Sara Ittelson

Partner at Accel (San Francisco), joined January 2022; an operator-turned-investor (ex-Faire, ex-Uber) who leads early-stage consumer, enterprise, and AI deals and led depthfirst’s $40M Series A in January 2026.

Background

• Partner, Accel — joined January 2022 as an early-stage partner. Works with early-stage consumer, enterprise, and AI companies from early traction through scale.
• Head of Strategic Partnerships, Faire — May 2019 → Nov 2021. Per Accel and Shoptalk bios, supported Faire’s growth from a $535M\ast \ast valuationto\ast \ast$12.4B; her role connected 200,000+ independent retailers and brands globally.
• Global Business Development, Uber / Uber Eats — May 2015 → May 2019. Worked on product, API, and driver partnerships in the ride-share business and then Uber Eats’ global enterprise and strategic brand partnerships.
• Director of Global Business Development, Knewton — July 2011 → March 2015 ^[per The Org].
• Earlier career: consulting at McKinsey & Company; experience at Chicago Public Schools ^[per The Org].
• Education: MBA and MA in Education from Stanford University Graduate School of Business; B.S. from Northwestern University. Originally from Chico, California.

She joins Accel after “a decade-plus of operating” inside hypergrowth consumer and B2B marketplaces (Faire, Uber, Uber Eats), per Accel’s welcome post.

Note: the init.inc brief speculated an ex-Stripe / ex-Facebook background; both research engines resolve her prior career as ex-Faire / ex-Uber instead (Accel itself was an early backer of Facebook, a likely source of the confusion).

Investing

• Stage / check: seed and Series A; reported check range $15M–$70M ^[Evalyze / Signal by NFX, aggregator-sourced].
• Focus areas: “the security foundations required to build durable AI-driven applications,” plus the category-defining consumer and enterprise applications enabled by them; intersection of AI, consumer, enterprise, and SMB technology.
• Board seats (per Accel team bio and Shoptalk): depthfirst, Cinder, AssemblyAI, Minoan, Syrup, among others.
• *Notable investment — depthfirst $40MSeriesA(Jan14,2026):\ast \ast Ittelson\ast \ast led\ast \ast theroundforAccel.depthfirstis"anappliedAIlabshapingthefutureofsoftwaresecurity"buildingaplatformcalledGeneralSecurityIntelligence;foundingteamdrawnfromGoogleDeepMind,Databricks,andFaire.Co-participants:AltCapital,BoxGroup,Liquid2Ventures,MantisVC,SVAngel,plusangels(JeffDean,KirstenGreen,ColinEvans,LoganKilpatrick,JulianSchrittwieser).Herquote:\ast "depthfirsthastheindustrybackgroundandteambestpoisedtotransformthis$400B corner of the enterprise market, and just in time as AI and agentic tools become widely adopted.”
• Other portfolio touchpoint: Syrup Tech, an AI-powered retail-logistics platform, cited as a recent investment ^[Evalyze, single-source].

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

init.inc is raising a standard seed (~$5M). Sara Ittelson is listed as an attendee of the 2026-06-01 full-partner meeting at Accel.

• 2026-04-29 — Sazzad had an in-person lunch with Kerry Wang + Ivan Zhou (Accel). Kerry Wang is init.inc’s champion at Accel.
• 2026-05-26 (iMessage) — Kerry asked “How much do you want to raise?”; Sazzad replied “Standard seed, 5M.” Kerry: “Would be great to have all 3 of the founding team meet more Accel partners on Monday.”
• 2026-06-01, 2:30pm — “Mtg: Init | Accel” at Accel SF, 35 S Park St, The Penthouse. Attendees: Kerry Wang (organizer), Ivan Zhou, Richard Wong, Sara Ittelson, Steve Loughlin, plus the init.inc founding team (Sazzad, Isaiah, Intiser).
• Competitor-conflict status: Accel is institutionally clean of init.inc’s tracked competitors (see Accel).
• CRM status: Kerry Wang = “Follow Up Phase” (updated 2026-05-28); owner Sazzad.

Related

Accel