Venture firm Accel is known for making one of the most lucrative start-up bets in history, parlaying an early $12.2 million investment in Facebook into a stake worth over $9 billion at the time of the company’s IPO in 2012.
Seven years later, Accel is enjoying a comparable stretch of success.
The firm is the biggest investor in Slack, owning a 23.8% stake ahead of the messaging app’s upcoming public market debut on Thursday. Based on a reference price of $26 a share provided by the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, Accel’s shares are worth about $3.1 billion.
That’s a decade after the firm put $1.5 million into the seed round of a gaming company called Tiny Speck, which later morphed into Slack.