hammerbacher, Co-Founders of Cloudera; Nand Mulchandani, Co-Founder of ScaleXtreme; Jeff Rothschild, Architect at Facebook; Chuck Ganapathi, a former executive at Salesforce.com; and Jeff Weiner, current CEO of LinkedIn.

At LiveOffice, Nick's team helped thousands of businesses around the world store and search billions of objects and petabytes of data in the cloud. As CEO, Nick led the company's profitable growth to $25 MM in archiving revenue and successful sale to Symantec. Along the way, LiveOffice earned recognition as a Visionary by Gartner, as an Inc 5000 company, and as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist. Prior to LiveOffice, Nick was a Vice President at VERITAS Software (acquired by Symantec) where he held several leadership and product management roles including most notably running the market-leading Enterprise Vault (formerly KVS) email archiving and E-Discovery software business. Nick received an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College and an S.M. in Computer Science from Harvard University.

About Accel Partners
Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel Partners today invests globally 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 Partners has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies, many of which have defined their categories, including Angry Birds (Rovio), Atlassian, Braintree, Facebook, Groupon, Kayak, Playfish, QlikTech, Spotify, and Wonga. For more information, visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com or find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.

Contact: Keirsten Lampkin, 650-614-4800

SOURCE Accel Partners