Index Ventures

AI has fundamentally transformed how tech firms are built, but the essential ingredient of the best companies has remained the same: the talent of the founders and those they recruit. It’s why we continue to invest in people, just as we did in 1996. This belief in people is the main reason we’re backing Nomos. I first met co-founder Stefan almost a decade ago, when he was interning at a company I worked at, and it was clear then that he was special.

I met Arthur three and a half years ago, lucky enough to cross paths with him while visiting Alan's office in Paris with my partner Jan. At the time, Mistral had barely been incorporated, and Arthur walked us through his vision: enabling enterprises to deploy intelligence with full control over their data, their expertise, and their costs.

This time, things were a bit different. For one, it was Morton’s first solo trip to Catalina — a crossing few sailors attempt alone, through the busy San Pedro Channel, where the waters run deep and commercial traffic is heavy. More importantly, he had business on his mind. For months, he had been weighing the idea of starting his own company.

Do you remember learning to ride a bike? At first, you probably had training wheels or a parent’s hand keeping you upright. Eventually, though, to really go forward, you had to pedal on your own. You wobbled, you fell, you skinned your knees. But you got back up, you learned how to balance, you built confidence and speed. And one day, without realizing it, you were flying through the neighbourhood, choosing your own adventure. AI today is at a similar inflection point.

From day one, we built Index around a single conviction: that great founders can come from anywhere, that venture is a craft and a relationship, and that our job is to find the best people early and stay with them for as long as it takes.

Navigate back to Perspectives Navigate back to News Before he was simulating human society, Joon Sung Park was painting it. An oil painter turned Stanford PhD, his 2023 "Smallville" study put 25 generative agents in a virtual town and became one of the most-cited AI papers of its era.

As a girl growing up in China, Lin Qiao spent hours in her father’s office. A mechanical engineer, he designed massive cargo ships, and Lin would sit with his blueprints, tracing the angles and studying how each piece solved a problem. Decades later, Lin is picking up where her father left off, only in a different medium. Where he built infrastructure that moved the physical economy, she’s building the infrastructure that moves the intelligent one.

When you first meet Joshua Meier, it’s impossible not to notice his intense curiosity, clarity of thinking and passion for the problem he’s working on. Within just a few minutes of talking to Josh, I knew this was someone we had to get to know. Josh has been seeking a better way to do drug discovery since he was a teenager, when he was researching in his high school’s stem cell lab.

The Rota Vicentina is a trail running down the west coast of Portugal, marked by red wooden arrows across dunes and forests. Having hiked the route nearly ten years ago, I can still remember the first bite of my packed sandwich at lunch time, the sip of a cold beer in the evening and the satisfying ache in my legs after a long day. Everything feels different when we've put effort in. If you took the route by car, the sandwich or beer just wouldn't be the same.

If you look west from our New York office, you can see Little Island, a manmade park floating on a bed of giant tulips over the Hudson River. Commissioned by Barry Diller and Diane von Fürstenberg, and designed by the world-renowned Heatherwick Studio, the project was announced in 2012 and took years of planning before the first stone was laid in 2018. What sets Little Island apart isn’t just the audacity of building a public greenspace atop 132 undulating columns suspended over the water.