X

Index Ventures raises 350M euro early-stage fund

Venture capital firm's sixth fund will focus on early-stage technology investments in Europe.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
Expertise I have more than 30 years' experience in journalism in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
See full bio
Steven Musil

Venture capital firm Index Ventures announced today it has closed a new 350 million euro ($442 million) fund to invest in early-stage technology companies.

The new fund, the firm's sixth that focuses on early-stage technology investments, will concentrate its resources heavily on Europe, while also making investments in Israel and the U.S.

The new fund is very similar to the firm's fifth early-stage fund, which it raised in the summer of 2009, with some small differences.

"One surprise on our last fund was that we did a much higher percentage of deals in the U.S. than we had expected," Mike Volpi, one of Index's San Francisco-based partners, told Fortune. "Our target is one-third U.S., but we were up at around 40 percent. I think it reflects the richness of companies, particularly tech companies, in the U.S. market over the past few years. There also were a larger number of things in New York than we had expected."

The firm, which is based in Geneva with offices in New Jersey and San Francisco, has previously made investments in European firms such as Skype and MySQL. More recently, the firm has made investments in Flipboard, Factual, Swipely and Cloud.com.