Index Ventures

Last week, Amgen has announced the completion of the acquisition of Nasdaq-listed German company Micromet Inc., valuing it in the proximity of US$1.2b. With this acquisition, Amgen has gained a Ph3 stage molecule (blinatumomab) in development for blood tumours, a Ph1 molecule for solid tumours and the BiTE platform, the underlying innovative antibody technology platform.

We are very excited to announce that Sophia and the Nasty Gal team have agreed to partner with Index to build the next stage of what is already an incredibly successful startup.

For those of you who don't know about Nasty Gal, it is one of the fastest growing fashion etailers out there. Nasty Gal is great illustration of what happens when you marry ambition and vision with the need to be scrappy and resourceful to build your business.

Solution: have the lead investor perform like a lead investor.

Conventional wisdom and good sense would argue that it is good news for an early stage biotech company to announce the backing by a large investors syndicate (4 or more). Indeed, the fact that many smart people are independently deciding to invest into a company, contributing their cumulative expertise, networks, and cash, validates the potential of the start- up, powering it for success. This is all true, however this blessing comes with some caveats, that entrepreneurs need to keep in mind.

At face value, this could be just another (welcome!) blog about a great acquisition, but scratch a little deeper and today's news that Worklight are about to be acquired by IBM is a story of staggeringly creative entrepreneurship at work.

That story starts six years ago, when Shahar Kaminitz and Yuval Tarsi launched Worklight under the name of Serendipity. The initial vision was to enable business users to access information buried in hard-to-reach enterprise databases via flexible and consumer-style interfaces.