Acend Acend Inactive ALIVE Gilad Hakim musashi Alessio Xhaferi pyrolll Artur Minin cullumx Nikolaj Cullum Andersen chiwa Egor Stepanyuk will not be participating in Valorant esports in 2025, ending their four-year tenure competing in the VCT.

Acend was born in 2021 as a rebranding of Raise Your Edge Raise Your Edge Inactive cNed Mehmet Yağız İpek koldamenta Jose Luis Aranguren starxo Patryk Kopczynski BONECOLD Santeri Sassi Kiles Vlad Shvets , a team which had just qualified for the European Masters 1. The team would make waves under their new purple banner when they upset the competition to take the crown of Europe's best. Their success would continue later in the year when they qualified for Masters Berlin and Champions 2021. They would place a respectable top eight at Masters Berlin, but it was at Champions where they really made their name known. Acend swept through the bracket before taking down the reigning champions of Gambit Esports Gambit Esports Inactive Redgar Igor Vlasov Chronicle Timofey Khromov d3ffo Nikita Sudakov sheydos Bogdan Naumov nAts Ayaz Akhmetshin in the grand finals to be crowned the very first Valorant Champions, forever etching their name into history.

Acend lifting the Champions trophy in 2021. The first of their kind (Photo by Michal Konkol/Riot Games).

Acend managed to maintain their Champions winning roster for the following season, but were unable to reach the same heights. They would fall behind their regional competition and miss all three of the international events in 2022. Following this subpar season, Acend would not be selected as a partnership team for 2023, leaving their star-studded roster picked apart and forcing them to rebuild from the ground up.

In the 2023 VCL East Surge, the newly rebuilt Acend were dominant, winning both splits in 3-0 fashion to qualify themselves for Ascension and earn a shot at returning to the VCT stage. They would make it to the top three at the tournament before being swept by the eventual winners of Gentle Mates Gentle Mates Europe Rank #36 K4DAVRA Thomas Johner RobbieBk Robbie Boerkamp Minny Patrik Hušek Zyppan Pontus Eek Click Haydem Ali . They would never quite recover from this loss, as 2024 was met with more disappointment as they failed to even make it to the Ascension tournament.

In their announcement statement, Acend cite the decline of the tier two scene as a primary reason for their departure. “The increasingly hostile ecosystem has simply made it untenable to responsibly run a team,” reads their statement.