PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Accel Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital and growth equity firm, today announced the addition of two Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, bolstering the firm's experience in the mobile space.

Tom Moss and Michael Chan, most recently of Three Laws of Mobility (acquired by Motorola in 2010), have joined Accel to evaluate and assist companies in the mobile space while they also incubate ideas for new mobile enterprises.  "We are very excited to be joining Accel at a time when there is an explosion in the growth of mobile computing.  This is creating an ever expanding opportunity for a new generation of entrepreneurs to have massive impact on how people communicate, generate and access information on a daily basis," said Tom Moss and Mike Chan. 

Accel Partners has been an early investor in leading mobile companies such as Angry Birds (Rovio), Admob, Hotel Tonight, Lookout, and MoPub and enterprise software and cloud startups such as Cloudera, Couchbase, Fusion-io, Springsource, Atlassian, and others.

Most recently, Tom was CEO and co-founder of 3LM, and Mike, the first engineer at 3LM, led client development. 3LM, a start-up focused on providing enterprise security and device management for mobile devices, was acquired in 2010 by Motorola Mobility Inc., which was later acquired by Google Inc.

Per Rich Wong, Partner at Accel Partners, "We are incredibly excited to have the opportunity to work with Tom and Mike yet again on their next venture."

"While mobile computing itself is a massive opportunity, we believe that there are more opportunities for innovation working in the open Android mobile ecosystem than other platforms. Unlike competing mobile platforms, the openness of Android enables an additional set of technology companies, companies working with the platform directly instead of just on top of it, and we have barely scratched the surface of the possibilities for companies in this space," said Tom Moss. "3LM is an example of a company that added value in the Enterprise space in Android in a way that was simply not possible to do on any other major mobile operating ecosystem. Android's openness simply enables more innovation," said Mike Chan.

In the most recent quarter for which data is available, Android comprised an amazing 75% share of all smartphone sales worldwide (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/02/us-android-share-idUSBRE8A11A820121102). Google announced in September that new Android devices are being activated at the rate of 1.3 Million devices per day, which, if maintained, means that over 470 million Android devices will be activated over the next 12 months (http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/05/eric-schmidt-there-are-now-1-3-million-android-device-activations-per-day/).

Prior to 3LM, Tom was an executive on the Android team at Google. At Google, Tom served as Worldwide Head of Business Development and Partnerships for Android. In this role, Tom was in charge of Android's wireless carrier and OEM deals/relationships, and served as an internal advocate on behalf of external Android stakeholders worldwide, helping to foster a robust ecosystem of wireless carriers, OEMs, semiconductor companies and software developers.

Tom received a Juris Doctorate from the UCLA School of Law, and a baccalaureate degree (with honors) from the University of Oregon.

Prior to 3LM, Mike worked as a systems engineer on the Android team for several years. During this time, Mike worked on different areas of the Android operating system, including security, application management, and power management. Mike served as tech lead for Power Management for Android from 2008 to 2010. Prior to his work on the Android team, Mike worked on the platforms team in Google, the team responsible for Google's internal infrastructure.

Mike received a baccalaureate of science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington.

About Accel

Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London and Bangalore, as well as in China via its partnership with IDG-Accel.

For more information, please visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com.   Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.

SOURCE Accel Partners