Index Ventures raises $550M to fund early stage startups

Index Ventures has raised a new 400 million euro ($550 million) fund focused on investing in early-stage startups in the US, Europe, and Israel, the venture-capital firm announced Tuesday.

The fund -- the company's seventh early-stage fund -- will focus on mobile consumers, the enterprise, networks, and financial services, Geneva-based Index said in a statement. The new funding brings the total amount raised by the firm to more than $3 billion since its inception in 1996.

The firm notes that in the past 12 months, five companies it supported made public market debuts at valuations exceeding $1 billion. In addition to software maker Zendesk and restaurant delivery company Just Eat, Index was behind King Digital Entertainment, the mobile-game maker behind the wildly successful social game Candy Crush Saga.

Index Ventures also supported Arista Networks, a cloud computing and networking company that went public last week in a debut that valued the company as high as $3.8 billion in its first day of trading. The firm has also made other investments in consumer-Internet and mobile startups, such as DropBox, Flipboard, and SoundCloud, a streaming music service with 300 million users and a $700 million valuation.

Noting that many of its biggest successes are from Europe and Israel, as well as the US, the company said it doesn't let geography hamper its investment ambitions.

"With our newest fund, we're more committed than ever to making early bets on the world's most ambitious entrepreneurs, no matter where they emerge," said the statement from Index. "We continue to be deeply inspired by the raw passion and ambition that we see in Silicon Valley; but we've always believed that the Valley is not just a place, but a mindset too."

The company, which also has offices in London and San Francisco, has previously made investments in European firms such as Skype and MySQL.