Index Ventures

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.

You hit a certain point — a bonus lands, some equity vests, or you look up one day and realize you've saved more than you expected — and looking after your own money stops being optional. It turns into a job, one you never trained for and have to fit around your actual life. American finance has a strange shape. If you have almost nothing, an app will manage your money beautifully for next to nothing.

Financial markets are moving on-chain. Currencies, treasuries, equities, every asset class is finding its way onto blockchain rails, which offer better infrastructure for moving value. It’s disintermediated, secure, and accessible. We’re trending towards a world where the line between what’s on-chain and what’s not will blur to the point of not mattering. Trading on-chain will simply become trading.

Almost every major enterprise runs on decades of hard-won knowledge baked into its operations – how a plant runs, how the supply chain connects, or how products get priced. These unique processes aren’t mere technical debt or the relics of legacy systems. They are the business, its IP, the very thing that gives a company its competitive edge.

I’ve known Zohar Alon, the CEO and founder of NewCore, for over a decade, but I wouldn’t say we experienced love at first sight. We first got to know each other in the early days of Dome9 — the cloud security company he founded. And although we introduced him to his first CMO and connected him with Ofer Katz (before Ofer truly became Ofer), we didn’t converge on multiple rounds of financing. In fact, he ran the business until Check Point acquired the company.

Uncovr, the surgical AI company transforming how surgery is analyzed, documented, coded, and learned, has raised $7 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures. Uncovr is already working with leading hospitals in the US and Europe. The platform automatically generates operative reports and procedural coding directly from surgical video and intraoperative data, enabling hospitals to catch missed insurance billing and record evidence that can reduce infection, readmission, and reoperation rates.

In 1831, a former bookbinder’s apprentice, toiling in a candlelit basement at London’s Royal Institution, moved a magnet through a coil of copper wire and watched a needle twitch. Michael Faraday had never been to university and had almost no formal scientific training. But he was the first person to ask if a magnetic field could produce electricity, and to use his creativity and curiosity to pursue an answer.