Index Ventures

Why we decided to back Capitaine Train with €500k of seed capital last year, and to keep supporting them today with a €1.1m contribution to their Series A.

Index Ventures recently completed an $11M Series A investment in XO1, an asset-centric company established with the sole objective of developing the monoclonal antibody Ichorcumab under license from Cambridge University.

If ever there was a case of a demo sealing the deal, then this was it. From the moment we saw Anki Drive cars racing around their track, our minds were made up. Those hundreds of hours I’d spent as a kid, battling electric-powered cars against my friends came flooding back. The Anki team -- who are set to ignite an explosive new category of entertainment experiences, paving the way for a consumer robotics revolution -- had killed it. We were hooked. The deal was all but done.

More and more biotech entrepreneurs and investors, alike, are realizing the considerable risks associated with simultaneous development of multiple assets and instead opting for a more streamlined approach that has come to be known as “asset-centricity.”

The carnage on the British High street - and its Main Street, USA equivalent - is no blip. The cycle of decline, which has seen a run of recent closures of UK household name retailers and a total of more than 200 medium or large retail businesses going bust over the past five years, is here to stay.

Delighted to report that today Shapeways announced a $30m fundraising led by Andreesen Horowitz. You can read more about it here >> (Shapeways, New York Times, AllthingsD, Wired, GigaOm, Venturebeat). Index Ventures first invested in Shapeways in October 2010 after many months of negotiations to spin out of Philips.

While many looked at Supercell’s phenomenal rise and assumed that, statistically speaking, its best days had to be behind it, my partners and I took the contrary view and decided to lead a €100 million investment in the company.

When our good friend, Andy Rachleff, started Wealthfront with Dan Carroll a few years back, they held a revolutionary belief about how money should be managed. Having been a trustee of several university endowments, Andy had seen how larger and more sophisticated investors managed their funds. Efficient frontiers, rebalancing, tax efficiencies, custom portfolios…. All these were tools to better returns for these endowments. But, these tools were only available to investors who could afford the knowledgeable (and expensive) advice of asset managers.

Budget 2013: We need action to open up UK equity markets to high growth companies says Robin Klein

Economics is occasionally derided as a phony science. Frankly I struggled with it school and university so to me this description really resonates. How can the graphs and formulae in the textbooks ever really capture the behavior of complex organizations and impulsive consumers?