Venture capital firm ACCEL and global tech investor Prosus on Tuesday announced the inaugural cohort of their Atoms X programme, backing six early-stage startups building frontier technologies across sectors such as climate infrastructure, space communications, aerospace, and healthcare.
Launched in 2021, Atoms is Accel’s flagship pre-seed program, while Atoms X is a new track within that, led by partner Pratik Agarwal, in partnership with Prosus, headed by Ashutosh Sharma in India. This track will fund “leaptech” startups, which are innovations that radically improve the human experience through new products and technologies.
These are ideas take years to build, and demand early, conviction-led support, the investors say. Accel has already partnered with leaptech startups like Posha, which makes autonomous kitchen robots, air taxi startup Sarla Aviation, internet services aggregator Wiom, and Haber, which offers an AI-led manufacturing intelligence platform.
The fresh Atoms X cohort
The fresh Atoms X cohort is selected from over 2,000 applications. “We’re not looking for founders who are going to start seven different companies in their lifetime. We are looking for founders who have one company in them, and they’re building over long arcs versus short cycles of hype,” Agarwal says.
The Atoms X programme departs from traditional venture models by offering a less dilutive structure. Only 60% of the investment is tied to immediate equity, while the remaining 40% is structured as an uncapped convertible instrument that converts in a future round. This allows founders to access more upfront capital while deferring dilution.
Agarwal says conventional venture investing models are often not suited for ambitious, “off-the-map” ideas that require longer gestation periods. The goal is to give them enough capital, support, and resources so they can progress at a pace that’s natural to their business.
“If the orthodox venture model could do justice to this opportunity, there was no requirement of a special program like this,” adds Prosus’s Sharma. Under the partnership, Prosus will match Accel’s investment in each startup.
Members of the latest cohort
The first cohort includes startups such as Dognosis, which uses dogs and AI models to sniff out cancers from breath samples, Ethereal Exploration Guild, which is developing fully reusable orbital launch vehicles that dramatically reduce launch costs to $500/kg, and Praan, which is building indoor air purification tech.
Other startups include Qosmic, focused on high-speed optical satellite communication, Ferra, which offers at-home strength training systems, and a stealth startup working on brain-computer interfaces.