Today as we announce the news that we’re launching Index’s second growth equity fund, a new €500m fund to invest in fast-growing businesses, it seems like a good chance to take stock and give a little context.

It’s been an incredibly busy last 12 months for us, in which:

We’ve been continuing to invest deeply and in an integrated way across a broad range of key themes including:

We’ve also extended our commitment to support companies across all key stages of development with 29 seed deals, 57 venture investments and follow-ons and 15 growth deals.

There’s no question that the world in which we invest is changing pretty rapidly: there are new models for investment, new cost efficiencies for company building and new disruptive models for distribution. The infrastructure of networks and technology is also going through unprecedented and fundamental change. In fact at every level of society: consumers, businesses and governments are feeling the profound effects of technology and looking to innovation to help improve productivity and create new value.

Change is everywhere. But although change is the nature of our business, and in fact change is what we invest in, we like to think over the last 15 years we have maintained a very consistent and unique proposition for entrepreneurs.

We are huge believers in Europe and over the last 15 years, we have seen London emerge as the true crossroads for the European tech sector. We have been fortunate to have been involved with some landmark companies like ASOS, Betfair, MySQL, Last.fm, Playfish and Skype who have called London their home and gone on to become global category leaders.

We are also thrilled at the prospects we see across in almost every major city in Europe. We’ve been lucky enough to work with Criteo (Paris), Fon (Madrid) and Privalia (Barcelona), Adyen (Amsterdam), Soundcloud (Berlin), Moleskine (Milan), Ozon (Moscow), MyHeritage & Soluto (Tel Aviv), Stardoll, Rebtel & iZettle (Stockholm), Erply (Tallinn) - and of course amongst other Alertme, Funding Circle, Housetrip, Moo, Mind Candy, Just Eat, Photobox, Songkick & Viagogo (London).

But although we have deep European roots, we have always had a very international team and a fundamentally transatlantic point of view. In the same way we have supported over 35 companies going into the US market in the last 15 years, we have also gone really deep in North America, investing in over 60 companies from Santa Barbara (Right Scale, Sonos) and LA (Factual , OpenX and Adconion) t0 NYC (etsy, Squarespace, Stack Exchange), Orlando (Pentaho) and Toronto (Oanda) looking to go international. We of course have invested deeply over the years in the Bay Area including in recent years Flipboard, Trialpay, Path, Lookout and Cloud.com.

This international perspective really drives the way we think about both business and the entrepreneurs we look to back. There are very few companies we have worked with who are not international in nature, or aspire to be. Since we grew our business at Index from Geneva and London, we understand that although capital can be a magnet for talent, we can’t just stay still and expect the world to come to us. We need, and like, to get out there to try to discover where the best entrepreneurs are and then try to help them take their businesses to the places that will make the most difference for them.

To do this, we try to dig deep into key local markets, so we can build relevant and credible networks to help companies build teams, gain key customers and partnerships and access the most sophisticated local capital they can.

Our new fund will help us to keep adding to the proposition and double-down on our core in London & Europe where we now have 10 partners investing across early-stage, growth and life sciences as well as extend our platform to San Francisco with 2 partners on the ground.

If you want to know more about the specifics behind of our growth investments, feel free to read more and if you are interested in finding out more about how we are going deep in one of the core regions, please check out what we have to say about the Artic Rim.

With our new office downtown in San Francisco; we now along with London (East as well as West) have physical presence in the world’s best landing pads for tech startups and can’t wait to help the next generation of ambitious entrepreneurs take their businesses from local to international markets.

- The Index team