Accel Scholars

The Accel Scholars program empowers undergraduate engineering and computer science students at UC Berkeley through unparalleled access to Silicon Valley, personalized mentorship, and industry-relevant curriculum. This program is a joint venture between Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel and UC Berkeley’s EECS department.

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Our Program

Accel Scholars is a “bridge to Silicon Valley” helping you get connected to leaders and peers throughout the startup ecosystem. Additionally, we teach a real-world practical curriculum, that is unfiltered and unvarnished, and that isn’t taught on campus - how to be an engineer in the real world, how to build your professional network, how to make sense of startup equity compensation, how to process and deal with failure, where do startup valuations come from etc.

Our Network

Join the most active alum community at Berkeley, with daily engagement. Comprised of 160+ former Cal Bears classes 2017-present who are now engineers, PMs, founders, and data scientists at leading companies such as Stripe, Figma, Hex, Headway, Slack, Scale, and more. Our network is filled with alums from ML@B, B@B, BESSA, Cal Hacks, AWE, MET, and HES, with critical mass in San Francisco, New York, and Seattle

Our Commitment

We endeavor to get to know each student in our program; individually, so that we can provide targeted, unique, and considered mentorship to help you begin your career on the best possible terms. We work with each student to surface opportunities, leverage our network in your favor, and coach you through recruiting to help you land in a compelling opportunity for the summer and onwards.

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Accel Scholars is open to all undergraduate students at UC Berkeley, but our programming is most applicable to intended or accepted CS, EECS, and data science majors. We do not have a GPA or age minimum. 

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The deadline for applications is: April 1st

Amit Kumar is a partner at Accel, where he leads investments across a number of categories, in leading companies such as Headway, Chainalysis, Unit, Tailscale, Airbyte, and others. Previously, Amit was a 3x founder and engineering leader, most notably co-founding CardSpring which was acquired by Twitter in 2016. Amit is a proud EECS alum, graduating from UC Berkeley in 2003.

Olivia Koshy is an early software engineer at Hex, a leading collaborative data science platform. Previously she was an engineer at Nines, an Accel-backed ML healthcare startup. Olivia graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in CS in 2019. During her time at Berkeley she was a founding exec for ML@B, CS mentor, and conducted research.

Accel is a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm that partners with exceptional founders from inception through all phases of growth. We’re fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with world-changing companies such as Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Spotify, Atlassian, Etsy, Jet.com, Squarespace, InVision, Flipkart, Qualtrics, Supercell, and many more.