Welcome, Matt Robinson!
We’re thrilled to welcome Matt Robinson to Accel as our newest early-stage partner in London where he’ll work with our team on finding and partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs across Europe and Israel.
Our shared history is a long and fruitful one of both investing in Matt and co-investing alongside him. We first started working together more than a decade ago when he co-founded GoCardless alongside Hiroki Takeuchi and Tom Blomfield. Accel led the seed round when GoCardless emerged from Y Combinator back in 2011 and then went on to co-lead the Series A a couple of years later forming a deeper partnership with the company. We’ve supported Matt and the GoCardless team on their journey ever since.
It’s been a joy to see Matt, together with his co-founders, build GoCardless into a world leading recurring payment company. He was pivotal in building the team, product and GTM from scratch and we’ve continued to work closely together as he remained an active board member until 2023. The company now processes more than $35B in payments annually across 30 countries on behalf of more than 85,000 businesses.
Having built a B2B business, Matt wanted to learn about building for consumers. Having experienced the problem firsthand, he set his sights on redefining home selling in the UK and founded Nested in 2016. Today, the company offers a platform used by estate agents throughout the UK, with market leading tech and a loved consumer brand.
We’ve watched Matt grow over the past 14 years as he’s become a fantastic example of the talent flywheel that’s now spinning in Europe. Not only is he a serial entrepreneur, equipped with the industry knowledge, growth ambitions and technical expertise to launch new companies, but he has always taken the time to support the next generation of founders. He is now one of the UK’s most active and respected angel investors, investing in great founders at companies such as Cleo, Incident.io, and Wayve.ai. He’s also a co-investor in a number of early stage companies alongside Accel where we’ve loved working together and have had a shared view on the right way to empower and support founders to build great companies.
With his firsthand experience as a founder and deep connections in the ecosystem, Matt is ideally positioned to not only provide our portfolio with learnings to help them navigate the path ahead but also to spot the next generation of founders early on.
Welcome (back) to the Accel family, Matt. It’s great to be working together again!