Accel London IV will be dedicated to companies in the IT, software, Internet, and consumer sectors, with three-quarters allocated to early-stage companies and the remainder for later-stage deals. According to unnamed source, it will invest 80 percent of the pool in Europe and Israel and the rest in the U.S.

Accel is perhaps most well known for being an early investor in Facebook. The firm has also made investments in big name companies like Spotify, Rovio, Dropbox, Cloudera, Etsy, Trulia, Groupon, and Kayak, which went public last year and sold to Priceline for $1.8 billion.

The firm has offices around the world in Silicon Valley, New York, London, China, and India. The latest London fund is expected to officially close in March, but Accel has not yet responded to request for comment.

While buzz exists here in the U.S. about emerging markets and the potential for European startups, there is less access to venture capital across the pond and many entrepreneurs prefer to come to Silicon Valley to seek out funding and connections.

Bloomberg cited data from the London-based research group Preqin Ltd. Fundraising that there are 26 Europe-focused funds, as opposed to 84 North American-focused funds, and that venture investing in Europe fell by almost 55 percent in 2011.

But some exciting things are happening in Europe. Sweden and Germany are hot spots for tech, design, and innovation, and the Prime Minister and Major of London unveiled a plan into December to build a £50 million ($78 million) coworking space in London.

Accel has made some good bets over the years and in 2011 carved out a $100 million “big data” fund, correctly anticipating that enterprise tech, IT infrastructure, cloud computing, and big data would be a hot sector in the years to come.

With this latest fund, Accel seeks to cement its position as a premier venture capital firms on the continent. Other notable players include Index Ventures, which announced its sixth fund of $473.8 million (€350 million) in July and e.Ventures.

Twilio offers a pay-as-you-go platform for phone and messaging services, and it provides application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can build phone and messaging apps on top of its platform. Airbnb, for example, has built an app atop Twilio to automatically confirm bookings with SMS messages; and Salesforce used the platform to run an app at its Dreamforce conference that let attendees text in their votes for the best app of the show.

In October, the company made its official move to the United Kingdom and has since had its eyes on its next 20 European countries. Jeff Lawson, the company’s chief executive officer says one the biggest queries Twilio receives from its developer community is “when will Twilio be in my country?”

“We launched the company on this notion that we should open up communications,” said Lawson in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our general goal is to make a product that works wherever our customers are.”

One feature of Twilio is that it allows its clients to choose phone numbers from anywhere in the US. So, for example, a merchant could choose local customer service numbers so that customers feel like they’re connecting with the vendor locally. And political campaigns could to the same for their constituents across any region of the country. Expanding into new countries means developers and companies everywhere can choose numbers not just from the United States, but those countries as well. Currently, the company has rolled out its complete offerings in the UK and the US and has public betas in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria and Denmark.

Other than being able to choose and use telephone numbers from different countries, having these places be Twilio ready means providing a cohesive way to communicate across borders. Anyone who has traveled internationally knows that it’s a pain to have to plan for communication, either paying out the nose for international fees, or buying a whole cell phone used just for that period of travel. Texting between countries has also been a pain for many, as different carriers have different text message fee requirements. Twilio currently has an international SMS product in beta, which will make it easy for developers to incorporate text communication between multiple countries. Lawson expects the product will launch in the coming months.

Twilio is also using the funding to hire, as the company is expanding rapidly. Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures both sit on Twilio’s board now. The company’s APIs are used by Salesforce, Airbnb, LinkedIn and Zendesk, whose relationship with Twilio is very close, including shared visions of expanding internationally.