Index Ventures

And then I made a little bit of money out of it.

And I had just been an entrepreneur in residence at Index Ventures.

And so here I was again, kind of like trying to figure out what was next.

And so what dawned on me was that when you are a serial entrepreneur, you have this, what I call the in-between time, which is this quite magical period of time that is super vulnerable, but it's also not very kind of supported by many people because you as an entrepreneur normally very much live and breathe by your narrative and what you put on LinkedIn.

So I've always told that in every round, the pre-seed round first that we did two or three years ago, where it was just a few millions, a couple of millions.

And then the seed round indeed in December with Andresen, Horowitz and Index Ventures.

I've always said the same, that we have this big advantage indeed to work on audio, which is important.

It needs basically the same quality of people in terms of research than large language models or large vision models.

Thanks very much for having me.

Well, thank you for having me here in the Index Ventures New York office.

We just got back from your SF office last week, which also is beautiful.

I know you've got a lot of travertine around here, some nice interior design, all the good stuff.

So I'd love to get your perspective.

You joined the firm back in 2008.

So give us the state of Index Ventures.

So I started at Index as an intern in 2004.

Unlike other legal AI startups, Crosby operates as an AI-enhanced law firm with their own clients rather than selling their tools to other firms.

That said, they're backed by Sequoia, Bain Capital, Lux Capital, and Index Ventures, so could have deep enough pockets, or at least enough access to capital to make this deal work.

If the play works out, Crosby could have the top quality data and brand required to make a run at building the first agentic white shoe law firm.

And just to be super clear about what they'd be buying here, this isn't about while selling private client records, as that would be highly illegal.

Radical Ventures was one of the Series A investors in Cohere.

now they probably will get the biggest upside because they got in the earliest so Dominic Barton is set to make a killing off of all this so into the next series which is the year later series B once again radical Ventures there they are again there's other companies here index Ventures section 32 Tiger Global and you got the next year 2023 we've got Nvidia we've got Oracle Salesforce Etc a bunch of companies here nothing really of note then we go on to the next year July of 2024 We have a $500 million funding round.

This is Series D, where we've got the government now of Canada, PSP Investments.

They invested, as well as this Crown Corporation, Export Development Canada.

The company remains a research laboratory without a commercial product, but investors are betting heavily on its thesis.

Flapping Airplanes raised $1 billion in Series A funding this October, backed by investors including Index Ventures, Lux Capital, Sequoia, GV, and Nvidia.

Its valuation has reached $6 billion.

That's a remarkable valuation for a company still focused on research.

It's a company that has gone through a phenomenal growth trajectory.

At Temo, we're backed by two of the leading venture funds, Index Ventures and Accel Partners, and over 10 CEOs.

So we're fortunate that we have direct access to a lot of existing shareholders, including board members at some of the leading private companies where we are invested.

So access is a constraint and people are trying to engineer around access through swaps derivatives.

If your sales are steady enough to borrow against, debt is cheaper than selling more of your company.

Alara raised $30 million from GV and Index Ventures.

It's a virtual women's health clinic that served more than 120,000 women.

The Yasso founder is invested in Delicious through their holding company, foundership, and they joined the board.