Index Ventures doubles down on AI with fresh $2bn fundraise

Index Ventures closed out the week with a $2bn haul, split across a new $400m seed fund, a $900m venture fund, and a $700m top-up to its growth vehicle, which now stands at $2.2bn. Add it all up and the London firm has $3.5bn ready to write checks with, spanning everything from a founder's first pitch deck to pre-IPO rounds.

This isn't a firm chasing a trend from the sidelines. Index has been in the room for some of Europe's biggest wins: Revolut, Adyen, Figma, Roblox, Datadog, and Wiz all trace back to early Index checks. And the timing of this raise is no accident. Google's $32bn acquisition of Wiz earlier this year, Figma's public listing, and a secondary sale that valued Revolut at $115bn have all fed directly into the kind of returns that make LPs comfortable committing fresh billions.

The backdrop matters here. Venture capital broadly has been stuck in a rut, with exits scarce and many firms struggling to raise successor funds because they simply haven't been able to hand money back to investors. AI has been the exception, sucking up capital while other sectors go hungry. Index's own language leans into that divide, framing AI as a force that's putting the ability to build products into far more hands and compressing the distance between an idea and something shippable.

The firm has already been putting that thesis into practice, backing Mistral, Cohere, and Ineffable Intelligence, the new venture from ex-DeepMind researcher David Silver. With $3.5bn now in the bank, expect Index to keep chasing AI bets across cybersecurity, fintech, healthcare, and consumer software, the sectors it flagged as ripe for disruption, while continuing to lean on Europe, Israel and the US as its home turf.