Index Ventures

OZON’s announcement of the largest ever investment in a Russian eCommerce company marks a fantastic achievement for the whole team, and all of us here at Index are very proud to be playing a small role in this remarkable story.

Our crack IT man, Daniel O'Hanlon, was struggling a few months ago. A lot of us at Index had moved over to Macs and iPhones, but he had built Index's entire identity and access management system around Microsoft Active Directory (AD). As is the case with so many IT shops out there, who have adopted Microsoft platforms as the "core" architecture, Daniel was feeling the pain of a changing world.

Today, Cloud.com has announced that it is being acquired by Citrix. It is a bittersweet moment for us at Index as we have loved working with Sheng and the team at Cloud.com, but Citrix made an offer that the team couldn’t refuse.

The IP Networking industry has matured significantly from the go-go days of the 90’s. In that era, companies like Cisco, Wellfleet, Synoptics and Cabletron grabbed headlines the way Facebook and Twitter do today. In was an exciting time because the birth of the web created massive demand for communications networks that spoke IP – the lingua franca of the Internet.

We are delighted to announce that Sami Lababidi has started to work part-time at Index Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Sami was absolutely pivotal in the success of Playfish but always extremely humble and generally left the promotional slots to be filled by Kristian Segerstråle and Sebastian De Halleux.

The 1770 and 80s were tumultuous and exciting times in America’s history. The “founding fathers” had catalyzed the nascent country into declaring its independence from England and architected the foundation for what was to become one of the most remarkable ascents of national power over the next 300+ years. These were heady days. But, the challenges facing the country in the late 1770s were also daunting. This was a start-up nation that had declared war against the Microsoft or Google of the time: the all-powerful nation of England.

Over the last 5 years many of us have made the 3.2 mile trip between Conduit St and Old St countless times. While we love to travel, as we’ve learned with our move to the US, there comes a time when you have to put down some roots.

So from today, the Index team in London will have two homes - one in Central London in Mayfair and one in East London near Silicon Roundabout.

Following hard on the heels of the Home Office's announcement relating to Entrepreneur visas, this week's budget had a distinctly enterprise supportive flavour.

I had very much hoped this would be the case and certainly the signals coming out of the Department for Business in the shape of Mark Prisk - who attended Seedcamp's SeedSummit for a full hour and half - the PM in his Tech City announcement and No10's enterprise task force including treasury officials, gave one hope.

Index Ventures is today delighted to be leading a $3.7m Series A funding round for onefinestay.

Inspired by the boom in home exchanging, the phenomenon of couch surfing, and the growth in boutique hotels, onefinestay was founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneurs Greg Marsh, Demetrios Zoppos and Tim Davey, who between them have property management, logistics, investment and technology experience.

We’re really excited today to formally welcome one of our close friends, Simon Levene, into the Index family. Simon is joining us as a full-time Venture Partner based out of our London office, and bringing him on board really adds to our ability to support the most ambitious entrepreneurs looking to build international businesses from Europe and Israel.